GOOD AS GOLD

Australian saffron is difficult to grow, expensive to buy and completely, utterly captivating, 

-  ALEXANDRA CARLTON

People like to put all sorts of lovely adjectives around the idea of growing saffron,” says Gamila MacRury, from saffron farm Gamila at Beechworth in northeast Victoria. “My simple description is this: tedious.” When cultivated in Australia the prized deep red spice – the colour of sunset and fire, according to Hindu lore – sells for around the same price as gold, but it certainly makes those growing it work for their money. “I bought 100 corms [the bulb that produces the saffron crocus] in my first year. I got all these flowers, which I thought was excellent so I bought 200 corms the next year,” she says. “And then I spent five years with the saffron kicking me in the arse.”

Saffron’s finickiness takes many forms. For starters, there’s the cold hard facts of yield versus effort. It takes a whopping 150,000 to 200,000 crocus flowers to produce a kilogram of saffron. The plants insist on warm summers and cool winters. They’re susceptible to diseases such as corm rot, which you can’t see until it’s too late because it’s under the soil. The flowers bloom very close to the ground, like tiny bullets, which must each be hand-picked in the window before they’ve fully bloomed. Back-breaking stuff. Then their spindly triple-thread stigma – the saffron itself – has to be manually removed. And as a final flourish, for maximum difficulty rating, they have a minuscule picking window of only a few days in autumn. In fact, says MacRury “if we were picking for absolute perfection – which of course we can’t because this is the real world – there’s about a 20-minute window where the saffron flower should be picked.”