Ingredients Bread + Dough Flatbread Pita Bread Pita Bread 5.0 (1) 1 Review Chef Alon Shaya of New Orlean's Shaya restaurant makes these beautiful pita breads in a 700° wood-burning oven. You can recreate the heat at home with a pizza stone and your broiler. Shaya recommends letting the dough rise for the full two days for the best flavor. By Alon Shaya Alon Shaya F&W Star Chef » See All F&W Chef Superstars Restaurant: Domenica, New Orleans Experience: Antonio’s, St. Louis; Besh Steak, New Orleans Education: Culinary Institute of America, Hyde Park, NY A long-time culinary accomplice to chef John Besh, Alon Shaya is so much a part of the New Orleans cultural fabric he even enjoyed a small role on HBO’s Treme. But the chef got his culinary start much farther north. Although born near Tel Aviv, Shaya was raised in Philadelphia from the age of four. He began cooking as a child, pinching the corners of traditional Jewish hamantaschen cookies and folding spinach-and-feta–stuffed bourekas alongside his mother. Though Domenica is an Italian restaurant, the menu is highly personal, integrating classic New Orleans ingredients and the flavors and traditions of his Israeli-Jewish heritage. As Shaya finalized the details of his 2012 Hanukkah menu—one of several annual nods to the Jewish holidays at Domenica—the chef sat down with Food & Wine to talk goat meat, hot sauce and the bitter mastery of a great Negroni. What recipe are you most famous for? I would say I’m most known for the whole head of roasted cauliflower that we do at Domenica. We have this beautiful wood-burning oven that we use to cook our pizzas, and we can also fit multiple heads of cauliflower in there. They char up beautifully, and we serve them with a whipped goat feta and a sprinkle of dried chili. It’s one of our best-selling items, we go through a couple hundred heads of cauliflower a week. What two dishes really tell us your story as a chef? Definitely the octopus carpaccio. When I was living in Italy, my girlfriend (she’s now my wife) would come out and visit me. One time we drove out to the beaches in Tuscany. This was in the middle of the summer, and every restaurant was serving octopus carpaccio. It was just poached octopus that was chilled and sliced thin, usually with just a little bit of vinaigrette. I have vivid memories of being with the person I love, on the beach and eating this dish that was so good and so mesmerizing. When I came back to New Orleans, I put it on the Domenica menu and it became one of our signature dishes. We slow-poach octopus, roll it into the shape of a log, chill it down and slice it thin. Then we do a preserved lemon vinaigrette, plus a salad of arugula, shaved fennel and citrus. Another dish would be my goat shakshuka. We buy goat from a local farmer out in Mississippi and slow-roast the shoulder. We make a fresh tomato sauce and put it in a cast iron pan with the goat and all of these beautiful vegetables. We crack an egg right into the middle of the pan and put it in the pizza oven until the white is just set and the yolk is still nice and liquidy. The dish taps into my Israeli roots but it also really incorporates things I love about the South, like the great vegetables we get down here. What is your favorite cookbook of all time? My favorite isn’t really a cookbook—but it is a food book. It’s called Eating in Italy, by Faith Willinger. It breaks down the places to go in Northern Italy for local, traditional, badass food. When I lived in Italy it was really my bible. The book led me to a restaurant called La Dogana, in a town called Camaiore. It became one of my favorite places and I never would have found it if it wasn’t for that book. What is one cooking technique that everyone should know? Preseasoning your meat before you cook it is really important. All the meat we cook at Domenica gets seasoned a day in advance with herbs and salt. The extra time helps the flavors really work their way down through the meat. What is your secret-weapon ingredient? Really good extra-virgin olive oil. I finish sauces with it to add a really beautiful balance and an awesome mouthfeel. Olive oil changes the texture of a sauce, makes it rich and helps spread flavors around inside your mouth really nicely. I use a brand called Flag. It was one of the original Sicilian olive oils that came to New Orleans during the big Italian immigration here in the late 1800s. Name one indispensable store-bought ingredient. Sriracha chile sauce. I really love spicy foods and I use it on everything. I put it on grilled meats, in mac and cheese, or stir it into a curry to add a beautiful spicy pepper flavor. It is kind of like my ketchup. What’s your favorite food letter of the alphabet? I would say E. I love eggs and I love the magical opportunities of a roasted eggplant. I’m sure that there’s a lot more E out there, but over the past year of my life I’ve found myself adding eggs and eggplant to my menus more and more often. You’re planning a budget-friendly food trip—where would you go and why? I would go to Lafayette, Louisiana. There’s such a strong food culture in Lafayette: étouffée and gumbo and jambalaya and boudin and cracklings and oysters and crawfish. And it’s always supercheap. Once in a while my wife and I will take a ride out to Lafayette—it’s just a couple of hours away from New Orleans. We’ll get a room for 80 bucks a night, and we will spend all of our time eating this awesome Southern food. There is a restaurant called Shucks that makes just the best damn bread pudding that I’ve ever had in my life. And a place called Best Stop, just outside Lafayette, makes a boudin that will blow your mind. If you were facing an emergency, and could take only one backpack filled with supplies, what would you bring? I wouldn’t take a backpack, I would take my Big Green Egg barbecue. It’s on wheels so I would load it full of all my equipment and food. I’d take my customized bottle of Tabasco, the spicy guacamole that I buy from a local Mexican grocery store near my house, and some dog food because I would be bringing my two dogs with me and they would need to eat. What ingredient will people be talking about in five years? I would say that people will be talking about goat meat more in this country. Goat is the number one consumed protein in the entire world and we haven’t caught on in America just yet. We’ve been so rich as a country, we’ve raised beef and pigs and huge storehouses full of chickens. We’ve never had to eat goat. As our culinary awareness grows, goat will become part of [our diet]. What is your go-to cocktail? How about wine and beer? I love a really good Negroni. I like that balance of bitterness and sweetness. And I love all Italian wines. They have an acidic component but they aren’t dense, chewy or woody. Do you have a favorite app? I use this app called Kitchen Calculator Pro. I like to measure all of my ingredients in grams when I cook, so it helps me translate ounces to grams quickly. I also like the Chefs Feed app. It profiles chefs in different cities and asks them about their favorite places to eat, where they go late night or on their days off. Food & Wine's Editorial Guidelines Published on August 11, 2017 Print Rate It Share Share Tweet Pin Email Photo: Laura Rege / Food & Wine Active Time: 30 mins Total Time: 7 hrs Yield: 8 pitas Ingredients 1 1/2 cups warm water 2 tablespoons canola oil, plus more for greasing 1 teaspoon instant yeast 4 cups bread flour, plus more as needed 1/4 cup all-purpose flour 3 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt Directions In a large mixing bowl or the bowl of a stand mixer, combine the warm water with 2 tablespoons of canola oil and the yeast and let stand for 5 minutes. Add the bread flour to the yeast mixture. If using a stand mixer, fit it with the dough hook and knead the mixture on low speed for 3 minutes, until a dough starts to form. Pause occasionally to scrape down the side and bottom of the bowl. If kneading by hand, start by stirring with a wooden spoon and then use your hands to knead the dough until the flour is incorporated. Loosely cover the bowl with plastic wrap or a dish towel and let rest for 30 minutes. Add the 1/4 cup all-purpose flour to the dough along with the salt and knead until a smooth ball forms. The dough will be pretty tacky, but if it’s so sticky that you can’t work with it, add more bread flour, 2 tablespoons at a time. Transfer the dough to a clean, non-floured work surface and roll it into a ball. Lightly grease the inside of a large bowl with canola oil and place the dough inside, flipping it once or twice to coat. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap or a clean dish towel and let the dough rise at a warm room temperature for 1 hour. After 1 hour, the dough will be stretchy but very soft. Leaving it inside the bowl, pull both sides over the center. Rotate the bowl a quarter-turn and do this one more time, then flip the whole mound of dough upside-down and cover. Let rise for 1 hour. Repeat this series of folds one more time, then cover the bowl tightly with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight or up to 2 days. Transfer the dough to a clean, dry work surface and use a bench scraper or sharp knife to cut it into 8 equal pieces; make clean, decisive cuts rather than a sawing motion so you don’t deflate all the air inside. Cover the cut dough with a dish towel. Working with one piece at a time, cup your hand around the dough with your fingertips and rest the heel of your hand steady on the work surface. Roll it in brisk, small circles, creating tension with the countertop that pulls the dough into a smooth, taut ball. Place the ball seam side down underneath the towel and repeat with remaining pieces. Lightly grease a large baking sheet with canola oil and place each round of dough a few inches apart, seam side down, rolling lightly to coat in oil. Tightly cover the baking sheet with plastic wrap so the dough doesn’t dry out and let the dough rise at room temperature for 2 to 4 more hours, until pillowy. Meanwhile, set a baking stone on the center rack of the oven and turn the broiler on high. Let the oven preheat for at least 1 hour. Lightly flour a work surface and use a bench scraper or thin metal spatula to coax one piece of dough into your palm; be sure you don’t manhandle it or you’ll force out the pockets of air that formed while it rose. Dust a little more flour on the top of the dough and onto your rolling pin. With firm, even pressure, briskly roll the dough a few times along its length. Flip it upside-down, rotate it a quarter-turn, and roll it the same way, keeping it as round as possible. Repeat, dusting a little extra flour as needed, until it’s about 6 inches across. Use tongs or an oven mitt to partially pull out the oven rack with the baking stone. Carefully pick up the pita, drape it over your palm, and slap it down onto the stone, being careful not to physically touch the hot stone. Close the oven and bake the pita for about 2 minutes, until puffed and blistered on one side. If pita is still pale, close the oven and bake in 30-second intervals until done. Use tongs to flip the pita over and finish baking with the oven door cracked open. Pull the pita out when the second side is puffed and blistered, from 30 seconds to 2 minutes depending on the broiler. Repeat with remaining dough. Serve hot or at room temperature. Rate it Print