2024 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards Finalist for Cooking
Longlisted for the André Simon Award for Food Books for 2024
"A beautifully written book by a true artisan. . . . Easy to read and likely to inspire, this book will take your bread-making to the next level."-Sandor Ellix Katz, fermentation revivalist; author of The Art of Fermentation and other fermentation bestsellers
"It's impossible to read through the recipes in The Hungry Ghost Bread Book without being inspired to scoop out some sourdough starter and get mixing."-Maurizio Leo, author of James Beard Award–winning The Perfect Loaf
For the adventurous home baker and small-scale commercial baker alike, The Hungry Ghost Bread Book is a delicious guide and a pious devotional to the wonderful, awe-inspiring world of sourdough.
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.
"The Hungry Ghost feeds more than spirits with its spectacular breads."-Saveur (naming Hungry Ghost Bread a "Great American Bread Bakery") "More than any baker I know, Jonathan embraces the unpredictability of bread-making. Indeed, as revealed in the pages of this book, he makes these challenges into a kind of poetic partnership. The dirty little secret is that we professional bakers are in constant dance and strife with uncooperative grains, reluctant ovens, and either stilted or exuberant fermentation. Our victory is that we manage, by hook or by crook, to have things looking mostly right when the bakery door is unlocked. This beautiful book will serve as both guidance and reassurance to the aspiring baker that we are all aspiring bakers."-Barak Olins, James Beard Award–winning baker, ZU Bakery
"Through story, poems, and recipes, Jonathan Stevens reminds us why we bake and offers us the tools to become better bakers along the way: MORE HYDRATION, MORE FERMENTATION, MORE HEAT IN THE OVEN! Beautifully written, with profound ruminations on baking as an act of (Neolithic) revolution. Brilliant!"-Jennifer Lapidus, founder, Carolina Ground; author of Southern Ground
"Bread is a fun, vast topic whose technical side can intimidate. In The Hungry Ghost Bread Book, Jonathan Stevens finds so much pleasure in bread and makes baking so wholly approachable that you might never realize how grounded the recipes are in the ways that a professional makes bread really delicious."-Edward Behr, editor, The Art of Eating
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