Jonathan Stevens is co-owner of Hungry Ghost Bread in Northampton with his partner Cheryl Maffei. They opened the store in 2004, and 20 years later, continue to bake all sorts of loaves, from French batards and eight-grains to fougasses and challahs. Stevens has been nominated six time for the James Beard Awards, with his bread featured in publications such as The New York Times, Saveur and Taste. His book, “The Hungry Ghost Bread Book: An Offbeat Bakery’s Guide to Crafting Sourdough Loaves, Flatbreads, Crackers, Scones and More,” comes out Thursday, and he will speak at Elmendorf Baking Supplies on Sunday. The event will include a Q&A and a tasting. We interviewed him Monday; his words have been edited for length and clarity.
How did you get started baking?
As a stay-at-home dad. It was a sleep-deprived, early morning, what do I do now? kind of activity. I had one of those little bouncy seats that I would put my son in and I had this big bowl I would use to make the bread. It was very somatic. After two of those kids, and building a house for them, I was faced with this question of what I was going to do next. I started trying to sell my bread, first through my kids’ day care in a subscription, which was kind of a comical business process, if you could even call it that. Eventually I got to community-supported agriculture programs and those sorts of things, and after a few years, I opened the retail shop. It was all a very slow and gradual evolution.
What made you want to write this book?
Because of that slow evolution and because of the bumbling way I did it, I came upon a certain attitude for making bread. It’s not unique, but it’s a technique that isn’t widely used at this moment, and I thought it was worth documenting and trying to share some of these strategies with other people who might want to make bread in this way.
Is there a main thesis of that technique?
The most important thing to learn is to not be afraid. I think most people are afraid of failure, but when you’re just making bread at home, there’s no point being that afraid of failure. And I also think people are afraid of the dough; they make it too dry, they bake it too little, they don’t ferment it long enough. That’s why I say there’s just three simple things to start with: more water, more fermentation and more baking. We’re in an age of high anxiety and bread represents nature to people in a domestic way, and they’re afraid of it. They want to engage with it, but they don’t know how. I think this will help people get started or get better.
Was it challenging to distill decades of baking and bakery ownership into a couple hundred pages?
I had a great editor named Natalie Wallace who helped me out here. If it was up to me, I would include more poems, for instance, but it turns out that people don’t get the poems. It’s just too much metaphor for people and it’s too individualized. So even as subjective as the book might seem, for me there’s actually a minimal amount of that personal kind of stuff. I had to restrain myself and keep it mostly about the technique and about the useful things.
Did revisiting the past make you think about anything differently?
It did, in the sense that writing this book was a matter of figuring out what the book I wished I had when I started out was. I’m writing this for my former self, in a way. There are tons of bread books out there, and some of them are helpful, but honestly, I didn’t find a lot of them useful.
There are way too many coffee table bread books that are never meant to have flour on them – I don’t find platonic ideals useful in any field, in any approach to anything in life. There are books that focus more on technique, but sometimes they’re a little over the top. Famously, there’s a 35-page procedure in “Tartine” about how to make French bread, and for some people, that’s just too much. I’m not a bread nerd, it’s just not my approach to things. So I tried to write something for people who are neither nerds nor food porn people – just the casual, everyday baker.
Jonathan Stevens reads at 6 p.m. Sunday from “The Hungry Ghost Bread Book” at Elmendorf Baking Supplies and Café, 594 Cambridge St., East Cambridge. Free. Information is here.
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