Saffron is the dried stigma/pistils, collected from Crocus Sativus flowers. These stigmata are deep crimson-red in colour. One saffron plant usually bears four flowers and each flower contains only three pistils which are collected and dried. The entire process of sowing, reaping, collecting the flowers, hand-plucking the pistils from the flowers involves a great deal of human labor thus making it one of the most expensive spices across the globe. Right from sowing bulbs to plucking flowers everything is done manually by laborers.
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Every single flower has to be hand-picked because it is delicate and it has to be done before sun rise. That's an awful lot of labour involved considering it needs about a football field area of plants to get a just half kg of the spice. So, it takes about 150 to 200 flowers to form a single gram of saffron!
The yield of saffron is only once in a year and the best season for harvesting is autumn. So if you are yet to experience the taste of saffron, this is the correct time for you to try it.
