Joe Gauci is known as Malta Joe, after his pastizzi company in Tucson. You can pick up pastizzi frozen in bulk at his factory or get it hot at a local farmers market.
He’s old enough to be retired and it’s a difficult language, thanks to Malta’s unique position in the Mediterranean Sea. While at its core, the language mixes Sicilian and Arabic, its vocabulary and grammar reflect the island nation’s generations of colonization. English has been an official language since 1934, when it replaced Italian as the language of British administrators.
Sometimes his mom would send him to the deli to pick up soda or water, and sometimes she’d ask for his help making pastizzi. The night before they would have guests over, they would start laminating the dough. By morning, 12 pastries would be ready. When the internet came along, Joe searched for pastizzi and could not find them anywhere. “It was part of my motivation for starting this,” he said.
Joe now has a factory of his own, which he converted last year from a laundromat. While you might be able to find pastizzi in individual bakeries across the country — in Astoria, Queens, perhaps; another in Dearborn, Michigan — many metropolitan areas, like Chicago and LA, are pastizzi deserts. Here in Tucson, we can avoid the shipping hassle by picking up the pastizzi frozen in bulk at his factory at 3452 E. Milton Road. “As far as the neighborhood goes, it’s like the Willy Wonka factory,” he said. “It’s not much to look at from the outside, but inside, it’s magical.”
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