The evolution of silicon carbide (SiC) ceramics has recently attracted the interest of several researchers due to their industrial applications. Nonetheless, the shaping of SiC is quite challenging using conventional techniques due to its extreme hardness, high thermal stability and high brittleness characteristics. This study attempts to shape a modified SiC called siliconized SiC (SiSiC) by the electrical discharge process (EDM). Moreover, the effective utilization of the Taguchi approach to study the EDM parameters and optimize the responses has been reported. The responses to be studied include material removal rate (MRR), electrode wear (EW) and surface roughness (SR). The Taguchi methodology using L9 orthogonal arrays was employed to plan the experiment, and the signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio was used to predict the optimum parameter settings. The experimental results were analyzed using S/N and ANOVA. The results reveal that the peak current (I) and on-time (ON) were the main significant parameters on MRR and SR whereas EW was influenced mainly by the peak current. The off-time was found to be insignificant in all the selected responses. The results obtained were justified by conducting the verification runs. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020.