Safflower

• kusum

  Hindi

  Sold in some markets as a saffron substitute. It colours but contributes almost no flavour, and it is not saffron.

• golrang

  Persian

Almost none. A mild vegetal, faintly bitter note at high concentrations and nothing at culinary ones. Safflower is a colouring agent that happens to be edible rather than a flavouring, and treating it as one is the mistake it invites.

Very faint — a slight hay-like vegetal note and little else. The near-absence of aroma is the clearest practical difference from saffron.

Flat thread-like florets, orange to yellow-orange, uniform along their length and slightly limp rather than brittle. In water they release a clear yellow within minutes.

Soft dry threads that soften completely in liquid and are usually left in the dish. They add colour and no texture worth noting.

• Carthamin — The red pigment, water-insoluble and historically the basis of safflower’s use as a textile dye rather than a food colourant.
• Safflower yellow (hydroxysafflor yellow A and related) — The water-soluble yellow pigments, and what actually colours food. They dissolve readily in water, which is why safflower is steeped rather than bloomed in fat.

Steep it in warm water rather than warming it in fat. The useful pigments are water-soluble, so a pinch in a few tablespoons of warm water or stock for five minutes gives a clear yellow that can go into the dish with the threads. Use considerably more than you would use of saffron — the colouring power per gram is far lower — and expect nothing else from it, because there is nothing else there. The one genuinely important thing about cooking with safflower is knowing what it is: used deliberately for colour it is cheap and effective, and used in the belief that it is a saffron substitute it will produce a yellow dish that tastes of nothing and a cook who concludes saffron is overrated.

Colouring rice, stews and soups across the Middle East and parts of South Asia, where it is used openly and cheaply for a yellow that costs nothing. It works with rice, chicken, lamb, potato and pulses, and alongside turmeric, cumin, cinnamon and black pepper. Its honest brief is narrow — colour without flavour — and within that brief it does the job well.

• infusing — The standard use: steeped in warm water or stock for a few minutes until the liquid is yellow, then used with or without the threads. Water rather than fat, because the useful pigments are water-soluble.
• boiling — Simmered directly in a dish, giving colour throughout the cooking and losing nothing, since there is no volatile aroma to drive off.
• grinding — Rarely ground. The threads are soft and mat rather than powdering, and there is no advantage.
• toasting — Not toasted. The pigments degrade with heat and there is no aroma to develop.

Steep a pinch in a little warm water. Fresh safflower turns it clear yellow within a couple of minutes; a faded batch gives a weak straw colour or almost nothing. Smelling it tells you nothing, because there is nothing to smell either way.

• Straw or brown rather than orange florets
• Weak or absent colour when steeped
• Clumping or visible bract fragments

• Photo-bleaching of the yellow pigments, which is the only failure that matters
• Slow oxidation towards a dull brown
• Moisture uptake and clumping

There is only one form, so the buying decision is about honesty rather than grind. Buy it as safflower, from somewhere selling it as safflower, and use it for what it does: it colours rice and stews yellow, cheaply, without adding flavour, and that is a genuinely useful thing to be able to do. Keep it dark, because the colour is all it has. What it will not do is stand in for saffron in a dish where saffron was chosen for its aroma — and if you are offered saffron at a price that seems too good, this is very often what you are being offered.

• Bright orange-yellow rather than straw or brown, and uniform along the length of each thread.
• Flat thread-like florets of even colour, not trumpet-shaped and not deep red — those would be saffron, and at a safflower price they would not be.
• A clear yellow within two minutes when a pinch is steeped in warm water.
• Sold and priced as safflower. Anything described as saffron at a low price is one of these two things mislabelled.

Graded on colour and cleanliness, with no consumer grade. The meaningful retail question is identity rather than grade, since safflower is inexpensive and the fraud runs in the direction of selling it as something else.

Asteraceae

A spiny annual thistle of dry regions, growing to a metre or so, with orange-yellow flower heads. It is grown far more widely for its seed oil than for the florets.

The eastern Mediterranean and western Asia, with a very long history of cultivation as a dye plant across Egypt, the Levant and India.

• India — major producer. The largest producer, though mostly for seed oil rather than for florets.
• Kazakhstan — major producer
• Mexico — notable producer
• Egypt — notable producer. Where the culinary and dye tradition is oldest.

Florets picked by hand from the flower heads at full colour, over several passes as the heads open. The plant is spiny and the work is unpleasant, which is reflected in the price of good floret material.

1. Hand picking — Florets pulled from open flower heads across several passes.Why: Colour is at its strongest at full opening and declines afterwards.
2. Shade drying — Dried out of direct sun to preserve the colour.Why: The pigments photo-bleach, so sun drying costs the product its only real attribute.
3. Cleaning — Sorted to remove bract and stem fragments, which are the characteristic contaminant.

Graded on colour and freedom from bract and stem. No consumer grade exists, and the meaningful question at retail is usually whether the product is honestly labelled at all.

Unusually, safflower is more often the adulterant than the adulterated. It is the classic saffron substitute and has been used to bulk or replace it for centuries, sometimes dyed to improve the resemblance. As a product in its own right the recorded risks are bract and stem bulking and added colouring.

Grown as an annual field crop, overwhelmingly for oilseed. Floret production is a minor and largely hand-harvested sideline, which is why the spice is a regional product rather than an international commodity.

Hot, dry and tolerant of poor soil, with a deep taproot that suits semi-arid conditions. It is grown where more demanding crops fail.

One of the oldest cultivated dye plants, with a record reaching back to ancient Egypt where safflower-dyed textiles have been recovered from tombs. Its culinary role has always been secondary to its use as a dye, and its long career as a saffron substitute is documented across the medieval and early modern periods — the English names false saffron and bastard saffron record how the trade regarded it.

Traded now overwhelmingly as an oilseed rather than as a spice. The floret trade is small, regional and concentrated in the Middle East and South Asia, with a persistent secondary market as a saffron adulterant.

Documented traditional use in Chinese and Ayurvedic traditions, chiefly as honghua in the former. Recorded as documented tradition. SpiceHQ holds no clinical source and makes no health claim.