How much saffron do you actually need?

The colour and flavour compounds in saffron — crocin and safranal — are locked inside the thread and are water-soluble. Dropping dry threads into a dish releases only a fraction of them, which is why so many people conclude their saffron is weak when it is simply unopened.

Crush the threads between your fingers, steep them in two tablespoons of warm (not boiling) water for fifteen minutes, and use the gold liquid. You will get several times the colour from the same number of threads.

Roughly 250 for our all-red Super Negin threads, which are longer and heavier than lower grades. A gram of shorter, lower-grade saffron can contain 400 or more threads — which is one reason thread counts alone are a poor way to compare brands.

Almost never. A level teaspoon of saffron threads is close to a gram — around 250 threads — which is roughly twenty times what a pot of rice needs. Recipes written for weak, filler-cut supermarket saffron routinely over-specify. Start with the number this calculator gives you and adjust upward only if you genuinely want more.

Saffron holds its full colour and aroma for about 24 months from harvest when it is kept sealed, in its box, in a cool dry cupboard. The enemy is light — crocin breaks down on exposure, which is why the box matters as much as the bottle.

The calculator recommends the smallest bottle that covers roughly a year of your cooking, so you should finish it well inside that window. If it points you at the 5 g, you cook enough saffron to justify it.

Yes, and it is the whole argument for buying well. Colouring strength is measured as crocin content under ISO 3632, where Category I starts at 200. Against a weak, filler-cut saffron you need meaningfully fewer threads for the same result — which narrows the real price gap considerably.

All-red Super Negin is the strongest form of the spice because it contains none of the yellow style, which adds weight but carries almost no colour or aroma.