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by oeuviz 2408 days ago
I have never heard of that lazy version. Here is how probably most Bosnian families would do it:

- Grind coffee beans as fine as you can, much finer than for espresso

- in the meantime, make sure to boil your water and then put it aside.

- heat up the džezva (turk: cezve) slowly for a few seconds (so that water that is poured in does not cool down too quickly)

- take 9g of coffee powder per cup and put it into your džezva. You can vary the amount to your likings. I take 18g of coffee for around 360ml of water.

- with the džezva still on the hot plate pour around 1/3 of the water slowly into the džezva. The water turns into a foamy dark liquid. Gently adjust temperature so that the liquid is slowly heated. This will make it rise due to the foam on top.

- Let it rise to about 2/3 of the džezva. Remove džezva from the plate, let the coffee set a little (to about 1/2).

- Pour more water into the coffee, again to 2/3 of the džezva

- put džezva back on plate, heat it up and let the coffee rise to 1/1 of the džezva

- remove from plate, slowly fill with water until the level is back to 1/1 (foamy liquid is setting again and will allow you to add more water)

Your coffee is ready to serve. Serve in fildžan or small cups.

Edit: formatting.

1 comments

What was the name of coffee in Bosnia historically? I can't believe it wasn't "Turkish coffee". I would expect that the name "Bosnian coffee" (that the article claims is now used) is something very recent (something similar to what bigwheeler here writes about "Greek" coffee). Is the name even really used?

Btw, the proper formatting here is to separate paragraphs with an empty line and to remove all leading spaces in front of every paragraph, to avoid the text being treated as the source code.

I was there recently and visited Sarajevo and actualy faced this as a real world problem: wanted to order bosnian coffee in a restaurant but was kind of unable to express myself.

If you order coffee (kahva/kafa) in Bosnia nowadays, you are likely to get whatever comes out of the machine installed at the bar.

To get the real deal I had to order using one of these expressions: domaća kafa/kahva (homeland coffee? native coffee?) naša kafa/kahva (translates to "our coffee")

or

bosanska kafa.

However, traditionally I guess coffee was just called kahva/kafa as it probably was not distingueshed between the verious forms of preparation. And also calling it turkish coffee would seem ok, as the whole area is highly influenced by (ancient) Turkey, not only linguistically.

> naša kafa

Yeah, but if you're a foreigner that would not work.

> And also calling it turkish coffee would seem ok

I'm pretty sure everyone in and around the Balkan peninsula would get the idea.

Thanks. I believe you can still fix the formatting above to avoid “source code” look which can’t be read easily, especially on mobile.
Done, thanks for pointing it out!