Co-owner of the James Beard Award nominee Hungry Ghost Bread bakery Jonathan Stevens will join us in our Manchester store to autograph copies of his delicious guide and pious devotional to the wonderful, awe-inspiring world of sourdough.

“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

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”)

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.

If you have questions about this or any other Northshire event, please write us at events@northshire.com.

Due to an unfortunate accident, the porch entrance to our Manchester store is closed until further notice. Please enter the store through our Bonnet Street entrance or through the Colburn Cafe. We regret any inconvenience this causes and hope to see you soon.

We want to notify everyone that our elevator is unfortunately out of service. While repairs are underway, it likely won’t be back online in time for our event. We are very sorry for any inconvenience.