Small organic chocolate tablets made with saffron from Teruel, in a box of ten, from Chocolates Artesanos Isabel — a Spanish artisan maker.
Saffron is the most expensive spice on earth, and the reason is arithmetic. It is the dried stigma of Crocus sativus, and each flower produces exactly three. They must be picked by hand, on the morning the flower opens, before the sun wilts it — and it takes in the region of 150,000 flowers to produce a single kilogram of dried saffron. There is no mechanisation possible at any stage. Every thread you have ever eaten was pulled from a flower by a person.
The plant cannot even reproduce itself. Crocus sativus is a sterile triploid: it sets no viable seed and exists only because human beings have divided and replanted its corms, one generation at a time, for something like three thousand years. Every saffron crocus in the world is part of a single unbroken chain of human propagation stretching back to the Bronze Age Mediterranean. It is one of the very few crops that would vanish entirely within a few years if people simply stopped.
Teruel. Aragon's saffron country, in the Jiloca valley, is a long-established Spanish growing region — high, dry, with cold winters and hot summers, which is exactly what the crocus wants. Spanish saffron is generally picked and toasted rather than air-dried, which gives it a deeper, slightly smoky character.
How it works in chocolate. Saffron's flavour comes from picrocrocin (bitter) and safranal (the aroma), and both are hay-like, honeyed and faintly metallic — a combination that sounds unlikely against cocoa and turns out to be remarkable. It is a genuinely unusual bar and quite unlike anything else on the shelf.
A box of ten small tablets is a sensible format for something this intense: enough to share, portioned so you do not have to commit to a whole bar of an unfamiliar flavour.
Available at Só Verde, an organic concept store in Foz, Porto.
CHOCOLATES ARTESANOS ISABEL
CHOCOLATES ARTESANOS ISABEL
CHOCOLATES ARTESANOS ISABEL
