Pizzelle Recipe and Analysis

Pizzelles Recipe:

Ingredients:

• 1 ¾ cups of flour

• 2 teaspoons of baking powder

• ½ teaspoon of salt

• 3 eggs

• ¾ cup of sugar

• ¼ pound of melted butter

• Vanilla to taste (start a 1 teaspoon)

• Anise to taste (not used in the batch I made)

Steps:

1. Whisk dry ingredients together in a bowl and set aside.

2. In a larger bowl, beat eggs and sugar until blended and slightly fluffy. Slowly add in cooled, melted butter, vanilla, and anise and mix until fully incorporated.

3. Slowly add in dry ingredients until the batter is smooth and thick

4. Drop batter onto the pizzelle iron, using a cookie scoop, and cook till cookies are golden brown.

A Note for the Beginner:

DO NOT LET THEM BURN! (It smells worse than burned popcorn.)

Analysis:

The food in this recipe is processed, but not to an extreme. Both the flour and the sugar are bleached, and the extracts have chemicals in them, as does the butter. However, this recipe was designed to be made by peasants in Italy. Nothing in the recipe has to be processed, it is more a matter of what is available to the consumer when you buy the ingredients. While most of the ingredients are processed, it is not nearly as bad as buying pre-made pizzelles, which have exponentially more sugar and chemicals in them than if you make it yourself.

As a desert, this is obviously not the healthiest of meals, but humans have evolved to digest everything used in the recipe. There are chemicals added to make them easier to sell and to store, but not necessarily to make it easier to digest. Pizzelles are not meant to be eaten all year round. Mostly they are served around Christmas, and eaten with espresso after dinner. Too much intake could lead to diabetes, but that would take a lot  of pizzelles.

As far as environmental ramifications go, almost everything used was produced in North America. The thing that came the furthest was the vanilla, which was originally grown in Mexico. Almost everything else was produced in the Midwest or East Coast. There is not a lot of travel involved in producing pizzelles because they are so simple. Again, this is originally a peasant desert. You had to be able to come up with the majority of your own ingredients and get the rest for cheap when this recipe was written. That meant nothing that I had travelled too far, if at all.