The Hungry Ghost Bread Book: An Offbeat Bakery's Guide to Crafting Sourdough Loaves, Flatbreads, Crackers, Scones, and More - Paperback

by Jonathan Stevens (Author), Richard Miscovich (Foreword by)

A delicious guide and a pious devotional to the wonderful, awe-inspiring world of sourdough for adventurous home bakers and small-scale commercial bakers alike

"A beautifully written book by a true artisan...take your bread-making to the next level."--Sandor Ellix Katz, fermentation revivalist; author of The Art of Fermentation

Jonathan Stevens, co-owner of Hungry Ghost Bread in Northampton, Massachusetts, has pondered this question over 30 years of baking: What does it mean to take on the practice of bread?

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.

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.