Adventures with Turkish Coffee

For the most part, we make our Turkish coffee in the traditional style. I say for the most part because we do it in a big batch, and I've yet to find a giant cezve to heat it in. So a big stock pot it is, at least until Jenya fishes her welding tools out.

Coffee is so important in Turkey that the word for breakfast, "kahvalti", literally means "before coffee." Word. Turkey's got it going on.

To prepare our iced Turkish coffee, we begin with finely ground espresso beans (from Equator Estate Coffee in San Rafael, an awesome woman-owned business that deserves its own blog post), water, the finest ground cardamom from Whole Spice, and a little bit of sugar. We refer to our version as "slightly sweetened." In Turkey this is called az şekerli. In fact there are four different levels of sweetness to Turkish coffee with specific measurements: sade (plain; no sugar), az şekerli (little sugar; half a level teaspoon of sugar), orta şekerli (medium sugar; one level teaspoon), and çok şekerli (a lot of sugar; one and a half or two level teaspoons). If you haven't already gathered, these people take their coffee seriously.

The cezve (or in our case, giant stock pot) is heated until the whole mixture begins to foam. If it boils, dump everything out and start over - you haven't put enough coffee grounds in. Once the mixture is completely foamed over, remove from heat and stir for the first time. If serving in small portions hot, as the traditional method dictates, the whole mixture is poured into a cup, where the grounds will settle to the bottom. After a few failed attemps at straining, we learned that the grounds would eventually settle to the bottom of our big pot, in essense straining themselves.

In Turkey and around the Mediterranean/Middle East, the leftover grounds can be used for a kind of fortune telling called tasseography. Once the ground-filled cup is covered with a saucer and turned upside down, the symbols can be interpreted. Some examples: Flying birds = good news, candle = enlightenment, kite = wishes will come true, raven = death or bad news.

Because we don't have access to running water and electricity at the markets, we make our turkish coffee iced to maintain high quality and fresh taste. Though we do dream of opening up a restaurant and offering a hot version some day.

Full disclosure: This blog post was written in a Starbucks. Where's a girl to wait for her mechanic?

--Traci