Hookah Love Blog

We’ve all done it – perhaps clicking closed a cell phone we’ve wondered “How did I ever live without one?”. Perhaps a couple of seconds’ research on the internet answers a question that’s been on your mind for ages and mused “I don’t know what I did before I could Google things”.

How could I possibly smoke my hookah back before there was washed, flavored tobacco? The answer is simple: after a bowl of traditional jurak, the smoker probably didn’t care about how it tasted. “Jurak” most often refers to whole leaf, unwashed, unprocessed, unflavored tobacco. By today’s standards, a bowl of jurak would most likely render a smoker unable to care about anything except a strong buzz from the large quantities of nicotine.

After the leaves of tobacco are soaked for a few hours, the leaves were either shredded using a special knife and placed in a special type of bowl (not unlike the shisha or mo’assel we all love). Alternatively, strips of the squeezed-dry shisha were wound around the bowl stem, looking something like a vertical cigar. Just as one would light a cigar, the coals were placed on the top and smoked downwards throughout the session.

How does it taste? I can’t say, from personal experience. Most who have tried it compare it to a cigar or pipe tobacco taste, but slightly more smooth.