Fante's Pizzelles: or, The recipes keep getting better

After more than a decade of trying, Ebay's suggestion algorithm finally got me.

Fante's Special Pizzelle Recipe 3 eggs 6 oz (¾ cups) sugar 5 oz (1 cup plus 2 tbsp) melted shortening 1½ tsp anise seeds* 1½ tsp vanilla Juice and grated rind of ¼ orange or lemon 11 oz (2 cups) flour Beat eggs and sugar until they become light and foamy. Add the melted shortening, a little at a time. Add the anise seeds, vanilla, grated rinds and juices. Gradually add the flour until a light dough is formed; light enough to drop onto the iron with a spoon. You may have a little bit of flour left over. Drop spoonfuls onto the center of a hot pizzelle iron. Use a knife to push the dough off of the spoon. Cook until golden, following to the manufacturer's directions. *Use ground anise seeds, anise extract, or anise oil if desired. Note: This may be totally inauthentic, but our favorite way to flavor these is to add a near-excessive amount of cinnamon. Source: Fante's Kitchen

I'm impressed that Ebay sold me another pizzelle iron. After all, I already have one. Furthermore, I hate when clutter piles up around me. On top of that, I don't give Ebay a whole lot of shopping history to work with. About two-thirds of my purchases are out of necessity (such as tracking down replacement interior bits as my car ages). About half of the remaining purchases are not for myself, but for various friends and relations who ask me "Could you go online and find me a _____?" This leaves a tiny amount of recreational splurges for Ebay's computer to work with. Nevertheless, they sold me this thing.

Before we get to the recipe, I wanted to get to know this iron in the most low-stakes way possible. And so, rather than making anything from scratch, I reconstituted some instant waffle mix. I don't particularly like instant waffles, but they do make it easy to mix a small serving without measuring impossibly tiny amounts of baking powder. Heck, if you want a single pancake the size of a coaster, you can easily pour out a tiny allotment of powder and then stir in a half-splash of water.

Because I'm not an idiot, I gave our iron a good spritz of cooking spray. After putting the batter on it, I closed the lid and held it tightly shut as we have done for our previous pizzelles. I opened the pizzelle iron and immediately knew that I had failed. 

After giving it some thought, I remembered that you're supposed to put little cooking oil in waffle batter instead of just adding water. (Well, the directions on the back of the box call for melted butter. But we're economizing until we are competent.) And so, we reconstituted another single waffle's worth of batter (this time with cooking oil in it), put it on the iron, and.... 

Although the waffle didn't stick, it was too thin to lift intact. It easily let go of the iron with some gentle prodding, but the end results looked like this:

The first one is always for the fairies anyway.

At least we were improving. The first waffle had to be gouged off of the iron with a toothpick, this one flaked off without any cursing whatsoever. 

Anyway, this failure was very informative. It told me that with this particular iron, one must be very careful how thinly one presses the waffles within. With our first pizzelle iron (shown below), the actual waffle part is a little bit recessed inside a raised rim. And so, if you hold it tightly closed, your pizzelle will come out perfect. Or at least, it won't be squished to death.

However, the iron we're using today has no raised rim. So apparently, you want to press it sort-of closed so that your pizzelles are thin and crisp-- but you don't want to hold the handles too tight lest you squeeze your pizzelles out of existence.

I also gave this some thought and realized that I wasn't making pizzelles. I was making instant waffles. You're not supposed to squeeze those flat, but let the batter push up the lid as much as it wants. And while we might cook waffle batter on a pizzelle iron, it will never turn into a pizzelle. We needed to let the batter be its fluffy self instead of trying to make it act like Italian cookies. And so, for our third attempt, we put the batter onto the iron and then let go of the handles. 

Because I'm daft but not an idiot, I also drenched the iron with cooking spray. As the batter lifted up the iron, you could see the heavy coating of oil bubbling and sizzling within.

Upon opening the iron, we found a lovely-looking, totally-not-stuck waffle! However, I had no idea how to get it out. It's not like you can just slide a spatula under this thing. But after carefully pushing a wooden skewer under each ridge one at a time, we achieved liftoff!

At this point, I was getting tired of barely managing to get waffles off of this iron. Clearly there was a technique I was missing. I decided to reach out for help again. 

You may recall that when I first tried to cook pizzelles on the stove, I called Fante's Kitchen Shop in Philadelphia to ask how hot the burner should be under the pizzelle iron. Well, I poked around their website until I found an email address. I then sent an email with photos of the iron, more or less begging for help. The owner herself answered, advising that I grease it generously. I told her that I'd used plenty of cooking spray, and she replied that spray "is not always the best choice for these irons." She recommended brushing it with melted shortening.

She also asked "Is your iron is hot enough?" As far as how to pry them off the iron since a spatula was useless, she wrote "Pizzelle should slide right off."

Well I had no idea if my iron was hot enough. I had been getting it about as hot as I do a frying pan when I'm about to put dinner in it. Then I considered that I had been advised that one should be able to say one Hail Mary for each side of the pizzelles. But I couldn't say the Hail Mary slowly enough for how long mine needed to cook. 

I asked myself "What's the worst that can happen if I overheat the iron?" A burnt waffle would be disappointing but insignificant. A stuck-on waffle would be irksome, but I'd already scraped stuck-on batter out of this iron and we had only been together for one afternoon. We were in no danger of blackened cinders welding themselves to the metal because I was not going to put the iron onto the stove and then wander off to let it burn unattended. (And if things got really bad, I could cadge some of the more hazardous solvents from my friends who like working on cars.) 

With that in mind, I got the iron searing-hot. When I flicked some water-drops off my fingers, they didn't land with a sizzle. They vaporized with a harsh-sounding SPAT! 

During the surprisingly long wait for the iron to heat up, I melted shortening in the microwave and got out the marinade brush that gets used a lot in grilling. Usually, greasing the pan is one of the most forgettable parts of cooking. I was not mentally prepared for where today's pizzelles were taking me. Despite using a stovetop waffle iron, I wasn't ready to get so old-fashioned as to forsake the cooking spray. It felt like crossing a bridge over which I could never return.

Of course, greasing waffle irons with shortening is a very old technique. In the days before you could quickly melt it in the microwave (or set the shortening over the stove's pilot light), Miss Leslie directed cooks to rub their hot waffle irons with a small cloth bag of lard. 

I was telling a friend who is a chemist that I had forsaken my beloved cooking spray and gotten more archaic than I planned. He noted that shortening "has some uncanny nonstick properties more comparable to Teflon than a natural oil."

I should also note that a while ago, I asked an environmental scientist friend of mine whether shortening biodegrades or not. I said "I know that's not your area of study, but I figure you must be up the hallway from someone with an answer." A day later, he responded "She said 'under the right circumstances.'"

When the iron was finally hot enough and also hand-brushed with melted fat, I placed another dab of reconstituted waffle mix onto it. Our waffle required a lot longer than a single Hail Mary per side, but I figured that it was fluffy instead of thin and crisp. Therefore, the heat had a lot batter more to penetrate.

After the iron started to emit a toasty smell, I raised up the lid to see what we had inside. To my astonishment and delight, our waffle flapped around a bit as I lifted the top of the iron. In other words, the waffle let go of the iron of its own accord. I then held the pizzelle iron over a plate and flipped it upside down. The waffle fell right out, and landed on the plate in golden perfection. I didn't even use the spatula I had gotten out. In happy surprise, I returned it to the drawer instead of dropping it into the sink with the other dirty dishes. The waffle itself was fluffy in the middle, and crispier on the outside than any waffle I've ever made. Or maybe it was the same as the many other waffles I've made, and the secret ingredient was the sweet feeling of success. But whatever the reason, this was the best instant waffle I've ever had. It didn't even need syrup.

This brings us to today's recipe. Since the people at Fante's had been so helpful in my journey towards pizzelle competence, why not use the pizzelle recipe from their website? The note they typed above it was a decisive sales pitch: "This recipe has been around since the beginning of the century, and has been enjoyed by the thousands upon thousands of our customers who have, over the years, purchased pizzelle irons from us."

Source: Fante's Kitchen

I love that the original handout recommends calling Mrs. Fante herself "if more information is desired." 

As I got ready to make today's recipe, I decided to ask an Italian friend what to flavor them with. (One of the beautiful things about the modern age is that you can talk to people across the world much faster than the speed of pen pals.) I'm not obsessed with "authenticity," but I thought it might be a neat cultural insight. And I certainly got one when he answered "Do you know I have never heard of it?"

He went on to state "Being from northern Italy, it's not our tradition to make them." But he did a bit of internet searching for me, and came back with the most surprising (to me) part of the entire conversation: there are two kinds of pizzelles. Furthermore, the lacy-looking, waffle-iron cookies that appear in every Italian-American home I've ever been to are the "less known" (his words) kind in Italy. Apparently the word "pizzelle" more often refers to miniature pizzas stacked on top of deep-fried crusts. 

So pizzelles are more Italian than garlic bread, but they're not ubiquitous throughout Italy. I wasn't prepared for that answer, but I should have been. In America, it's easy to forget that Italy has multiple regions with different types of food. What we tend to think of as "Italian food" is (mostly) from southern Italy, because that's where most Italian immigrants came from. My friend, however, lives in the northern part of the country. To put this into American terms, it's like asking someone from New England how to make Southwestern food. They may not even recognize the names.

Because I sometimes have the foresight to plan ahead, I measured out the ingredients while supper was simmering on the stove. I only say this because our tiny mint cake looked very cute next to them.

(I made the mint cake just to find out what it tastes like to put mint extract into an otherwise unassuming cake. Turns out mint and butter go together unexpectedly well.)

The recipe directs us to beat the eggs until foamy (well really, the single egg because we're not cranking out 6 dozen pizzelles). I turned on the mixer and let it run while I finished tidying up the counterspace. By the time we had everything ready, our egg was so well-beaten that even Miss Leslie would have approved.

The bowl contains one egg and nothing else.

Unlike our previous pizzelle recipe, this one uses no baking powder at all. The only leavening is what you beat into it. With that in mind, I sifted the flour to break up any lumps before stirring it in. That way, we could do minimal stirring and thus deflate the batter as little as possible.

As a final recipe note, even though I was about to put copious amounts of shortening on the iron, I had reservations about putting it into the pizzelles themselves. And so, we dug into the freezer and pulled out the beef fat. You couldn't taste any meaty difference. It's like we're using lard, only we rendered it at home instead of buying an unnervingly heavy can of it. Also, I've been saving beef fat ever since the price of hamburger shot past the moon. It's been sitting in the freezer for ages. I had no idea what to do with it, but felt guilty about throwing it out.

And so, sooner than I expected, we were ready to try and cook these on the new zigzag pizzelle iron! This is our first real recipe on it, and I had high hopes. 

Well, we brushed on the melted shortening(!) and dropped on a tiny spoonful of pizzelle batter (better to go too small than too big when your excess batter burns when it oozes out). I then cooked it for a little over a minute per side, and then opened the iron to find that its first "real" pizzelle was stuck. No amount of striking the iron from the back with a wooden spoon would free the cookie. I think that after carefully and excessively dousing every notch and groove on the iron, I forgot to brush anything onto the flat circle in the center.

I barely (but successfully) managed to pry the pizzelle off in one piece. For our next one, I made sure to brush the entire iron, including that flat spot in the middle of it. After our next pizzelle had cooked, we raised the lid and hopefully wondered: "Does it look a little looser?" Well, we held the loaded iron over the cooling rack, turned it upside-down, and the pizzelle fluttered downward like a beautiful snowflake.

I started gradually increasing the pizzelle size, hoping to find that perfect amount of batter that fills the iron without dripping out of it. Our results were erratic. I frequently had to use the spatula to scrape off any oozing excess from the sides. 

Also, our first successful pizzelles looked like a pair of owl eyes on the cooling rack.

In full disclosure, a lot of our pizzelles had singed edges. I tried to convince myself that they were "rustic," but my powers of self-delusion can only go so far.

My friend's comments about the "uncanny nonstick properties" of shortening proved correct. If we hold one of these up to the nearest light, check out how wispy it is between the ridges. I can't believe it fell off the iron intact.

I thought that brushing on melted shortening would be a miserably messy ordeal. But while it is a very drippy process, it doesn't have the same blast radius as a can of cooking spray. All of our dripping fat was confined to one small zone instead of sprayed onto everything on the countertop. There were some stray shortening drops that get flicked off the brush, but the cleanup was a lot less greasy. Also, it's about as quick as cooking spray. You just flick the brush across the iron for a second or two. 

After the last of the pizzelles had been cooked, I had to stop and just stare at what we had done. I don't know if I've ever done cookies that looked this good before.

These tasted so good. I may end up adopting this pizzelle recipe instead of the one from my ex's grandmother's basement. In terms of flavor and texture, our my ex's grandmother's tasted professional, but these tasted homemade. If you want to try making your own pizzelles, I definitely recommend this recipe. Also, nutmeg is a surprisingly good spice for these. It goes really well with the toasty flavor that comes from cooking these to that rich golden brown. It's not authentic, it's not traditional, but it's delicious anyway.

And with this purchase, I am officially immune to any algorithmic attempts to sell me another waffle iron. In the unlikely event that the price doesn't ward me off, I only need to remember how crowded it's getting on top of the fridge.

I really hoped to end this with a short, jaunty paragraph demystifying stovetop pizzelle irons, or maybe a handy numbered list of tips for anyone who wants to try using one for themselves. But I'm still getting the hang of cooking on these myself! 

The only useful advice I can suggest is to put a paper mat down on which to grease the iron and apply the batter. In an earlier time, I would have suggested using old newspapers. These days, I've been saving the brown paper that pads a lot of mail-order boxes. 

Maybe someone out there can grease a waffle iron without any mess at all, but I am not that good. 

Anyway, if one of these stovetop irons seems daunting, you can always get an electric pizzelle iron. You just put your batter in there, shut it, and wait for the ready-light. A lot of them even have little dials that let you set how brown you want your pizzelles to be. And of course, they all come with instructions.

But regardless of whether one uses a stovetop pizzelle iron or an electric one, this is a really good recipe to put on it.