Every thread we sell grows within a few kilometres of Pampore, on the raised plateaus Kashmiris call karewas. We are named for them. This page explains where the saffron comes from, how it is picked and dried, and why every pack we fill carries a code you can check against a laboratory report.
The karewa plateaus
The karewas are flat-topped beds of ancient lake sediment that rise above the Jhelum floodplain south east of Srinagar. Their soil drains quickly, holds little standing water, and sits at about 1,600 metres above sea level. Crocus sativus, the saffron crocus, happens to want exactly that: a corm left in wet ground rots, and a corm at this altitude flowers late in the year when the air is cold and dry.
Saffron has been cultivated on these plateaus for many centuries. The town at their centre, Pampore, is spoken of across India as the saffron town. The fields are small family holdings, not estates, and the growers we buy from have worked the same plots for generations.
The harvest
The crocus flowers once a year, for a few weeks between late October and mid November. Each flower opens for a day or two and holds exactly three red stigmas. Those three threads are the entire crop; everything else is composted or fed back to the field.
Picking starts at first light, while the flowers are still closed and the stigmas are protected from sun and wind. The flowers are carried off the field whole and the threads are drawn out by hand the same day, because a stigma left inside a wilting flower loses colour and aroma by the hour. It takes upwards of 150 flowers to yield a single gram of dried saffron. When you hold a 2 gram vial, you are holding the work of a morning’s picking and an afternoon’s separation.
From flower to thread
Fresh stigmas are around four fifths water. Drying removes that water quickly and gently, which is where good saffron is made or ruined. Dried too slowly, the threads ferment and dull. Dried too hot, the aroma compounds cook off before they have formed. Done right, the thread turns deep crimson, turns brittle, and develops the honeyed, haylike smell that fresh stigmas do not yet have.
After drying, the threads are sorted by hand into the trade grades: Mongra, the separated deep-red tips; Lacha, threads with a little of the paler style still attached; and Guchhi, whole threads bundled as they came from the flower. If you want to understand what those names mean before choosing a pack, we have written them up plainly in Mongra, Lacha and Guchhi explained.
Proof, not promises
Most saffron sold online in India is described as Kashmiri. Much of it is not, and some of it is not saffron at all. We do not ask you to take our word against everybody else’s. We put the evidence where you can read it.
Saffron reaches us in harvest batches, and every batch is tested at an accredited laboratory for the three measurements that define saffron quality under ISO 3632: crocin for colouring strength, safranal for aroma, and picrocrocin for the characteristic bitter edge. The report is published on this site, in full, as a PDF you can read before you spend a rupee.
Each pack is filled from a single batch and printed with that batch’s code. Type the code into the batch verification page and you will see the grade, the harvest year, the village of origin, the laboratory’s name and every measured value, next to the range ISO 3632 expects. Or browse the complete lab report index, which lists every batch we have ever sold, including the ones that have sold out. Nothing is edited out of it.
What we will not do
We will not blend harvests inside one pack, because a blend cannot be traced to one report. We will not sell a batch whose test results we would not print. We will not describe our saffron with certifications we do not currently hold. And we will not use photographs of somebody else’s fields. As we build our own photography of the plots, the drying rooms and the people, this page will carry it.
If you have read this far, start with the saffron itself: see what is available from the current harvest.