What does it take to create truly great bread? Jonathan Stevens, co-owner of ‘Hungry Ghost Bread’ in Massachusetts, USA, has pondered this question over thirty years of baking, and he answers it in his new book The Hungry Ghost Bread Book, which is a window into one artisanal baker’s craft and a guide to the wonderful, awe-inspiring world of sourdough.
Stevens believes that great baking is more than just process; it is a ritual that demands attention, physical proximity, close observation and continual adjustment, connecting us with a 10,000-year-old craft.
Sourdough, declares Stevens, is not a style of bread. It is bread.The humble 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 ‘Mores’ – More Hydration, More Fermentation, and More Heat in the oven.
Inside The Hungry Ghost Bread Book you’ll find tools, techniques, insights, short-cuts, ingredients, warnings and a handful of haikus. Stevens shares 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
For the adventurous home baker and small-scale commercial baker alike, The Hungry Ghost Bread Book offers stunning results: bread that bites back, heels worth chewing on and scraps worth toasting.
Author Biography:
Jonathan Stevens is co-owner of Hungry Ghost Bread in Northampton, MA, nominated six times for the James Beard Awards. His bread has been featured in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Saveur, and Taste, among other publications. He has taught baking workshops throughout New England and is ready to sit on your kitchen countertop. He’s also a poet, songwriter, and inveterate cyclist. Previous jobs have included: window washing, rough carpentry, housing advocacy, traditional Inuit medicine research, and merchant marine deckhand in the Gulf of Mexico. His songs can be found on Spotify, and the poems are slipped into bread bags at work. He lives on the edge of Conway State Forest with his partner, Cheryl Maffie, and a sharp bread knife.
