Making Turkish Sand Coffee: Culinary Alchemy on the Streets of Jordan

There’s a lit­tle culi­nary alche­my hap­pen­ing in this video shot in Aqa­ba, Jor­dan. It involves cof­fee and sand. And “Broth­er Gantry” on Red­dit has it all fig­ured out. He explains:

He’s brew­ing cof­fee using tech­niques tra­di­tion­al­ly used to make Turk­ish Cof­fee...

Fill­ing each of those ves­sels (called a cezve) part­way is water, very fine­ly ground cof­fee, and pos­si­bly sug­ar. Because this is hap­pen­ing in Jor­dan there might also be a lit­tle car­da­mon in there and/or no sug­ar.

Nor­mal­ly to make prop­er Turk­ish cof­fee you heat it to a point where it just begins to bub­ble, but under a rolling boil, so it begins to foam up into the neck of the cezve before reduc­ing the heat and allow­ing the foam to die, repeat­ing the process 3 or 4 times before the mix­ture is poured into small cups (fin­can) and you’re left with a won­der­ful­ly strong, thick cof­fee with sus­pend­ed grounds which quick­ly set­tle to the bot­tom. Sand over a flame tra­di­tion­al­ly used in the process as a sort of “adjustable dou­ble boil­er” cups left on the sur­face stay warm and the heat used for brew­ing can be adjust­ed by the depth of the cezve in the sand with­out hav­ing to wor­ry about the tem­per­a­ture of the heat source itself.

The guy in this video seems to be mod­i­fy­ing a lot of the steps to make some­thing like a “reg­u­lar strength” cof­fee more the­atri­cal­ly using tra­di­tion­al equip­ment (e.g. he starts with much less ground cof­fee in the pot, judg­ing from the col­or to begin with, over­fill­ing it, not tak­ing time to let the foam die down but pour­ing out some the brew­ing cof­fee into a cup to reduce the lev­el, and pour­ing the results of a cezve made for sev­er­al cups into a nor­mal sized cof­fee cup instead).

Find more infor­ma­tion on mak­ing Turk­ish Sand Cof­fee at Secret Cof­fee Drinks.

via Digg

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hon­oré de Balzac Writes About “The Plea­sures and Pains of Cof­fee,” and His Epic Cof­fee Addic­tion

Philoso­phers Drink­ing Cof­fee: The Exces­sive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard

“The Vertue of the COFFEE Drink”: An Ad for London’s First Cafe Print­ed Cir­ca 1652