Once you have a crop ready to grow, you take out only of the seedling, then you go around and gather the leaves and roots and then just keep on saffroning them and using them in my dish. I just started this year saffroning saffron. It takes me about four to five weeks to get the first few inches out of my plant. If you haven’t been cultivating it for a while, it will take longer. If you have a lot of plants going, like I do, then you can get away with five-six weeks of growth. So, there’s some growing that’s going on, but what you end up with is a beautiful dish that will last you for a lifetime.
I think a lot of our readers are probably wondering about the quality of the saffron that it uses in your dishes. I want to tell you a couple of things that I’ve learned using saffron in my cooking and that I’m going to tell you about.
First, saffron is a super-premium root vegetable. It’s not something you buy. This can be your only saffron. Just like spinach, you know, I will have some saffron for dinner, and sometimes I will go to a restaurant and buy the greens that I cooked that night. I’ll buy 10 or 15 leaves that are about four inches tall. And I use them to make my saffron.
I don’t know whether it’s because of some reason or an instinctive love of saffron and for the plant, because it has such a nice flavour. Maybe it’s just because I’ve had really good saffron that I’ve used in so many dishes. But for that, I think that if you want a really high grade vegetable that you can’t get anywhere else, I think you should start with saffron. But I still would go by the roots and use the whole plant. I still would put some in the fridge, but I would remove it and saffron that I had on the plant. There are some very, very good ways to use that saffron. It’s really super-premium.
Then, my other trick is that I really tend to use pretty much all of the leaves that have come from a single plant, which are really gorgeous, and I think that’s part of why the dish is so magical. Even just the leaves. Some of the leaves that you get will be
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