Berkshire Mountain Bakery

“Listen to that,” Richard Bourdon says as he squeezes a freshly baked loaf of bread in Michael Pollan’s beautiful 2016 Netflix series, Cook. “You can hear it crack, like walking on crispy snow. You crack it a little bit and the smell comes out. It is one of those little pleasures a baker might get.”

Bourdon must have experienced that pleasure countless times at his Housatonic MA-based Berkshire Mountain Bakery since its opening in 1986. Over that time he has become a virtual institution in the culinary world producing traditional European-style artisanal breads.

A mid-Sunday afternoon visit revealed a crush of customers cramming into his tiny salesroom located at the front of a 7,000-square-foot former paper mill that has been converted to a bakery. There were as many kinds of breads and pastries for sale as there were people wanting to purchase them: sesame-crusted sourdoughs, rich ciabattas, French peasant loaves, baguettes, cakes, pastries and more.

In addition, the bakery has spelt and wheat pizza crusts, five varieties of frozen pizza and a line of cookies.

Archaeological evidence suggests early bread making pre-dates agriculture and that over the past 14,500 years, man has perfected the art of artisanal breads. But commercialization has seen that perfection degraded.

In Cook Bourdon explained that natural fermentation is the secret to the wonderful taste and texture of his bread. “Building the (sourdough) culture is the art of the baker,” he said. “It is a living process that changes all the time. If you don’t do this, you don’t get the nutrients out of the bread.”

He said yeast is a commercial shortcut that eliminates the fermentation process and makes bread harder to digest. “White flour has a good shelf life because there is nothing in it that can go bad. It taxes your system,” he said. “There are so many bad wheat products, I’m not surprised people are not feeling well. I hate it that they promote eating whole wheat grains but they don’t say fermented wheat.”

There are no such shortcuts taken at Berkshire Mountain Bakers. Bourdon said he likes to call himself a “grain processor” rather than a baker. “In a kernel of grain there is everything to support a whole life,” he said. “But you have to free the nutrients out of the seed, to process it in a way that it becomes digestible.”

To ensure the freshness of volatile oils, Bourdon grinds whole grains using a slow stone mill to make spelt, wheat or rye flour for each batch of dough.

Bourdon, who Michael Pollan terms “kind of a mad scientist,” in his series, approaches the process of bread-making with an appreciation for process that has earned him widespread acclaim. In the January 2011 Bon Appetit magazine, Berkshire Mountain Bakery was listed among the Top 10 Best Bakeries in America.

Tearing open a piece of bread in one scene, Bourdon explained that natural fermentation provides a sweetness to the bread. “The more you chew, the deeper the flavor becomes,” he said. “It makes you salivate and that is essential to trigger digestion. When you eat yeast bread, you have to drink something because it doesn’t stimulate the salivary glands.”

It is hard to imagine that Bourdon might not even have become a baker. A native of Ville-Marie in northwestern Quebec, he came from a family of 10 and described himself as “mother’s little helper” in the kitchen. He developed a deep commitment to good food but went on to study French horn at Hague Conservatory of Music. While there, he decided to switch career paths and placed an ad in a paper looking for a job. It said, “Interested in food production with either a farmer or a baker.”

“Whoever called first, that is what I would do,” he said. “The baker called first.”

After plying his trade with top bakers throughout The Netherlands, France and elsewhere in northern Europe, Bourdon settled in Amsterdam and ran a bakery there for six years. While working in Holland, he met Michio and Aveline Kushi, founders of the Kushi Institute in Becket MA, which espoused a macrobiotic lifestyle. They invited Bourdon to join them.

His bread quickly proved to be popular and he began to dream of expansion. A client at the institution loaned him sufficient funds to move to Housatonic in 1986 and by 1987 he was producing 8,000 loaves a week, exceeding his new location’s capacity. A loan from an organization called the Southern Berkshire Investment Corp. allowed him to move to the brick warehouse and to equip it. By 2016, the bakery had annual sales exceeding $1 million.

Berkshire Mountain Bakery is located at 367 Park Street in Housatonic; 413-274-1313. His Berkshire Mountain Cafe & Pizza is located at 180 Elm Street in Pittsfield; 413-464-9394. To order online from the Housatonic store go to www.OrderBMB.com.