Pizzelles: or, Lose the man, keep the recipes!

This festive season is a great excuse to bake our way through our feelings!

I may have lost the man who bought me the Norwegian wafer iron, but first I got his Italian grandmother's recipes.

Pizzelles 1 stick (½ cup) margarine* 3½ to 4 cups flour 2 tbsp baking powder† 3 eggs 1 cup sugar 1 tsp vanilla (and other flavorings of choice) Melt the margarine and set aside to cool. Sift together the flour and baking powder, set aside. With an electric mixer, beat the eggs on high speed until foamy. Then gradually add the sugar, beating the whole time. Continue beating for another 3 or so minutes, or until thick and cream-colored. Add the margarine and the vanilla, and beat for another minute or two. Lastly, reduce the speed to low. Mix in enough flour to form a firm dough that can be shaped in the hands. Mix only until all is combined- do not overbeat. (If you're worried about overmixing and toughening the dough, set aside the mixer and stir in the flour with a spoon instead.) Bake on a hot pizzelle iron according to the manufacturer's instructions. *use the margarine that comes in sticks, not the spreadable kind that comes in tubs. †Yes, tablespoons. The "b" in "tbsp" is not a mistype. Note: If using citrus rind, put it in a small bowl with the sugar. Then rub and pinch it between your fingers to release the flavor.

When my not-ex-at-the-time's mother found out I like to cook, she immediately got out the recipe box in which resided all of her Italian mother's recipes (in her own handwriting) and insisted that I whip out my phone to take pictures of them.

In retrospect, I should have been suspicious when his mother immediately liked me so much. Every time someone's parents were that grateful to meet me, their offspring proved defective.

Anyway, back to pizzelles. It took me a long time to work up the nerve to make these. After all, this is someone's Italian grandmother's recipe. You don't mess with Italians, even ones with faulty progeny. I didn't want to bodge the recipe and then be cursed from beyond the grave. Even after I had a wafer iron in my hand, I was too nervous to give the recipe a go.

The pizzelles lurked in the back of my mind like an unfinished project. I even started looking at pizzelle irons on Ebay, telling myself that I would never buy one. Here's how well that went:

I don't normally do unboxing photos, but I have to commend the person who packed this. Many sellers just slap a wad of bubble wrap onto something and assume it is safe. But this seller packed our pizzelle iron marvelously. Please note the styrofoam lining that was placed against the sides of the box before filling the center with confetti and pizzelles. 

You might think we simply dug out a pizzelle iron from inside the paper, but instead we found a plastic-wrapped mummy. Also, the seller had lashed the merchandise to a long piece of styrofoam in case all the other padding wasn't enough. After we unwrapped it, we found... a thoroughly immobilized pizzelle iron.

After further unwrapping, our treasure was finally free! Again, I have to commend the person who packed this. I've always believed you should pack things as if you were going to throw the box down a flight of stairs. After all, if you want a 20-pound package sent across the continent in four days for the price of a mediocre pizza, do you really think they can afford to lovingly caress your precious cargo throughout its journey?

And so, with great delight, we opened our pizzelle iron and beheld the pretty design in it.

Does it look familiar?

You may think I obsessively tried to find a pizzelle iron just like my ex's grandmother's, but I didn't. It turns out this is a really common design. In fact, it was one of the first listings that I saw when I recreationally searched Ebay for "stovetop pizzelle iron." So, finding this specific pizzelle iron is less like "I had to track down an ice cream mold from this one metalworking shop that was in my great-aunt's hometown in 1913," and more like "I wanted an avocado-colored Crock Pot just like my mom had." In other words, it was relatively easy, but not instantaneous.

Even after finding the iron I wanted (multiple times), I thought I was safe from buying one. They were always priced dangerously close to a hundred dollars. And so, secure in the knowledge that everything was too expensive to tempt me, I would flip through listings of pizzelle irons, admiring the pretty designs whenever I needed mental breaks from looking at words on a screen. Then someone in Ohio insidiously listed this one in my price range.

Our fate was sealed. We would have my ex's grandmother's pizzelles. They start with margarine.

Tastes like semi-stolen heirlooms!

As aforementioned, I have been trying to work up the nerve to make this recipe for quite some time. Because of that, we've had an embarrassing number of boxes of margarine pass through the refrigerator. Every time I purchased the margarine, it would sit in the back of the bottom shelf, waiting for me to work up the nerve to take on the recipe that put it into my shopping cart. But my courage would fail, and I would reluctantly use the margarine in other recipes as it threatened to expire. But that will happen no more. 

Every time I bought yet another box of it, I did consider that margarine doesn't seem particularly Italian. But I'm not someone's Italian grandmother writing down recipes.

Meanwhile, we had to figure out what to flavor our pizzelles with. She only wrote down vanilla, but that seemed a bit underwhelming. I always thought Italian pizzelles had a lot of flavorings in them, not just a splash of vanilla.

Some time earlier, I had asked my future ex what his mom liked to put in hers. He said "I don't know."

I could not hide my disbelief. "You mean you grew up with Italian relatives and never hung around the kitchen to find out how they made everything?"

"Not really...?"

I should have known on the spot that we would never last.

At any rate, I decided to put in orange rind and almond extract. To my ignorant perspective, that combination seemed Italian-ish. Also, the oranges at the supermarket have been really good lately. (I would later find out that apparently anise is considered traditional in pizzelles.)

You can already see the oil coming out of the orange rind barely after we grated it.

I put the orange rind into the spice grinder with some of the sugar to properly pulverize it. However, the rind contained so much (delicious-smelling) oil that it turned our sugar into a paste. Even though our orange sugar wasn't a free-flowing powder, getting it out of the spice grinder was easy. Resisting the temptation to eat it all was not.

Moving on in the recipe, we are directed to beat the eggs "until foamy." I don't know how foamy the eggs are supposed to be, but I decided that meant to let the mixer do this while I get everything else ready:

Things remained gloriously foamy until we poured in the margarine, whereupon the eggs deflated. You can see the high-water mark on the sides of the bowl, and compare it to the shrunken puddle that lies below.

At this point, our pizzelles were almost complete. Let the record show that even though I rarely bother with such things, I actually sifted the flour first. Again, you don't argue with Italian grandmothers.

Our pizzelle dough was thicker than any waffle batter I have ever made. It didn't fall from the beaters so much as slowly slough off in globs. 

But I thought we had probably made it right. The recipe says to "cut into small pieces," which would have been impossible with a batter. Although this was just ever-so-slightly too soft to cut into anything, though one could roll it into balls between the hands. Whether I had made this right or not, it was time to put our dough onto the pizzelle iron.

Or at least, it was time to put it on some sort of waffle iron. 

You know how new waffle irons are maddeningly sticky before they've been used a lot? (Or at least, the ones without a nonstick coating are.) Well, I had horrible visions of gouging out burnt cookie fragments from all those pretty lines in the suspiciously shiny pizzelle iron. And so, I got out our faithful Norwegian friend to bake the first ones. Given the insanely high amount of baking powder, I put only a tiny little ball of dough onto the iron. After it cooked, we had a cute tiny wafer. It also showed the lines on the iron better than our cinnamon wafers ever had. If I knew someone into resin casting, I could have given them one of my ex's grandmother's pizzelles and asked them to copy the iron that made it.

Better a puny pizzelle than one that oozes into the flames below.

With our second pizzelle (is it really a pizzelle if I didn't use the pizzelle iron right in front of me?), I dared to put a little more dough onto the iron. As it puffed up, it raised the lid far more than I would have ever expected.

I had no idea how long to cook this, so I waited until the steam emanating from the iron tapered off. (I had no idea what other signs of doneness to watch for.) When we opened the iron, we were rewarded with the most beautiful cookie patty I've ever made. 

Having proven the recipe on familiar utensils, it was time to make pizzelles on an actual pizzelle iron.

As I laid the iron on the stove, I found that it was is oddly unsuited for a domestic gas burner. Those fin- like protrusions leading to the hinges prevented the iron from laying flat. I would like to point out that the Norwegian iron doesn't have this problem.

Anyway, I had stalled, dithered, and fretted about my recipe-unworthiness long enough. The iron was hot, the batter was made, and the time had arrived! I almost put the iron back and finished cooking the pizzelle dough on our faithful Norwegian friend. But I didn't want to waste the gas that had already been expended to heat the Italian iron. And so, I drenched it with cooking spray and committed myself to going forward.

I put a daringly large ball of pizzelle dough onto the hot iron, almost defying it to spill over the edges and ignite. However, after having made some Scandinavian-looking pizzelles only minutes earlier, I thought I had a reasonable-ish handle on how much the dough expands. 

Also, I figured that while the Norwegian iron has little delicate notches, the Italian one has deep trenches that need to be filled. 

Things got treacherously close to fiery, but our pizzelle (barely) remained inside the iron and unsinged.

After waiting for about 45 seconds, we raised the lid and saw.... this!

I was very suspicious of how well our first pizzelle came out. Maybe my ex's grandmother decided to cut me a posthumous favor as compensation for faulty progeny. Or maybe it's because I used enough cooking spray to practically fry it.

As much as I liked the flower more when looking at the iron itself, I thought the interlocking-squares design looked nicer on the pizzelles. Both sides looked really pretty, but I never thought I would prefer squares over flowers.

For our next pizzelle, I decided to try draping it over a bowl instead of laying it flat. Even when hot off the iron and therefore at its floppiest, the pizzelle was too resilient for our edible-bowl dreams.

After the pizzelle had cooled and we laid it on a plate, it was barely curved enough to look deliberate. No one was going to serve a charming and presentational assortment of fresh fruits and whipped cream in it.

After making all these pizzelles, you may wonder how they tasted. And... well, our first batch had an interesting, almost crumbly texture. It reminded me of when we made an entire cake out of egg yolks. I had always thought pizzelles were supposed to be crispy. I also was a bit suspicious of my first batch's pale color. The recipe card says to bake "until golden brown," and ours had remained obstinately yellow. And I could tell that if I had left them in the iron long enough to turn brown, they would have become tooth-breakingly hard. 

It was time to call in the experts.

This led me to Fante's Kitchen, a cooking store in Philadelphia that I used to go to all the time in the fondest dreams that I could afford all the beautiful cookware they had. I remember seeing hand-painted pie birds, ceramic baking dishes that looked more delicious than any food you could possibly put in them, and everything else that I wished I was the kind of cook who used. Heck, when I got it into my head to buy a two-pan balance scale just like Miss Leslie insisted on in her 1837 cookbook, Fante's Kitchen had a box of brass weights to put on it. (However, I hadn't the funds.)

Fante's has an entire page of pizzelle recipes, so I called them during store hours and asked for help and advice. In an attempt to seem more normal, I said I had gotten a stovetop pizzelle iron (true) without any instructions (also true) from my great-aunt (honesty isn't always the best policy) and didn't know what I was doing with it (true). The person who answered the phone said "Just one second, let me ask our resident pizzelle expert."

My first question was "How hot should the burner be under this thing, anyway?"

"You want to be able to say a Hail Mary for each side."

As I was informed, there's no simple "Set the stove to low/medium/high" for these things. Nor can you set a timer and let it dictate your baking. Also, pizzelles shouldn't expand upwards. Indeed, many pizzelle irons have a latch to keep them tightly shut as the batter expands. And with older pizzelle irons that were actually made of cast iron instead of aluminum, the sheer weight of the metal kept them pressed tightly shut. Since mine had no latch, I would need to tightly hold the handles as the batter expanded, which would force it to spread outward without going upward.

If all that sounds daunting, did you know you can just buy an electric iron? It works just like a countertop waffle iron, with a ready-light and everything. I'm not complaining about using a stovetop iron (after all, I deliberately bought the thing). I'm just noting that this can be a lot easier if you want to try it yourself. 

Archaic kitchen things are my idea of a good time— but only when they're a choice and not the only way. Some people forsake all the comforts of civilization to go camping with nothing but a tent and a pocketknife, secure in the knowledge that their car awaits to take them back to their house with plumbing and electricity. In the same way, I use things like stovetop waffle irons because I know that the burner sits on top of a fully-automatic, thermostatically-controlled, self-cleaning oven.

As I looked around online, I noted that a lot of people put their pizzelles on cooling racks instead of dropping them directly onto plates. (Well, there's this one guy who flings them onto the bare countertop. But I don't have that kind of horizontal space.) I had no expansive cooling rack, but I do have a small one I got for cooking fish fingers in the toaster oven.

Anyway, with our new knowledge, we set out to make pizzelles again. We adjusted the heat, we used the cooking spray, and after putting in the batter, we firmly squeezed the iron shut. The batter tried to shove the iron open with more force than I would have expected from a hot flour-and-egg foam. I had to clamp the handle with white-knuckle force. After about the time required to say a Hail Mary, I felt the fight inside the iron go away. The iron's handles, rather than struggling against my fist, went limp in my hand. It almost felt like I had squeezed the life out of my own creation.

The pizzelles were golden-brown and so lightweight I thought they might float out of my hand when I picked them up.

The cooling rack is tiny, but it's all I've got.

I began to think I might be getting the hang of this. I was told the thin parts should be almost translucent. Well, I held a pizzelle up to the nearest light, and it almost looked like the window over some ancient church's altar somewhere in Italy. 

As a reminder, you can buy an electric pizzelle maker and make this a lot easier. If you can operate a countertop waffle iron, you can use an electric pizzelle maker.

While the first attempt at pizzelles was on the better side of tolerable, the second ones were fantastic (if you flicked off any errant singed spots on the edges). I was so glad I kept this recipe. And since my ex doesn't cook, I spitefully told myself that I'm not even family anymore and I'll still have his grandmother's pizzelles more often than he ever will. 

I will be dealing with future men like this: