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About Dee Tees' Gourmet Pizzelles

Since 1996, Dee Tees' has been making authentic Italian pizzelles. These unique gourmet cookies are made using traditional Italian recipes to create a delicious "waffle style" cookie that is perfectly suited for any occasion. These waffer like cookies are thin and crisp, (just like Grandmom's) and are a delight to enjoy with your favorite cup of coffee or tea, after dinner, or as a snack. All Dee Tees' pizzelles are handmade fresh daily, using the finest ingredients and natural flavorings. In addition to our "Classic Pizzelles" we also offer Sugar Free and Gluten Free Pizzelles, all in a variety of flavors to please eveyone. Order and send to family, friends, business associates, and even indulge yourself!

For pricing information and availability please call Dee Tees' 609.859.9159 or click here to send us an email. Wholesale and retail inquiries welcome.

Our Sugar Free/Gluten Free Pizzelles were voted “Best of South Jersey” in 2004!

Making The Perfect Pizzelle: The Debbie Garlotta Story

By Maury Z. Levy

The long shadows of a very long day casually creep across the lawn of her Southampton, New Jersey home. It’s a little after six, and Debbie Garlotta is finishing dinner. A little salad, a little tortellini. It’s a little after six, and that can mean only one thing to Debbie Garlotta. Time for bed.

In about seven hours, she’ll be getting up to start making the mix for tomorrow’s batch of Dee Tees’ Pizzelles. She really doesn’t have to make mix at two in the morning. There are other people who would do it. There are machines that will do it. But that’s not Debbie Garlotta’s style. She started this business from scratch, and that’s how she’ll make the mix. She needs to have all 400 pounds ready by 5 AM. That’s when the first of her crew of family and friends comes in to start shaping the Pizzelles of Perfection.

Debbie Garlotta started this business six years ago in the kitchen of her modest home. It has grown so much now she has relocated and added on a cookie room. But, make no mistake, no matter how big it grows, Dee Tees’ will always be a quality and caring business.

It sure started that way. Every Christmas, Debbie would get together with the neighborhood women. They would trade cookies and they would trade recipes. Some made chocolate chip, others made gingerbread. Debbie Garlotta made pizzelles. Debbie’s pizzelles became the hit of the cookie parties. “You know,” one of her friends said, “you really should go into business and make these.” Sure, that’s all Debbie Garlotta needed to do. As if raising two young sons wasn’t enough of a job. So Debbie Garlotta continued to make her Christmas pizzelles, and everybody was happy.

Then something strange happened. Debbie turned 40. “That’s when I decided what I wanted to be when I grew up,” she says. The boys, Christopher and Daniel, were growing up and it was time for Debbie to do her thing. The pizzelle business, that’s what she would do. First, she had to get the recipe down pat. It wasn’t as though she had ever written it down anywhere. It was all in her head.

So she called “Mom” and they sat down in her house and started to experiment. Mom would use the iron; Debbie played with the recipe – a little more extract, a little less oil. Then she started experimenting with other flavors. Lemon came next, then chocolate. The result was he best pizzelle anyone had ever eaten.

What makes them better than all others? They’re done by hand. Others are done by automation. It’s hard to show love and care using a machine. People would eat them and say, “Oh, they taste like the ones my grandmother used to make.” “That,” Debbie Garlotta says, “is when we knew we had something special. When it comes to baking, grandmothers are the true role models.”

Even though the orders are pouring in, it’s still a quality business, Dee Tees’. (The T is for Taylor, Debbie’s maiden name.) “There are several key people,” she says, “who maintain the quality and care with the product – just like I do. They have freed me up to be able to pick up more leads. My Mom still works with me. She is the wind beneath my wings, my biggest fan! She is the one who pushes me on those days when it’s just so hard to move.

“When we first started, I was doing this out of my kitchen. One of the bakeries told me I needed a food license. Oh. I didn’t know that. So for that first year of ’96, I as working without a food license. I was basically learning the right way to do things as I went along. By April of 1997, everything was legit.”

The business started growing so fast that Debbie couldn’t keep up in her kitchen anymore. So she relocated and added on a cookie room. That’s where you’ll see the worktables, the drying tables, the edging tables, six or eight irons lined up at each station. “Once they come off the irons, you’re putting them in back of you to dry,” Debbie says. “There’s a fine line of drying time. You don’t want them on the tables too long or they will come out soft. There is nothing worse than a pizzelle that doesn’t snap when you bight into it! That’s the mark of perfection in a pizzelle. It should snap when you break it.”

Is it a science? “No way,” Debbie says. “When you’re working with irons there’s no science. You have to factor in the weather, the temperature in the room. Every day is a new adventure in pizzelle-land. What’s the true gauge of whether we send each batch to market? Since I still insist on doing the batter by hand, every batch is a little different. We have to taste them to make sure they meet our standards. It’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to eat it.”

What’s the secret of success of Dee Tees’ success? “We’re honest,” Debbie Garlotta says. “We’d never sell a batch we wouldn’t take home to our families.”

These days, Debbie and crew make over 6,000 pounds of pizzelles a month. That’s a lot of love! But Debbie’s used to volume. Every Christmas, I used to bake a billion cookies. Enough for the kids, enough for the neighbors, enough for anybody who wanted one.”

Some of those neighbors and family now work for her.

With all this popularity, how big will Debbie’s business grow? “Do I want to be a business so big that I have to use intercoms to get to the girls? No,” she says, “I’ll never do that. Then I’ll lose control. If we start getting into automation, then we’ll be the same as everyone else out there. And that’s the last thing we want to be, believe me.”

Somehow, it’s very easy to do that.

Originally Printed In South Jersey Magazine