Prateek S.
Yelp
This little bakery and café is an offshoot of the original Berkshire Mountain Bakery in Housatonic, located just over 18 miles south of Pittsfield.
Like the original bakery, the café is owned by Richard Bourdon. Richard is a Québécoise former French horn player who decided he wanted to work in food production. He reached out to farmers and bakers, vowing to go with whoever replied first.
The baker replied first and this became Richard's future.
He trained with old-world professionals in Europe but was convinced to come to the United States by a couple of friends after they told him how badly real bread was needed stateside.
He agreed, set up an old mill nestled in the cleavage of the Berkshire mountains, and became one of the founding fathers of sourdough baking in the United States. Based on similarities in appearance and importance, I'd say he's the George Washington of real bread in America.
He's been featured in a Netflix documentary and in the Boston Globe.
He'd have more branches if he wasn't so faithful to the old-school neighborhood-boulangerie concept that allows him to keep the quality of the bread and pizza crusts as high as possible. The board pushed him to expand further and he refused.
Respect.
The second I woke up in the hotel in downtown Pittsfield, I put clothes on and headed to the café. I had preordered a pie called "Richard's". I guessed from this that it was a pie Richard either invented or loved or both.
The pie had on it fresh mozzarella, marinara, sliced sweet sausage, kalamata olives, chèvre (a goat cheese), and sun-dried tomatoes.
This ended up being such a fresh, well-balanced team of toppings that they actually overshadowed the crust.
- The mozz was delicate and milky, which was the perfect canvas.
- The marinara was tangy but not in-your-face, which helped it become sort of an enhanced canvas.
- The sausage with its pleasing meaty bite and mild, sweet flavor was one of the stars of the show but it couldn't have worked alone because . . .
- . . . the kalamata olives were there to provide the zestiness to draw the relatively introverted sausage's flavor out of its shell and onto the dance floor.
- The sundried tomatoes were like an encapsulation of everything else that I have described so far in that they combined sweet, salty, and tangy all in one bite. Naughty AND nice. This means that along with the straightforward fresh flavors above, you get these little blasts of complexity throughout.
- And finally, the chèvre. This is the kind of touch only a Francophone genius can think of adding. I make a lot of homemade pizza crusts and I would have considered the pizza complete with just sausage and olives.
What the chèvre does is add little spritzes of both richness and intensity. Goat cheese is overpowering in large quantities. But it is sublime in pea-sized amounts evenly distributed. It rounds out this pizza perfectly.
Sorry Richard, but the crust was just okay.
I know sourdough crusts tend to be on the chewy side but this crust was way too chewy. I'm sure it was a crust that they had prepared in bulk and then pulled out of the freezer. They pre-bake up to a thousand crusts every weekend for the upcoming week. These crusts are delivered for people to top at home or they are finished off in the oven with toppings for takeout orders.
I like the caramelization but the corresponding crunch wasn't there. I can't deny that there was a complex flavor though. Even if you're using a sourdough starter made from all-purpose flour, the diversity of microflora in the starter will ensure a more complex flavor than if you were to just use commercial yeast.
That's just a fact of biology.
Nevertheless, I think you can get more flavor out of a crust like that. Even if you make it in bulk, there has to be a way to get around this. Don't get me wrong; I loved the rustic nature of it and it complemented those gourmet ingredients very well.
But I may have been setting myself up for disappointment because I worship Richard's work. I make a mean sourdough loaf and I'm poised to sell my own in the near future, mainly because of the principles I learned from him even though he doesn't know who the fuck I am.
So ignore this fanboy and try at least two pies when you go to Pittsfield. Get the Classic and the "Richard's." Richard's emphasis on the highest quality ingredients translates to a depth of flavor you notice immediately and, counterintuitively, a lightness afterwards you don't usually experience after pizza.
I myself will be back. I will order this pie again. I will order another pie with it. I will eat until the wife gets alarmed and starts googling "what to do if my soulmate has a heart attack."
