Jonathan Stevens and The Hungry Ghost Bread Book

Join us on Friday, November 29 at 4 PM as he talks about his new cookbook, The Hungry Ghost Bread Book: An Offbeat Bakery's Guide to Crafting Sourdough Loaves, Flatbreads, Crackers, Scones, and More.

What does it mean to take on the practice of bread? Jonathan Stevens, co-owner of Hungry Ghost Bread in Northampton, Massachusetts, has pondered this question over thirty years of baking sourdough bread. Baking is a ritual that demands attention, physical proximity, close observation, and continual adjustment. It begets sustenance, fosters community, and connects us with a 10,000-year-old craft.

The Hungry Ghost Bread Book is a window onto one baker's artisan approach to sourdough bread--the culmination of his time in the tide of dough.

Sourdough, declares Stevens, is not a style of bread. It is bread. The sourdough starter--the microbial community used to inoculate bread dough--transforms flour into something truly digestible by humans, unlocking the nutrients that are otherwise inaccessible. Stevens's unique approach to working with sourdough can be summed up by three tenets, each of which begins with "more." More hydration, more fermentation, and more heat in the oven.

Inside these pages, you'll find tools, techniques, insights, short-cuts, ingredients, warnings, and a handful of haikus. You'll find instructions for creating and nurturing your own sourdough starter, as well as formulas for a variety of loaves, flatbreads, crackers, folds, scones, bagels, and more, including:

• Eight-Grain Bread
• Fig & Sage Bread
• Potato-Thyme Fougasse
• Sesame-Spelt Crackers
• Rosemary Walnut Scones

The results are quite fantastic: bread that bites back, heels worth chewing on, and scraps worth toasting. A return to real Wonder.

Jonathan Stevens has been a bread baker for over thirty years, starting out as a stay-at-home dad, a bouncy-seat up on the counter right next to the dough. A cottage business next, with a backyard oven and a Volvo full of crumbs delivering loaves to local CSA’s. In 2004, he and Cheryl Maffie sold hundreds of “bread futures” to finance their retail shop in Northampton: Hungry Ghost Bread...Which has garnered plenty accolades in the past 20 years, including six James Beard Award nominations, as well as coverage in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Saveur Magazine and Taste.
Jonathan has taught baking workshops at The Kneading Conference in Maine, classes at Holyoke Community College, and appeared on Mark Dyck’s Rise Up baking podcast.

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