Turkish Coffee with Cardamom

Coffee arrived in Istanbul in the sixteenth century and the city took to it with such force that it built an entire etiquette around a cup. Under Suleiman the Magnificent there was a court position, the kahvecibaşı, the chief coffee-maker, whose sole responsibility was the sultan’s brew. The coffeehouses that spread through the city became known as schools of the wise, places where men gathered to talk, play games and hear news, and the drink itself entered the fabric of ordinary life so completely that the Turkish word for breakfast, kahvaltı, means literally before coffee. There is even a surviving law that once granted a woman grounds for divorce if her husband failed to provide her daily coffee.

Turkish coffee — the method, not a bean, and one shared across Greece, the Levant, the Balkans and the Gulf under different names — is the oldest surviving way of making coffee still in daily use. It is unfiltered, brewed in a small long-handled pot called a cezve, and served with the finest grounds still suspended and slowly settling. Done properly it is thick, aromatic and topped with a fine tan foam that is prized above almost everything else about it. Done carelessly it is a gritty, bitter mouthful that puts people off for life. The difference is entirely in the patience.

The grind is the whole thing

If you take one idea from this, take this one: the coffee must be ground finer than for any other method, finer than espresso, to something like the texture of cocoa or icing sugar. This is non-negotiable, because there is no filter. The coffee is drunk from the same water it brewed in, and only a powder-fine grind gives up its flavour fast enough and settles cleanly enough to leave a drinkable cup. A coarser grind gives you weak, thin coffee sitting over a sludge you cannot avoid swallowing.

Most home grinders cannot reach this fineness; a standard burr grinder set to its finest is still too coarse. The traditional answer is a small brass hand mill, which is a lovely object and genuinely effective, but the simple answer is to buy coffee sold specifically as Turkish grind, or to ask a shop with a commercial grinder to do it to that setting. Use a dark roast, which suits the method’s intensity, and keep it airtight, because ground this fine it stales within days.

The cardamom, and the foam

Cardamom is the classic Gulf and Levantine addition and my favourite way to drink this coffee. Green cardamom carries a cool, resinous, faintly citrus perfume that lifts the dark bitterness of the coffee and makes the whole cup smell of somewhere warmer. Crush the seeds from a pod or two to a powder and add them with the coffee at the start so they steep through the whole brew. It is the same perfumed warmth that makes a cardamom kulfi so hard to stop eating, borrowed here for the morning. A pinch of salt is an old trick worth knowing too: at a very low dose salt suppresses our perception of bitterness, so a single pinch rounds the coffee without ever tasting salty.

The foam, köpük, is the mark of a well-made cup and the reason the whole thing is done slowly over a low heat. As the coffee warms, gases and fine solids are carried up and trapped in a dense, persistent tan foam that rises up the sides of the pot. Rush it over a high heat and the foam breaks and boils away, and to serve a cup with no foam is, by the standards of the tradition, to have failed. The trick is to bring the pot up slowly, spoon a little foam into each cup before the final pour, and let it rise a second time — coaxing it, never boiling it.

The cezve, the water and the heat

The pot matters more than its price. A cezve — cezve in Turkish, briki in Greek, ibrik more loosely — is a small pot, wide at the base and narrowing towards the top, with a long handle to keep your hand clear of the heat. The narrow neck is deliberate: it concentrates the rising foam and slows its escape, which is why the shape has barely changed in centuries. Brass and copper are traditional and conduct heat quickly and evenly; a small stainless steel milk pan will make a perfectly good cup if you brew slowly and watch it. Size it to the number of cups, because a cezve works best filled somewhere between half and three-quarters full.

Use cold, fresh water and start from cold, so the coffee and water heat up together and the grounds have time to give up their flavour on the slow climb. A gentle heat source is the other half of it; a low gas flame or a moderate electric ring lets you build the foam over three or four unhurried minutes. Turn it up to save time and you boil the foam away and scorch the coffee, which turns the cup harsh and flat. Everything about this drink rewards going slowly and punishes rushing, which is a good part of its charm.

Method, step by step

Measure your water in the actual cups you will drink from — small espresso or demitasse cups — so the amount matches the number of drinkers; here that is two cups, about 120ml of cold water. Tip the water into a cezve, or the smallest saucepan you own if you have no cezve. Add two heaped teaspoons of powder-fine coffee, the crushed seeds of two cardamom pods, any sugar you want, and an optional pinch of salt.

Decide on sugar now, because Turkish coffee is sweetened in the pot and never stirred at the table. The traditional levels have names: sade is unsweetened, orta is medium with about a teaspoon per cup, and şekerli is sweet. Add it at the start with everything else. Stir the pot once, just until the coffee is wetted and the surface even, then put the spoon down and do not stir again. Set the pot over a low heat and let it warm slowly. Over three or four minutes a dark foam will gather and climb. The moment before it looks ready to surge over the rim, lift it off and spoon a little foam into each cup, then return it to the heat for a few seconds until it rises once more. Pour slowly and evenly into the cups, foam and all.

Then wait. Let the cups stand for two or three minutes so the grounds sink to the bottom, and drink from the top, leaving the last muddy centimetre behind. Never stir a poured cup, because that lifts the settled grounds back into every mouthful.

Serving, fortunes and a warning

Turkish coffee is a slow, social drink, served in small cups with a glass of water alongside to cleanse the palate first, and traditionally a small sweet — a cube of Turkish delight or a date — to set against its intensity. It is meant to be sipped and lingered over, and it carries a whole ritual with it. When the cup is empty, the thick sediment left in the bottom is the raw material of tasseography, coffee-ground fortune telling: the drinker inverts the cup onto the saucer, lets the grounds run down, and reads shapes in the trails. Whether or not you believe a word of it, it is a fine reason to sit a while longer.

A word of caution, because it catches everyone once. The grounds are meant to stay in the pot and the bottom of the cup; drink to the very bottom and you get a mouthful of bitter silt. Serve it, admire the foam, and stop a centimetre from the end. If you want another unfiltered, ritual cup from the same part of the world to sit alongside it, the warm, orchid-thickened sahlab is its gentle, milky cousin, and the two make a lovely pair on a cold afternoon.