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How to Identify Healthy Saffron?

The limited production and high prices of saffron has caused much fraud in the production of this plant, which includes the addition of saffron-like plant and chemicals.

According to the Fars, limited production and high prices of saffron have caused a lot of cheating on this plant, which involves adding more botanical and chemical substances than saffron. Various methods have been developed to determine these frauds, most of them based on morphological characteristics, anatomy and chemical tests.

Saffron is made from the stigmas and the bottom of the flower, usually yellow, reddish and orange red, and are simply separated from the flag, and this is less visible in other herbs. The three branches of saffron are shaped like a bough and its free part, which forms the hole crust, is toothed. The best type of saffron is saffron, which is called a screwed girl, that is, 100% normal, and the head is rooted intact, like a string of red yarn, down to white and half above it is red.

Safflower plant instead of saffron

To cheat in saffron, they use the flag of safflower and similar plants and mix it with saffron. The most important counterfeit that is made of saffron is safflower, which is very similar to saffron, which can be yellowish, and some of the corn or cilantric roots are used and painted it with saffron-colored artificial colors. One of the issues of saffron fraud is the use of chemical and artificial colors to paint saffron, which is unauthorized in the saffron industry. The most commonly used colors are tartrazine, Orange II, amaranth, sandstone, Ponceau 4R, quinole’ine juice. In this fraud, because the root of the ear is straight and the flag of the saffron is curvy, it helps to detect cheating.

The possibility of further cheating in saffron powder

Saffron powder is also used in safflower powder, and since this powder is almost red, it is mixed with corn pollen to adjust its color. Saffron, especially in powder form, can be falsified with more. You may also mix saffron and mix it with red soils to gain weight, or add white to white saffron saffron solution, along with other ingredients in the stigma. Sometimes they mix ingredients such as turmeric roots, safflower and spring flowers with saffron.

Method of Identification of Fake Saffron

There are several methods for detecting fake saffron that are referred to as:

1- If you put the saffron blades between paper and paper and press it, there should not be any stains of fat.

2- The color of the saffron blades is not soluble in gasoline, that is, if you put a few blanks in gasoline, it should not be gasoline.

3. Natural saffron has a bright red color and delicious taste and a bit bitter smell.

4. Saffron in concentrated sulfuric acid produces blue color, which gradually becomes purple, reddish brown and eventually brown.

5- It is possible to put saffron pieces on the butane gas. In this case, the saffron creates a purple violet that is related to potassium. Sometimes it may be orange, but in the case of fake yellow saffron it creates Gets

6- To 0.1 g of powdered saffron, stir 10 ml of distilled water for 15 minutes, then make the solution and add 1 g of charcoal and shake, then leave it for 10 minutes and refine. The color of saffron with charcoal disappears. Therefore, the presence of color in the final solution will indicate the presence of an organic color.

7. Adding 50 ml of chloroform to some saffron, the chloroform solution will almost be colored, while the color of the yellow color indicates the presence of carotenoid flowers, capsicum fruit or aniline dyes.

It should be noted that the above mentioned cases are preliminary identification and full identification of saffron is carried out with accurate laboratory methods and is carried out by authorized and equipped laboratories which requires precision measuring devices such as spectrophetometer. The color strength of saffron is one of the major parameters determining the quality of saffron, which is evaluated by measuring the amount of color composition in it at 443 nm wavelength by spectrophetometer.

source: tabnak /ir