Turkish Coffee

My first experience with Turkish coffee was when staying in an Israeli hotel and they had the free instant coffee in the room.  You’d boil water in the electric kettle then take one of the red Elite brand long thing single use packages of instant coffee, add it to the water, add the sweetener, and there’s your free cup of coffee.  However, I soon discovered that mixed in with the red long thin single use instant coffee packages were a bunch of decoy packages that looked almost the same but had slightly different writing on them.  And when you used those, somehow the instant coffee powder never actually dissolved.  It just stayed there at the bottom of the cup.  And no matter how hard you mixed it you’d just get a mouthful of bitter coffee grounds every time you tried to drink it.  On closer inspection, I made out the word “Turki” in Hebrew, meaning, i suspected, Turkish.  OK, I figured, just don’t ever use any coffee package that says Turkish on it and you’ll do fine.  I have no idea who would ever want instant coffee that doesn’t dissolve, or why its even an option, but clearly its just not meant for gringos like me, so i’ll just ignore it for now.  And that basically has been my philosophy.  And its worked just fine, actually.  

And then one day Val came home from a friend’s house and said she had made her coffee which was really good and she’s pretty sure it was Turkish coffee.  So I said, did it have a bunch of undissolved grounds at the bottom that you just don’t drink?  She said, yes, that’s apparently how it works.  So I started thinking, huh, maybe there’s something to this, maybe I should try it.  So I looked it up on my phone, bought one of the red packages at the grocery store that said “Turkish” on it, bought myself on of those super-small Turkish coffee pots to heat the water and coffee in and you know what?  Its very easy to make and very good!  You just have to get used to not drinking the very bottom, where the grounds settle out.  

Apparently the deal is that the coffee is ground much finer so more flavour gets into the coffee.  You first mix the coffee with the water and the sugar in the pot, then put it on the stove top.  You take it off just before it boils at which point its supposed to make a nice foam (I’m actually still working on the “nice foam” part….🤓) then just pour it into one of those small, double-esspesso sized cups.  And drink it slowly.  Apparently it has more caffeine that regular coffee but less than espresso. And it tastes great!