Some of Italy’s most famous sweets originate from Sicily: cannoli, ciambella cake (a citrusy breakfast bundt made with olive oil), and torrone (a nougat confection), to name a few. The island south of the mainland, just west of the boot’s toe in the Mediterranean, has a rich history with Arabic, Spanish, and Neapolitan influences, and as with many Italian pastries, Catholic nuns can take credit for creating the region’s most iconic sweets.
New York-based baker Renato Poliafito is celebrating Sicilian, Italian, and Italian-American sweets in his new cookbook, Dolci! American Baking with an Italian Accent. Poliafito grew up in Queens, with parents who had emigrated from Sicily to Brooklyn before he was born. After many summers spent visiting extended family in the tiny town of Adrano, near Catania, Sicily, he now returns to the island regularly, exploring its many nooks and crannies.
Poliafito was a co-founder of Baked, an acclaimed bakery in Red Hook that opened in 2005 (Poliafito left in 2017). In October 2019, he launched his first solo project: Ciao, Gloria, an Italian-American bakery and café in the Prospect Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn.
We sat down with Poliafito to discuss his new book, his family’s Sicilian history, and how he came to love Italy’s sweets.
As an Italian-American, how have you related to Italy throughout your life?
[As a kid, my parents] would say we’re going to Sicily for vacation for two weeks and we’d end up staying there for eight. It was great to just see my relatives and the world opened up to me at a very early age. But I would start missing my regular life, because they would pull me away from my toys and my friends, and these towns weren’t at the speed that New York was.
In college, I was an art major, and my focus became Renaissance art, so I decided to study abroad in Florence. It was my first time actually being in Italy, as opposed to just in Sicily. I was there on my own, and I was not in this small town. Suddenly, all these things that I always frowned upon were these huge positives, and it just shifted things.
Now, I go as often as I can.
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What are your memories of Sicilian food growing up?
The things that I loved tended to be more on the savory side, like arancini, for example. Of the things my mom made when I was growing up, I liked the impanata, which is basically a stuffed pizza dough that usually has anchovies, herbs, spinach, and cheese like pecorinos; it’s super delicious. As far as sweets, it’s the gelatos and trecina, those little braided cookies. Sometimes my mom would make an olive oil cake and those little S cookies, but she was definitely more of a savory cook.
And then there were the general Italian cookies. The ones that I would run to on the tray would be the tricolores, the butter cookies, the mini versions of the pastiera, struffoli, and I absolutely loved baba au rhum.
Did your mom get a say on which recipes are included in the book?
