Friday evening drinks
Guests turn up unannounced. Fifteen minutes later there is something on the table none of them has ever eaten.
Chickpea flour panelle · Sicilian tradition
Real Sicilian street food,
ready to win over all of Italy.
Palermo’s best-loved street food. Made with a handful of ingredients, naturally gluten free and lactose free, good for everyone — for a thousand years.
Get to know Sikelia
Discover our panelle and get in touch for information, availability and business opportunities.
- 20 panelle
- 300 g
- Vegan
- Gluten free
- Lactose free
- 15 min in an air fryer
4Ingredients
0Preservatives
1,000Years of tradition
100%Italian raw ingredients
The prejudice
We were taught that street food is a guilty pleasure.
Street food never had to change. What is finally changing is the way we look at it.
Heavy. Greasy. All bread and deep-frying. Delicious and guilty — something you allow yourself on a Saturday, not something you choose. And for exactly that reason street food is never granted any nutritional dignity: it is entertainment, not nourishment.
Then you look at how Sicilian street food actually came about, and you find the exact opposite. Panelle were born where there was nothing to waste. Ground chickpeas, water, salt, a herb. There was no money to add anything, so nothing was added.
The point
Tired of eating the “instead of” version?
You don’t buy it because you have to. You buy it because it’s good.
Gluten-free bread instead of bread. Lactose-free pizza instead of pizza. That is how almost all “free-from” food works: it starts from something you love, takes something away, and hands you back a version you have to accept.
You know it while you eat it. Sikelia doesn’t play that game — not because we are better at it, but because we were never in it.
| Where they differ | The “free-from” product | Panelle |
|---|---|---|
| Starting point | A recipe that contains gluten | A recipe that never contained any |
| What is done to the recipe | An ingredient is removed | Nothing. There is nothing to remove |
| Substitutes | Needed, to make up for what is missing | Not needed: nothing is missing |
| How it tastes | Depends on the recipe | The true taste of chickpeas |
| Why you buy it | Because you have to | Because it’s good |
| Who it was made for | For a niche, a few years ago | For everyone, a thousand years ago |
For once the table doesn’t need a compromise. There is one dish, and it works for everyone.
The range
Four flavours, one single chickpea flour base.
Parsley is the historic panella. Chilli, Garlic and Lime & ginger start from the very same recipe: one aroma changes, the product does not.
A thousand-year-old recipe
The roots are Arab. The soul is Palermitan.
Chickpea flour, water, salt. A recipe born under Arab rule, fried for the first time in Palermo, sold for generations at the counter of a friggitoria.
We haven’t changed it: we have simply taken it off the island.
Palermo · the friggitoria
How we keep them
Cold instead of preservatives.
Four ingredients that last eighteen months without a single additive. It is not a trick: it is the way the product is chilled.
0added preservatives and stabilisers
−18 °Cconstant temperature, unbroken cold chain
18 monthsshelf life
The occasions
When you’ll take them out of the freezer
This is not a special-occasion product. It is a Wednesday-evening product.
There is only one reason to keep something frozen at home: having something good without having to plan for it.
These are the four evenings when that actually happens. They are different from one another, but they all share one thing: fifteen minutes, and no cooking at all.
The no-effort dinner
Those evenings when you open the freezer hoping for a miracle. Here is the miracle, and it doesn’t weigh you down.
The table with everyone
The coeliac, the lactose intolerant, the plant-based eater, the children. One dish, no separate exception to prepare.
Sicilian homesickness
If you are Sicilian and live far away, you already know exactly what we mean. Palermo is now fifteen minutes from your freezer.
Let’s talk
A thousand years of history. A new opportunity to share.
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