Ciao folks, and welcome back to Cool Beans! This week we caught up with Renato Poliafito–owner of Brooklyn bakery-café Ciao, Gloria, and author of Dolci! American Baking With an Italian Accent—to ask what recipe he circles back to On Repeat. He shared his take on a southern Italian classic called caponata, an eggplant-based mixture that gets a flavorful zing from capers—and often raisins. It’s an agrodolce, Poliafito explains, meaning it’s sour and sweet. His go-to preparation, caponata bombas, is wrapped in pizza dough.
Caponata tastes great when it’s finished cooking, he says, but it becomes even more flavorful over the next few days. “For my book, I decided to take that caponata at room temperature and fold it into a very simple pizza dough and bake off into these little bombas, these little buns,” he says. “So it’s this nice bready bite filled with this sweet-and-sour vegetable mixture.”
Why I love it
“Caponata is a really versatile dish that you can eat any time of day, and it’s delicious. It’s a very typical Sicilian dish, and my parents are Sicilian, so it was a flavor profile I was very familiar with from an early age. I love that play between sour and sweet and having that marriage, that explosion of taste that happens in your mouth. And the bombas make such a fun bite.”
What I’ve changed
“I love to get a pizza dough—either make one homemade or grab one from the market or my local pizza parlor—and fold the caponata into little dough balls and bake them off: They’re great as a lunch that you could have with a salad. But you can use caponata in so many ways. For example, as a base for a protein, or you can have it as an appetizer or an aperitivo.”
What else I’m into right now
Shopping my fridge. I definitely try not to waste any kind of food, so I’m very into what’s in the fridge and what I can make out of all these things. I love that. Sometimes your most inventive and fun meals come that way.
Biking to work. I bike to work a lot instead of taking the car. Not only is it better for the environment but it helps me get to work quickly, and I’m at least getting a little exercise in. It’s hard when you work at a bakery all day to get your steps or your bike miles in. I live about a mile and a half from the bakery.
Low-light living. I’m not a big electricity user—I try to keep my electricity footprint very low. I tend to try to live in natural light as much as I can. The lights that are on in the evening are few and at their dimmest setting.