Fig
Dried fig, and the roasted-fig coffee made from it, which is a real Aegean and Balkan drink rather than a novelty. The fig is also a lesson in botany worth having: what is eaten is not a fruit but an inverted flower cluster, pollinated from the inside by a specific wasp.
Identity
- Botanical name
- Ficus carica
- Family
- Moraceae
- Part used
- Fruit
- Origin
- Western Asia and the eastern Mediterranean; cultivated across the Mediterranean basin since antiquity
- Drunk in
- Aydın, Turkey, Greece, Balkans, Iran
Character
As a dried-fruit infusion, thick, jammy and very sweet with a seedy texture. Roasted and ground, closer to a dark grain coffee — caramel, toast and bitterness with the fig sweetness behind it.
Notes: fig, caramel, toast, dried fruit
History
Among the earliest cultivated fruits of the Levant, and one of the crops whose domestication is argued about precisely because the archaeological evidence is early and ambiguous. The roasted-fig drink belongs to the family of chicory and grain coffee substitutes that spread across Europe in periods of shortage and stayed in local use afterwards rather than disappearing with the shortage.
How it is drunk
In Turkey, kuru incir from the Aydın valley is a major export crop, and fig coffee (incir kahvesi) is drunk in the Aegean region and sold to visitors as a regional speciality. Dried figs are simmered into hoşaf and into Balkan and Levantine compotes. In South Asia anjeer goes into hot milk.
Production
Figs are sun-dried on trays, flattened and graded on colour and on the sugar bloom that forms on a well-dried fruit. For the drink they are roasted dark and ground, which converts the sugar to caramel and bitterness — the roast is doing what the roast does to barley, chicory or a date stone.
Preparation
Decoction · Roasted grain infusion
Boiling and decoction
1–3 g/100 ml · 98–100 °C · 10 min
Herbal infusion (tisane)
2–4 g/100 ml · 95–100 °C · 5 min
Category-typical for roasted grain drinks rather than measured for this grain. Roasted material is already cooked, so the usual failure is under-dosing rather than over-steeping.
Caffeine: None. Roasted fig is sold and brewed as a coffee substitute and belongs to the same family of drinks as chicory and roasted barley.
What gets confused
Fig leaf is a separate material, infused in Turkey and Japan and tasting of coconut and green wood rather than of fruit — the leaf and the fruit are not versions of each other. “Fig coffee” contains no coffee, and blends of ground fig with real coffee are also sold and are a third product.
Common mistakes
- Expecting the roasted drink to taste of figs. The roast is most of what is in the cup.
Evidence for this page
This page is TeaHQ synthesis throughout. No external source stands behind any statement on it, including the botanical name. 132 of the 204 botanicals have had their names and distribution checked against a taxonomic authority and this is not one of them.
Brewing parameters here are typical practice for the category rather than measurements of this plant, and each set says so.
This page makes no safety claim. It describes what Fig is, where it comes from and how it is prepared — not what it does to a person. The absence of a safety note here is not a statement that the plant is safe. How TeaHQ handles this.