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Re:Saffron: The Story of the World's Most Expensive Spice by hammock on Wednesday April 03, 2024 @05:17PM (#39923281)
Could it be fake, adulterated or poisonous somehow?
Re:Saffron: The Story of the World's Most Expensive Spice by hammock on Wednesday April 03, 2024 @06:38PM (#39924209)
BS to downvote me for this comment. Cheap olive oil is counterfeit. Cheap milk, honey and coffee are adulterated with fillers. Cheap tumeric is colored with lead oxide
Re:Saffron: The Story of the World's Most Expensive Spice by throwway120385 on Wednesday April 03, 2024 @07:52PM (#39924861)
Not always. I've done the color test on a lot of cheap spices I get in the middle eastern stores I can go to and they've always passed the tests. Sometimes it's cheaper because you're not paying for it to be portioned into little glass jars and sold as an exotic, rare thing like it is in western european cuisine.
Re:Saffron: The Story of the World's Most Expensive Spice by tired_throwaway on Wednesday April 03, 2024 @07:02PM (#39924434)
I can buy some of your claims, but how do you adulterate a coffee bean?
Re:Saffron: The Story of the World's Most Expensive Spice by ssl-3 on Wednesday April 03, 2024 @07:44PM (#39924801)
Coffee beans are bin-sorted in a way where the good coffee gets better, and the lesser coffee gets worse.

The most-shapely and consistent beans go to the more-premium lines.

The small, underdeveloped, or misshapen beans (called "clinkers") go to the cheaper lines, along with the other defects. And so does the chaff from the coffee hulls, which is rolled up into weird little balls and thrown in too -- which is not done with premium coffees. The unavoidable portion of insect parts is higher in cheap coffee than it is in expensive coffee.

In an ideal world, all of the stuff that is removed from premium coffees would be used as compost or something.

But it is instead included in the lesser coffees, where it is consumed.

Re:Saffron: The Story of the World's Most Expensive Spice by infecto on Wednesday April 03, 2024 @07:25PM (#39924673)
You add fillers to the ground product.
Re:Saffron: The Story of the World's Most Expensive Spice by computershit on Wednesday April 03, 2024 @08:35PM (#39925143)
Downvotes were for poison hyperbole almost certainly
Re:Saffron: The Story of the World's Most Expensive Spice by fbdab103 on Thursday April 04, 2024 @01:16AM (#39926806)
Poison seems totally fair. Counterfeit tumeric can have high amounts of lead. Lead being one of those chemicals with no safe amount.
Re:Saffron: The Story of the World's Most Expensive Spice by mrguyorama on Thursday April 04, 2024 @03:20PM (#39934663)
We literally have a cinnamon adulteration case going through the US right now. Children were poisoned by applesauce with adulterated cinnamon.
Re:Saffron: The Story of the World's Most Expensive Spice by BobaFloutist on Thursday April 04, 2024 @12:04AM (#39926414)
Cheap olive oil from Costco is not counterfeit. Cheap honey from Costco isn't counterfeit. Cheap vanilla from Costco is...once again, not counterfeit.

Moral: Buy things from Costco.

Re:Saffron: The Story of the World's Most Expensive Spice by gnicholas on Thursday April 04, 2024 @12:37AM (#39926581)
Olive oil should be used within a reasonably short time of opening, which makes Costco-sized bottles less practical. We buy honey and vanilla extract from Costco, but we don't use olive oil anywhere near fast enough to justify buying Costco-sized jugs.
Re:Saffron: The Story of the World's Most Expensive Spice by vasco on Thursday April 04, 2024 @02:31AM (#39927186)
My family makes a small batch of olive oil from a couple of big trees we have and have never gotten through what we make that fast, even though we use a lot. What's the problem in taking long to consume it? (Months)
Re:Saffron: The Story of the World's Most Expensive Spice by gnicholas on Friday April 05, 2024 @12:00AM (#39938561)
I assume that the olive oil I buy in the store is very old compared to fresh-pressed oil. Similarly, my aunt has an avocado tree, and her fresh-picked avocados stay ripe for weeks, unlike the store-bought kind that have a sweet spot of ~36 hours.
Re:Saffron: The Story of the World's Most Expensive Spice by faizan-ali on Thursday April 04, 2024 @02:40AM (#39927238)
Olive oil somm here (yeah that's a thing!)

Olive oil (and all cooking oils in general) are the opposite of wine - once bottled they start degrading and any additional exposure to air, light, heat degrades them further.

What degrades specifically? Usually it's the nuanced flavors and health benefits of good extra virgin, it'll usually be fine for cooking but you're losing out on the purposeful decision of using olive oil over vegetable oils (gross)

Re:Saffron: The Story of the World's Most Expensive Spice by pcl on Thursday April 04, 2024 @03:53AM (#39927663)
Olive oil is so much cheaper in bulk. Do you have any tips for how to preserve it? Intuitively, I would assume that re-bottling a large volume into several small bottles (and then keeping the extras sealed and in the dark) would be better than using a larger bottle continuously. Does that hold up to your experience?
Re:Saffron: The Story of the World's Most Expensive Spice by gnicholas on Friday April 05, 2024 @12:03AM (#39938573)
If exposure to air is bad, it's possible that re-bottling wouldn't work well. I don't know if bottled olive oil is treated like many other packaged foods and sealed in with an inert(ish) gas, but I wouldn't be surprised if this were the case. I don't know how you could replicate that at home.
Re:Saffron: The Story of the World's Most Expensive Spice by fyt2024 on Sunday April 14, 2024 @06:35AM (#40030158)
Fill something into a smaller bottle. The stock:

Freeze

No light

Add a little vitamin E. Vit e catches to radicals and therefore prevent oxygenation

Re:Saffron: The Story of the World's Most Expensive Spice by BobaFloutist on Thursday April 04, 2024 @01:05PM (#39933086)
I can easily taste the difference between food cooked with olive oil and natural oils as long as it's a relatively mild dish with a limited number of flavors (which is the appropriate use case).

It's so weird to me when people act like neutral oil has no applications. Olive oil can be good without neutral oils having to be bad. They're just good for different things.

Re:Saffron: The Story of the World's Most Expensive Spice by thfuran on Thursday April 04, 2024 @12:43AM (#39926622)
Not lead oxide, lead chromate. So you can get all the hexavalent chromium you could ever need. But by "cheap", I think you mean "the absolute dodgiest crap that mostly never even gets exported from Bangladesh".