This story is part of On Repeat, a series in which we ask top chefs, cookbook authors, and other famous foodies about the dishes they just can’t quit.
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.