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July 29, 2006
Getting Greek Coffee Right
Ok, ok, almost two months ago I promised a post on how to make good Greek coffee, and my friends have been on my back ever since about it. Finally I got around to documenting the process, so here you go:
Ok, first, I should note that one of the things I never quite understood was why my grandparents always had these tiny little Greek coffee pots (called a briki in Greek) to boil their coffee in. It seemed impractical, especially because if you wanted to make a larger portion or multiple cups, you'd need to buy yet another, larger briki. I, figuring I'd be more practical about it, just bought the large one pictured above, so whether I wanted to make a little coffee or a lot of coffee, I figured I'd be all set. However, my coffee didn't come out quite right, and it wasn't until spending some more time travelling through Greece and Turkey and finally making my own at my grandparents' house in Greece that I finally realized what I was doing wrong.
The directions for making Greek coffee are pretty straightforward-- mix about 1 teaspoon of finely-ground coffee for every 3 oz. of water, boil the water until it foams up to the top of the briki, and pour it in your cup. If you boil it for too long, the foam boils away, and you end up with burnt coffee, poor tasting coffee-- kind of like Starbucks'. When I got everything right and didn't blatantly scald the coffee, it still didn't turn out right. I'll show what was happening after the jump, as this will require several pictures showing the process and the results.
I took my large briki and boiled up the coffee:
What was happening here was that the temperature of the sides of the briki were getting hotter than the temperature of the coffee, burning it when it boiled up. This situation remained after I turned off the heat, so that when I'd pour the coffee into my cup, the coffee would get scalded again as it poured down the side of the briki into the cup:
The result is not-so-good coffee, and you can tell because of the poor foam with overly-large bubbles.
Getting it Right
The first inkling that I should maybe use a different strategy was when I ordered some Greek coffee in Istanbul (or, as it's known there, "Turkish Coffee"). They prepared the coffee in a briki about the same volume as my coffee cup and brought it out on a tray of coals just before it had finished boiling. Then, at my table, the waiter lit the coals underneath the briki and let it finish boiling and poured out the coffee into my cup right in front of me. It was perfect.
So, while spending a few days in my family's ancestral village in southern Greece, I finally found the reason why my grandparents had so many different sizes of brikis (ok, technically, the plural would be brikia) -- they knew what they were doing when it came to this stuff. I decided to pass the time, as most Greeks do around there, by drinking coffee.
So, using 2 teaspoons of coffee grounds (it helps to be generous and I'll sometimes use a full tablespoon. I like the final product to be pretty thick) in a small, 5-6 oz. briki, I filled the water to the top, stirred it up will able a teaspoon of sugar, and started boiling. This time, it boiled up just before overflowing, but the coffee didn't get scalded:
I also managed to pour the coffee into the cup without getting the coffee burnt any further, effectively resulting in coffee as fresh in the cup as it was in the briki:
This ends up leaving me with the perfect cup of Greek coffee-- smooth and thick with a good dollup of foam at the top. This isn't my finest cup, but it is pretty good, and much better than the ones that I had made with the larger briki:
Posted by Dean at July 29, 2006 4:42 PM
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Comments
ha
i could have told you that...
i had to learn this in montenegro...
:-)
Posted by: t-rat at July 31, 2006 6:29 PM
BRAVO :)
Posted by: minardimi at August 4, 2006 4:48 AM