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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

I've recently started making Turkish coffee every morning at home (thanks Turkish GF for introducing it to me!). I like it. It's stronger than regular coffee and you drink it like espresso. The big difference is that you don't strain it through a filter; the grounds end up at the bottom of the cup.

The preparation is much more time-consuming than traditional coffee, which I think is the other half of the phenomenon mentioned. You can really only make 4-5 demitasse cups at a time, and it takes 10-15 minutes of actively watching and stirring the cup. Compare this to brew coffee or espresso drinks which take 30 seconds to 2 minutes, tops. So, it's not surprising that Turkish restaurants, whilst adapting to a fast-paced Western capitalist model, lose motivation for going through the whole process.

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Why does it take 10-15 minutes to make Turkish coffee? It takes about 2 minutes to make the kind of turkish coffee we drink here in Slovenia ...

Unless you're roasting your own beans, but that's supposed to take hours, not 15 minutes.

The water should be on low-medium heat, which by necessity takes a little while to get to a boil. High heat will get it done in 2 minutes, but the grounds won't mix as well and it sometimes will be burnt-tasting.

For reference, here is how I was taught to make it:

1. Put water in cezve equal to number of cups you'd like

2. Put cezve on stove at low-medium heat

3. Add in one teaspoon of coffee per cup

4. Add in sugar (if desired)

5. Keep on low heat until foam and small bubbles appear.

6. Pour a little bit of coffee into each cup, then return to heat. Repeat 2-3x until cups are full.

7. Let each cup sit for a minute to let the grounds settle.

8. Enjoy!

Ah, that's probably why we usually add the coffee when water is done boiling. Then bring it to a boil one more time. Or up to four times, depending on taste.

shrug Still won't take 10 minutes even if you're boiling slowly at low heat. Unless you're making a super large pot, but making more than two turkish coffees at once is far out. 2 is the number you shall make.

Your description sounds a little different than how we make it. Guess the recipe changed in the ~1000km journey up to us.

It takes like 5 minutes on average, it's not 10-15 but it's not 2-3 minutes either. And the machine makes it in 3 to 4 minutes.

The source is my mom, who is, like me, a native Turkish person, who just made the coffee I'm drinking now. :)

making more than two turkish coffees at once is far out. 2 is the number you shall make.

The conversation started about restaurants - it doesn't seem outlandish to expect restaurants to deal with more than two people at once.

You're supposed to use separate cezvas. If you're doing it absolutely properly then its' one cezva per patron. That's how my grandmother used to do it when she owned a restaurant. Still has a dozen of those tiny things laying around.

A more practical way is to wait for the water to boil, then pour out some of the water into a cup (which you will put back afterwards). This way there is more room for the coffee to rise and not overflow. Then put coffee in and bring to boil several times. The surface should rise but not separate. Some people even remove the foam altogether to remove the bitterness.

Random non-productive trivia;

There's a Turkish tradition that when you meet your girlfriends family with the intention of having their blessing to marry her, she makes coffee but puts (a lot of) salt instead of that sugar in step 4. (Only into your cup)

You are supposed to drink that without complaining. I'm not sure how or why this thing lives on.

Source: Turkish.

Neat. This is what Wikipedia has to say:

"For the groom's coffee, the bride-to-be sometimes uses salt instead of sugar to gauge his character. If the bridegroom drinks his coffee without any sign of displeasure, the bride-to-be assumes that the groom is good-tempered and patient. Indeed, as the groom already comes as the demanding party to the girl's house, in fact it is the boy who is passing an exam and etiquette requires him to receive with all smiles this particular present from the girl, although in some parts of the country this may be considered as a lack of desire on the part of the girl for marriage with that candidate."

Actually, roasting (from green -> finished) takes ~15 minutes commercially, and when I looked up "tradtional turkish coffee roasting"[1], the first useable link said up to ~20 mins (roasted in an oven).

Is there a traditional method that takes hours ?

-bch (commercial roaster in a former life)

[1] http://turkishcook.com/turkish-coffee-roasting/

Fwiw there are also machines that do it now, though purists disdain them. They are rare in homes (unlike espresso machines in Italy), but many commercial establishments in Turkey, the Balkans, and the Middle East will use the machine by default, if you don't inquire. In Greece there's probably a 50-60% chance of it being a machine nowadays, if you order at a restaurant or bakery and don't specifically ask if it's made in a briki. As is often the case, the solution to adapting to fast-paced capitalism seems to be automation.

I wonder if the disdain is for the idea of machine made Turkish coffee, or because there's some factor creating variance in the bubbling times for which the machines aren't compensating.

There's a HUGE culture behind Turkish(/Greek) coffee, and tons of details on making it.

A better machine could mimic the technical part (not that anybody makes them like that currently), but the very idea of a machine making it is against the whole philosophy of drinking it.

It's like making love to a plastic doll.

I agree as far as the ritual of making it in homes goes, but in a restaurant using a machine doesn't bug me much. Even when the coffee is made in a briki/cezve, at a larger store it'll be in a big assembly-line process in the kitchen, which doesn't really capture much mystique for me, and isn't visible to me anyway: all I see is that some coffee comes out a bit after I order it. So in that case it's just as well, to me, if a machine does it, as long as the quality is the same.

>I agree as far as the ritual of making it in homes goes, but in a restaurant using a machine doesn't bug me much.

For a larger store sure, it doesn't make much difference.

But the traditional way was at small coffee shops (kafenes) where people would see for hours, smoke shisha etc. Usually with a sand based stove (hovoli) etc.

Sounds like cowboy coffee to me, except for which container you settle the grounds in.

The preparation method is vaguely similar (heat the grounds in the water), but it differs in the fineness of the grind, which makes a substantial difference. Cowboy coffee uses a coarse grind, roughly like the grounds you'd use to make filter coffee, while Turkish coffee uses coffee ground to a powder, similar to the consistency of cocoa powder. This results in some of it staying suspended in solution, and the rest settling into a sludge.

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