New Le Sanctuaire Saffron from Iran

Location: from Iran

Size: 1 gram

Started in 2003 as a retail kitchen boutique in Santa Monica, California, Le Sanctuaire was conceived from the desire to provide only the rarest choice ingredients and tools to passionate home cooks with the most discriminating appetite for culinary excellence. Beautiful, high quality saffron from Iran, in the world of saffron there is a rating system:  namely, ISO 3632 deals exclusively with saffron. It establishes four empirical grades of colour intensity: IV (poorest), III, II, and I (finest quality). Saffron samples are then assigned to one of these grades by gauging the spice's crocin content.  These colour grades proceed from grades with absorbances lower than 80 (for all category IV saffron) up to 190 or greater (for category I). The world's finest samples (the selected most red-maroon tips of stigmas picked from the finest flowers) receive absorbance scores in excess of 250. Got all that?  Yikes, I know.   Basically the best is 250.  Le Sanctuaire Saffron from Iran scores a 246.50.  It’s like getting an A++.  Several saffron cultivars are grown worldwide. Spain's varieties, including the tradenames 'Spanish Superior' and 'Creme', are generally mellower in colour, flavour, and aroma; they are graded by government-imposed standards. Italian varieties are more potent, while the most intense varieties tend to be Macedonian Greek, Iranian, and Indiann in origin (but India has banned the export of high-grade saffron abroad).

Use Le Sanctuaire Saffron from Iran in Spanish, Moroccan, North African and Mediterranean cuisine.