Majdal Bakery’s most alluring flatbread is a platform for the least-expected ingredient

The humble carrot is too often relegated to the supporting cast — reduced to a building block for stock, diced into tiny orange cubes to brighten the pile of green peas, or cooked to mush for a cold-weather soup. The carrot’s star power, however, has been unleashed at Majdal Bakery, where roasted shreds of the root are the main event of an open-faced safeha flatbread dolloped with yogurt that owner Kenan Rabah says “resembles everything I love about cooking and what I’m trying to do here.”

Rabah, 29, focuses on the traditional baked goods he grew up with in the ancient Druze community of Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights but updates them with the techniques and inspirations he’s acquired since coming to Philadelphia to study cooking at Walnut Hill College in 2015. And in many ways, this pastry is the embodiment of both where he’s from and the journey it took to owning his own bakery in Queen Village, which opened in November.

While breads in Rabah’s homeland are typically made with commercial yeast and white flour, Rabah has adapted the sourdough method and locally milled heirloom grains he worked with at Lost Bread Co., where he was the head baker. That rustic dough, made with spelt, rye, and soft winter wheat, offers a pliant, earthy canvas for the wide variety of flatbread specialties he makes at Majdal, from myriad opened-faced safeha (Turkish eggs; cheesy labneh; spiced beef lahm baajin) to fully enclosed fatayar breads and a broad round folded into a pocket sandwich that’s stuffed with tender, shawarma-spiced chicken glossed in a garlicky yellow sauce, tahina, and pickles.

Majdal also makes crusty sourdough loaves, flaky boreks filled with cheese and greens, and lovely sweets, like babkas stuffed with chocolate, hazelnut, and cherries, and a poppy-flecked basbousa cake soaked in lemon syrup with citrus marmalade.

I enjoyed them all at a lunch with ginger-spiced tea in Majdal’s 10-seat cafe. But I kept returning to that carrot flatbread for its magnetic focus on just three key elements: the roasty crunch and delicate chew of the flatbread, the creamy pouf of yogurt, and the dried za’atar dusted on top.

The carrots are roasted hard with onions and cumin until the tips of those lacy shreds acquire little burnt bits that concentrate its earthy sweetness, while the yogurt — a cloud of tangy richness — is a tribute to one of Rabah’s former Philadelphia roommates, a Turkish woman who asked him to cook that combination because it reminded her of a dish she missed from home. It was a hit, and he’s been cooking it ever since, the one thing on this ever-changing menu that never alters. The za’atar is another souvenir from Majdal Shams: It’s grown in his father’s garden in the Golan Heights, then blended by his mother with toasted sesame and sumac before it’s mailed to Queen Village.

Rabah’s parents even got to taste the carrot safeha for themselves during a visit a couple months ago, he said, and couldn’t have been more delighted than to see how it all came together, because he’s carrying on the family legacy. His grandmother, Alia Safadi, was a professional baker who specialized in saj flatbread. One thing his mother noted was how the simplicity of this pastry’s few ingredients added up to something more magical than the sum of their parts.

“You always think you need to do something crazy and complicated to stand out,” Rabah said. “But she reminded me that sometimes all you need is to do something simple very well.”

Carrot and yogurt safeha, $6, Majdal Bakery, 618 S. 5th St., Philadelphia, PA 19147; majdalbakery.com