[Sca-cooks] Curious about a spice.

Lilinah lilinah at earthlink.net
Sat Mar 15 08:48:10 PDT 2008


rattkitten at bellsouth.net wrote:
>  Came across this in the Latin section of our Walmart and bought it 
>just cause...
>  They are round little balls and the label says Whole Saffron.  What 
>is it?  Any help?
>
>  Nichola

Susan Fox <selene at earthlink.net> replied:
>If it is in the Latin section, I would bet a cookie that these are
>Safflowers, not True Saffron.
>
>Selene

Safflower is made of flower petals (i've used the stuff when 
safflower was called for in a recipe) and sort of looks like giant 
saffron.

If the mysterious round little balls are quite small and hard and 
dark orange-red, they could well be achiote/annatto, which is used to 
color foods yellow, especially in parts of Latin America, and 
especially in the Caribbean parts. It's now also grown in the 
Philippines where it's called atsuwete or achuete. There's some 
additional info here:
http://www.uni-graz.at/~katzer/engl/Bixa_ore.html

-- 
Urtatim (that's err-tah-TEEM)
the persona formerly known as Anahita

My LibraryThing
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/lilinah


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