Unsupported Speculation

These days I prepare Turkish coffee in the morning, which tastes much better than my ordinary coffee, and is easier to make because only the Cezve (Turkish coffee brewing pot with a long handle) needs to be rinsed out to make it ready for brewing again.

I had been making coffee with a Vietnamese Phin drip coffee maker, but cleanup is a bit of a hassle afterwards, and so when I saw a YouTube video about Turkish coffee, I had to give it a try.

To make Turkish coffee, you do need to buy a coffee bean grinder that can grind the beans as fine as flour. This is important, because when the coffee beans are so fine, then when hot water is added, it almost brews instantly, though you should let it sit for five minutes just to make it taste more full-bodied. Coffee grinders are very affordable these days, and you only need to make sure you spin the adjuster to its finest setting, and you’re ready to go.

To make the coffee, what I do is put two heaping spoons full of fine coffee grounds into my cezve, since mine is the size which makes two of my cup’s worth. I also bought some Hawaij, which is a kind of spice the Middle East likes to add to their coffee. Hawaij, if I remember correctly, translates to something like ‘The Essentials’, by which they mean it is an essential spice for coffee, and other things I’ve heard as well, though they use a different mixture by the same name for different dishes. For the hawaij, I only add the tip of a spoon’s worth to the coffee grounds in the cezve, because the stuff is STRONG, and you need a lite touch to avoid making your coffee undrinkable.

Then I boil some water real quick, and once it’s boiling, I pour it into the cezve in a way that thoroughly saturates the coffee grounds and hawaij in the cezve, and add boiling water up to a little less than an inch from the top. Leaving room at the top is important because in five minutes, you put the cezve with your coffee on your stove to give it a quick reboil, and the fine coffee grounds cause the coffee to foam at the top, and you don’t want it to spill over the edge of the pot.

Then I let it sit for five minutes, and this is just to let the hot water turn into coffee throroughly.

After five minutes, just to heat it up again real quick before pouring a cup, you put the cezve onto medium-low heat, and WATCH it carefully. It will start to foam after a minute or two on the heat, and you let it foam to the top without spilling over, and then remove it from the heat.

After that, you can spoon some foam into your coffee cup if you want to, but I’m 40 years old and I just need caffeine and not a coffee-experience. Then you pour your coffee into you cup in a way that doesn’t disturb the foam, and it’s ready to drink. Keep in mind that you should have your cream and sugar or whatever you use in your cup already before the foam and coffee goes in.

The hawaij in my opinion is much better when you brew it with the coffee, rather than trying to add it to your cup of coffee after it is already made. The flavor actually gets infused with the coffee when it is brewed together, rather than being perceived as something that doesn’t belong in your cup.

And, like I said before, cleanup is super easy, because the only items that get dirty are your coffee cup and your cezve coffee pot. Since the pot is only one simple item with no moving or removable parts, then a scrub and a rinse in the sink is all it needs. Same as your coffee cup, I imagine.

One last thing is that towards the end of your cup, you’ll see that many of the fine coffee grounds have settled to the bottom of your cup. You don’t drink this, but you leave those there along with just a tiny amount of coffee you can’t safely drink without getting too many grounds in it.

This is the interesting thing about Turkish coffee, which is that the fine grinding of the coffee beans give the coffee a texture where you can’t detect the small amount of grounds that are in your drink, and that the majority of the grounds settle to the bottom.

I like to think about the grounds at the bottom in a historical context, which is that in the past, virtually everything needed to be imported through the trade routes into the desert, and so the grounds at the bottom of the cup is a reminder to avoid waste.

Enjoy your coffee!