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I've always hated cardamom in Turkish coffee, but the other day I went to a Greek restaurant and forgot to tell them to leave the cardamom out. And it turned out to be really good!

I tried to reproduce it, but for some reason I cannot achieve any consistency.

I have a portable kit for brewing Turkish coffee outside (a small alcohol stove, a small cezve, pre-ground coffee, sugar etc.) and I've been experimenting with cardamom pods from the same batch (a jar of whole cardamom pods from a supermarket shelf, two months old or so).

I open the pod, take out the seeds, and add them to the mix at different stages (cold water, right before boiling, right after boiling, in the cup etc.)

It always goes from zero to completely nasty. If I add too little or too late, I don't feel it at all; if I add just a little bit more just a little bit earlier, the cardamom completely masks the flavor of the coffee itself. I can never seem to hit the sweet spot.

All the recipes and YouTube tutorials I've seen so far don't pay any attention to the cardamom, they just open one or two pods and add them to the mix. One pod is always too much for me; half a pod sometimes I don't taste at all, sometimes the cardamom is the only thing that I can taste.

I am about to try different brands of coffee and different brands of cardamom, but before I do that I was wondering if there was some kind of procedure for adding the cardamom that I was missing?

Quassnoi
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1 Answers1

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Perhaps it helps to buy cardamom in an Indian or Pakistani food shop. Most likely, the quality will be good then. Also, crack the pods slightly in a mortar.

Further remark: Another kind of coffee which tastes very good with cardamom, is the one used in the Gulf countries, see Beans for Qatar-type coffee? . It tastes very differently from Turkish coffee, but is very good.

There are also packaged coffee versions containing cardamon such as this one, http://www.haseebcoffee.com/cofee-haseeb-en.html , which, in my opinion, have good taste.

Martin Peters
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