What Kashmiri homes keep for Chillai Kalan
Forty days of the hardest winter, from late December: the walnuts, dried vegetables and kahwa that see families through.
How we test and pack a batch of saffron
From the grower’s weighing scale to a sealed tin with a batch number: the steps every lot goes through.
Every tin we sell carries a batch number. Behind that number is a short chain of checks that starts on the day we buy.
We buy from 26 farms in Pampore, and each farm’s harvest is weighed, paid for and kept as a separate lot. At weighing, Bilal or his uncle Ghulam looks at the threads under a lamp, checks the colour, smells it and rubs a few threads on wet paper. Good saffron leaves a slow yellow stain, not a red one. A small sample from each lot is sealed and sent to a testing laboratory, which measures colour strength, aroma and moisture. We print the colour reading on the tin.
While we wait for the results, the lot rests in an airtight steel drum in a cool, dark room in our shop. Lots that test well go to packing; the few that do not are sold back to traders, labelled for what they are.
Packing happens on a covered table in a room kept dry, with the fan off, because threads are light enough to blow away. Saffron is weighed on a scale that reads to a hundredth of a gram, placed in a glass vial or a tin, sealed with a paper band and labelled with the batch number, farm area and harvest month. Packed in the morning, an order leaves Srinagar the same afternoon and reaches most of India in four to six days.
