coffee

Coffee (Coffea arabica, the roasted seed) is used once, in the Turkish coffee: 7 g of Arabica ground flour-fine, a heaped teaspoon, to 70 ml of cold water measured in the cup you will drink from. The coffee and sugar are stirred in until no dry powder floats, then the spoon stays out. The pot sits over the lowest flame for 3 to 4 minutes and comes off the moment the foam reaches the rim, before it boils. Nothing is strained, and the grounds settle for a minute in the cup.

The unfiltered cup is the centre of the Journal's note on Turkish coffee. Cafestol and kahweol, diterpenes in the coffee oil, measured 232 and 1,016 mg/L in a boiled unfiltered brew against 5 and 1.8 mg/L filtered. In one trial, fifteen volunteers given the non-triglyceride fraction of coffee oil for four weeks raised their mean cholesterol 48 mg/dL against placebo, and the same oil stripped of both diterpenes did nothing. The note names its limits: that clinical work was on Scandinavian boiled coffee, and the one Turkish coffee pilot, 40 young women drinking three 40 ml cups a day, points the same way without carrying their weight. Hence the recipe's caution: a cup or two, not a pot all day.

The dose differs by tradition too. Under one identical protocol, 20 g of beans in 500 ml of water for ten minutes, Turkish coffee measured 129.6 mg of caffeine per 100 ml and Saudi 49.8. The recipe puts a 70 ml cup at roughly 90 mg. The note also corrects the dark-roast assumption: of 57 ground coffees sold in Greece for this method, 25 were light blonde roasts, 11 medium and 6 dark.