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Drink

Turkish Coffee

Turkish coffee is made by boiling finely ground coffee with water and sugar, then adding orange flower water and cold water before serving.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Coffee and orange work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 326 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells buttery, creamy. The science ↓

Turkish Coffee

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Heat a coffee pot.

  2. Add 2 teaspoons of finely ground coffee, ¼ pint of cold water, and 2 lumps of sugar.

  3. Boil for about 10 minutes.

  4. Remove from heat and let the coffee settle.

  5. Add 5 drops of orange flower water.

  6. Just before serving, add a few drops of cold water to clear the coffee.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Coffee + orangetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together326 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (buttery, creamy).

  2. Coffee + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,344 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Sugar and orange barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Finely ground coffee
Provides the main flavor and body of the drink, extracted by boiling in water.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the bitterness of the coffee.
Orange flower water
Adds a floral aroma to the coffee.

The step that matters

Remove from heat and let the coffee settle. Letting the grounds settle before serving keeps them at the bottom of the cup. Boiling must stop first, since continued boiling can overflow the pot and over-extract bitterness.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (coffee, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against coffee, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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