Richard Hart is on a mission to bake the perfect loaf of sourdough – something he admits to managing once or twice a year. The British baker built a career as a chef but fell in love with bread and eventually became head baker at California’s respected bakery group Tartine.
His reputation preceded him upon moving to Copenhagen, where he was first appointed head baker at Noma, then partnered with Noma’s Rene Redzepi (a man who also knows his way around a ferment) to open Hart Bageri. What started as one bakery has expanded to many across the Danish city; encountering a queue at any one of them is the price paid to pick up a loaf of Hart’s chewy sourdough or one of his sticky cinnamon buns.
These queues were recently replicated in Melbourne when Hart brought his bakery Down Under for a five-day pop-up at Melbourne Food and Wine Festival. It follows a bumper few years for a man Redzepi calls the “bread whisperer”. Lionel Boyce, who plays pastry chef Marcus in The Bear, was sent to Copenhgaen to study beneath Hart in the lead-up to filming season one and his character visited the bakery in season two. A bakery in Mexico City, where Hart recently moved, is in the works and this northern hemisphere summer Hart will launch a bakery in swanky London hotel Claridge’s. Then there’s Bread, Hart’s cookbook, in which he shares the secret to nailing bread and its various offspring.
Alongside triple rye loaves and baguettes, Hart offers recipes for cinnamon buns, bagels and English muffins. Importantly, he shines a light on the importance of intuition to become a baker beyond just following a recipe.
He also shares a recipe for a Roman-style pizza base – the topping is entirely baker’s choice.
“The first time I had this pizza was at my friend Gabriele Bonci’s pioneering place, Pizzarium, in Rome,” Hart writes in Bread. “It seriously blew me away. The texture is unbelievable: a perfectly crisp pillow of air made possible, in part, by a small amount of diastatic malt, which turbocharges yeast activity in the dough. The following recipe was given to me by Giuliano Pediconi, head baker at Molino Paolo Mariani.”
You’ll need around two days to complete this recipe, including making your own biga, a type of starter often used to make Italian breads. The recipe also calls for a stand mixer with a dough hook, a flexible plastic dough scraper, a wide and shallow container, a marker and/or masking tape, a bench scraper, a 33cm x 23cm baking sheet, a pizza stone and pizza scissors or a pizza cutter.
Richard Hart’s Roman-style pizza
Makes one 900-gram pizza
Preparation time: 40 minutes, plus overnight fermentation and an extra 2 hours’ bulk fermentation and 30 minutes resting
Cooking time: 20 minutes
Ingredients
Neutral oil (enough to coat the inside of the bulk fermenting/proofing container)
A few handfuls all-purpose flour (for the work surface)
Olive oil (enough to oil the pan for baking)
Sauce of your choice: tomato, bechamel, pesto, or whatever you like (for topping)
A scant few pinches of quality sea salt (for garnishing)
Biga (you will need 368g biga for this recipe)
244g bread flour
122ml tepid water (25°C)
2g instant dry yeast
Dough
244g bread flour
4g diastatic malt powder
259ml warm water (30°C)
10g salt
15g olive oil
Method
On day one, make the biga. In a bowl, combine the flour, water and yeast and rub the ingredients together with your fingertips until the mixture clumps together and looks like wet breadcrumbs. You should have many small clumps of flour and water, not a smooth or uniform dough. If you overmix biga, it ferments too quickly.
Cover the bowl with a plate and leave it in a cool environment, ideally 12–14°C, for 12 hours or overnight. Since most home refrigerators are colder than this (typically 5–8°C), you can leave the biga out of the fridge for the first 3 hours of fermentation. In a warm environment, room temperature is fine. In a moderate or cold environment, you can keep the biga warm in a bowl of warm water for 3 hours, then transfer it to the refrigerator.
On day two, mix the dough. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the dough hook, combine 368g biga, flour, malt powder and half the water and mix it on medium speed until it is smooth (5–10 minutes). The dough should feel strong and well developed at this stage. Add the salt and continue to mix until it is uniform.
Now start adding the remaining water, a little at a time, allowing the dough to come together before the next addition. You should end up with a strong, well-hydrated dough that shows good resistance when you try to pull a piece away.
Next, add half the olive oil and mix until it has been absorbed into the dough. Add the remaining oil and mix again until it has been absorbed.
Next, to bulk ferment, lightly oil a wide, shallow container with neutral oil. Place the dough inside it and mark the top of the dough on the outside of the container using a marker and/or a piece of tape. Now mark your best estimate of where the dough will be once it’s expanded about one and a half times in volume.
Cover the container with a tea towel and allow the dough to bulk ferment for 1½–2 hours, until it has reached the second mark, indicating it has multiplied one and a half times in volume.
The next step is pre-shaping the dough. Turn the dough out onto a clean work surface. Using the bench scraper and a wet hand, tighten the dough into a ball. Let rest for 30 minutes.
To get the dough to its final shape, flour your work surface with all-purpose flour. Invert the dough onto the flour and use your fingers to gently press it out to a rough oval shape that’s about 1.25cm thick. Use the olive oil to coat the sheet pan, then transfer the dough to it. Let the dough rest for 5 minutes, allowing the gluten to relax before finally stretching it out to the full size of the pan.
Arrange a rack in the middle of the oven. Place a pizza stone on the rack. Preheat the oven to 250°C.
Top the surface of the dough with the sauce of your choice, using your fingers to get it into all the crevices. Sprinkle the sauce with sea salt.
Leaving the dough in the pan, transfer it to the oven, atop the pizza stone. Bake the pizza for 15 to 20 minutes, until it is golden brown. Cut it into segments, using pizza scissors or a pizza cutter, and serve it hot.
This is an edited extract from Bread by Richard Hart, published by Hardie Grant Books.
