The Hungry Ghost Bread Book

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.

Richard Miscovich is a Department Chair and teaches artisan bread baking to culinary students at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island, and to home and professional bakers at classes and conferences around the country. Richard is a Bread Bakers Guild of America Certified Bread Baker and served three terms on the Board of Directors. In 2014 he received the Johnson & Wales Distinguished Scholarship Award and was also inducted into the International Les Amis d’Escoffier Society. He is the author of From the Wood-Fired Oven and instructs the online Craftsy course “Handmade Sourdough: From Starter to Baked Loaf.”