Mastic Coffee
Καφές με μαστίχαka-FES meh mas-TEE-ha
A Greek coffee with a cool, resinous, faintly pine-like scent coming off the foam. It comes from a single tear of mastic crushed with the sugar, and the crushing is the only part that needs any care.
At a glance
- Coffee : water
- 1:10
- Active time
- 3 min
- Total time
- 7 min
- Makes
- 1 small cup
- Serve
- Hot, with water
- Kit
- Briki + mortar
Ingredients
Note: If you cannot find the resin, a teaspoon of mastiha liqueur stirred into the cup after brewing gives a lighter version of the same aroma.
Method
-
Freeze the mastic
Put the tear in the freezer for ten minutes. Cold resin is brittle and shatters into powder. Warm resin smears and sticks to everything.
Freeze 10 minutes -
Grind it with the sugar
Crush the mastic in a mortar with the teaspoon of sugar until fine. The sugar crystals act as grit and stop the resin clumping.
Do it in a stone or ceramic mortar. Mastic is sticky enough to coat a spice grinder's blades.
-
Stir everything in cold
Add the water, coffee and mastic sugar to the briki and stir until smooth. Then stop stirring.
-
Heat slowly and lift
Low flame, three to four minutes, until the foam domes up towards the rim. Take it off before it boils.
The mastic aroma is volatile. A boil sends it up the extractor fan.
3 to 4 minutes -
Pour and rest
Pour slowly so the foam stays whole. Let it settle for a minute and serve with cold water. Smell it before you drink it.
Settle 1 minute
Why this works
Mastic is the resin of a variety of lentisk tree, Pistacia lentiscus var. chia, and only the trees in the south of Chios produce it commercially. It is scraped from cuts in the bark, left to harden into tears, and has had protected designation of origin in the EU since 1997 as Masticha Chiou. The flavour is mostly volatile terpenes, alpha-pinene above all, the same compound that gives pine needles their smell. That is why it reads as clean, cool and green.
The resin itself barely dissolves in water. What carries the flavour into the coffee are those volatile aromatics, released by heat. Grinding it fine gives them a huge surface to escape from, and grinding it with sugar is the old trick for getting it fine at all. On its own, mastic is chewy enough to have been used as chewing gum for two thousand years, and it gums up a mortar in seconds.
The same volatility explains the heat rule. These aromatics boil off well below the boiling point of water. Bring the briki up slowly, lift it as the foam rises, and most of the aroma is trapped under the kaimaki and released when you lift the cup. Boil it and the kitchen smells wonderful and the coffee does not.
Keep the dose small. A lentil-sized tear in one cup is plenty. Too much and the pine turns medicinal and slightly bitter.
Variations
- Mastiha liqueur: a teaspoon stirred into a plain Greek coffee after brewing. Easier and lighter.
- With cardamom: one crushed pod alongside the mastic, as in parts of the Levant.
- Freddo with mastic: a little mastic syrup in a freddo espresso, which some Chios cafes serve.
- Mastic sugar in bulk: grind ten tears with 100 g of sugar and keep it in a jar for a month of cups.
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Questions
What does mastic taste like?
Clean, resinous and faintly pine or cedar-like, with a slightly cooling finish. In coffee it comes across mostly as aroma rather than taste.
Where do I buy mastic?
Greek delis and online, sold as Chios mastic or mastiha tears. Look for the Masticha Chiou protected origin label. Powdered mastic exists but loses its aroma fast.
Why does mastic stick to my mortar?
It warmed up. Freeze the tears for ten minutes and grind them with sugar, which acts as grit and keeps the resin from smearing.
Can I put mastic in espresso?
Yes, as a syrup or a few drops of mastiha liqueur. The resin itself will not dissolve in a shot, so grinding it in does not work the same way as in a briki.