The Hungry Ghost Bread Book

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")