An interview with Jonathan Stevens and Cheryl Maffei
Of Hungry Ghost Bread and The Hungry Ghost Bread Book
Andrew here: This week we have our best, guest-host Amy Halloran, with an interview with Jonathan Stevens and Cheryl Maffei, the owners of the renowned bakery Hungry Ghost Bread in Northampton, MA. Jonathan has just published a book on bread and the baking life, The Hungry Ghost Bread Book, which I loved (and blurbed!) I have a copy of the book to give away to one lucky, randomly-selected paid subscriber, so be sure to leave a comment below if you want in on it. And: I’ll be attending this, so say hi if you find yourself there:
Jonathan Stevens has written an inviting book about his approach to bread, which bridges the presumptive divide between precision and improvisation. All the bread recipes are sourdough, because, as he writes, sourdough is bread, not a style. Reading it, you’ll find technical information and personal information interwoven, and learn the history of Hungry Ghost Bread, the longstanding Northampton, MA bakery he runs with his partner Cheryl Maffei.
Jonathan began baking as a stay-at-home dad, and grew the bakery by running a bread subscription service before the brick and mortar began. Poetry has been a part of the bakery, too, traveling on sheets of paper inside the bread bags—and in a book of poems he put together, along with his son Haden’s photographs, in 2019.
Jonathan gives a thorough introduction to ingredients and methods and covers several of the bakery’s regular (great) breads. The rest of the recipes are really intriguing, especially the crackers, and if you cycle—or hike, or leave the house— you’ll love the Cyclist Repair Kit, a recipe for homemade snack bars with malted barley (YUM!) that will hit the spot.
The book guides you toward finding your own rhythms and relationship to bread, dough, and the rest of life, and is playfully, and generously introduced by Richard Miscovich, Johnson & Wales instructor and author of From the Wood Fired Oven.
I spoke with Jonathan and Cheryl by phone, shortly after they launched the book at Elmendorf Baking Supplies in Boston.
Amy Halloran: How did the evening go at Elmendorf?
Jonathan Stevens: Actually, that was kind of a dream. It was a room full of people and they all had really great questions. It was a really sweet engaging evening.
AH: What were some of the questions?
JS: One woman asked, “After 20 years, do you see the taste of the students changing?” My somewhat glib response was, “Well you know, the students don't actually eat the bread, the students eat the cookies, and their parents eat the bread.” A woman said, “Excuse me, but I was I was a student at Smith, and we ate the bread, and it was great.” I put up my hand and she gave me a high 5 and everybody just laughed. But otherwise, people asked questions about hydration or different flours or spelt or using yeast—it was one of these free ranging, vaguely flour nerd conversations. We gave away starter and cut up a lot of bread.
AH: How does it feel to have the book in the world?
Cheryl Matthei: I saw it as a good exercise in reviewing the last 20 years and closing the circles that needed to be closed. It gives a sense of wow we did this, a sense of closure.
I told the people that I work with that I'm not coming back after Thanksgiving next year. I'm just not. I’m 64 and I’m glad we’ve done this, but I want to do something else. I love the community we’ve created, and seeing people interact with the bread. Almost any bread is important, but the good bread is super real. People who don't eat bread very often recognize it as they put it in their mouths, and they chew on it, and they go Oh my God.
AH: Does this feel like a capstone for you, too, Jonathan?
JS: The book is a book version of the bakery. It’s meant to document our process, and the preciousness of bread—not necessarily our bread, but bread itself—and the process of making stuff. To show that everybody should be able to make stuff and make stuff that you can ingest and make memories with. It’s an interweaving of the technical and the personal. I tried not to enmesh the technical and personal too much because that makes it hard for people to get the information they need. I tried to not make it too precious; in some sense it's precious but it's just bread.
CM: It's pretty basic, and yet the profoundness is big. I think about how core it was to my family, core to the family that I've raised as well as the one I grew up in. Going out to dinner with my dad, when bread would come to the table he would grab a piece, and if you could take the center out and make it look like dough again, we couldn't eat it. It was deemed fundamentally undigestible, and this is before any of us knew anything about sourdough. It was just his instinct growing up in an Italian family. My aunts would tell stories about going down to the bakery, which of course there was a bakery on every block in Boston. Sometimes they would pick up a casserole dish that was in the [bakery’s] oven because it was so big it didn't fit in the oven at home, and they would pick up that and a loaf of bread. So, there's a tradition there, and when I ate Jonathan's bread for the first time it was like ohh, this is something right?
AH: Tell me more about that beginning.
CM: I was director of the preschool where Jonathan’s boys went, and he wanted to bring in bread.
JS: This was the beginning of a business plan to sell subscription bread to parents at the daycare center. I would put the bread in a bag and put that in another bag and hang it on the kids’ hooks, but the parents would forget to grab that bag.
CM: So, the first time the bread came in there was this loaf of eight grain bread and I still remember the poem that was with it. It was a poem about a snowman melting out in the spring sun and it was this beautiful poem and I'm reading at home and I'm taking these bites of bread which of course slathered in butter and I took this bite and I fell in love, with the bread for sure but it turned out I also fell in love with Jonathan, too, that took a couple more years—
JS: To really ferment, get it?
CM: Get it, ha. Right, so that was my experience with the bread and then of course I began planning meals around this bread. I helped him out and I can remember it was like an episode of I Love Lucy. I was working with a woman named Tanisha, and we threw the dough up onto the table and it started falling off the table. Jonathan was on a vacation with the boys, and he wasn't coming back till the next day. He wasn’t able to mix the bread. I didn’t even bother to ask how it came out.
AH: That's a lot of responsibility.
CM: Yes, it was. So now the mixing is really just left to Jonathan and other people who are exceptionally well trained, not me. I just shape the dough now and run the business.
AH: You shape the dough and shape the business.
JS: There you go.
AH: Talk about translating the work of the bakery into recipes for a home baker.
JS: In some ways it's easier to bake one or two loaves at home but in some ways it's not. In the book, there’s a line about jumping into the stream (of the bakery’s flow) and just catching the fish going by. That's essentially what we're doing in the bakery because we've got the stream running all the time. But keeping that stream running is a hell of a lot of work: like the fridge has to work and the mixers have to work, and the flour has to show up, and the money has to be there, and the wood has to be there to fire up the stove. It’s a dedicated business.
AH: And home bakers have to build the stream in our house every time we bake. I really like that chapter in the book, A Day in the Life of a Loaf, where you write that “your attention is constantly refocusing from the details to the whole and back again, from the fineness of the flour to an array of baked loaves and the line of customers waiting to claim them.” You really bring people into the bakery and into your process. The language in the book is very welcoming, too, and I really like how you talk about the precision required of baking but also the improvisation.
Bread is so much bigger than any one of us, but I know it's not a recipe book like most other recipe books. I want people to make their own bread, not my bread. I want to give them tools and some confidence and push them in a particular direction.
JS: We're very precise at work, but translating large formulas into doable home recipes is not always that straightforward. I mean honestly, it makes me a little anxious. I put it all out there, there’s no secrets, and one can't be proprietary about bread. Bread is so much bigger than any one of us, but I know it's not a recipe book like most other recipe books. I want people to make their own bread, not my bread. I want to give them tools and some confidence and push them in a particular direction. I just have to trust that people are going to follow both the spirit and the letter of the book. My friend Avery who is a home baker, he tested most of those recipes, and he and my editor and copy editor held my feet to the fire in terms do you mean this, or do you mean that?
AH: I think it reads very well, especially the hand movements. Have you taught classes?
JS: Yes, some, but mostly it’s 20 years of teaching bakers. Our dough is pretty slack and new people come in all the time and they say how do you do that, how do you do this; it just takes practice. One of the tech technical things we talked about in the book and at Elmendorf is how to handle super slack dough.
My philosophy of bread is basic: more hydration, more fermentation, more heat in the oven. So, it's a really wet dough and it's challenging for people, but the overarching point of the book is don't be afraid of bread dough. You want to make good bread, it's going be difficult, but it's not that difficult.
I'm always struck when we're watching a movie or a TV show and somebody's purporting to make bread and I'm sure you have the same experience. You see the dough and you think that's not bread dough, that's clay. That's got no water in it, and they're pounding it, they're pretending they're getting some kind of meditative transcendence out of pounding this rock-hard dough and you think no it's just going be terrible bread.
My philosophy of bread is basic: more hydration, more fermentation, more heat in the oven. So, it's a really wet dough and it's challenging for people, but the overarching point of the book is don't be afraid of bread dough. You want to make good bread, it's going be difficult, but it's not that difficult. There’s five steps and you have to tune into it, you can't just be listening to a podcast, you actually have to focus in on what you're doing. With a lot of things, if it's not challenging it's not worth doing and I certainly find that true with bread dough. The risks are not that great. If it craps out, oh well it just goes on like compost pile, but I find a lot of people we work with are anxious about things. They're anxious about engaging with other people, they're anxious certainly about the dough. They don't want to over hydrate it, they don't want to overbake.
The dough is the manifestation of nature in our domestic lives, right, and it's alive and we have to not just manipulate it we have to collaborate with it. We have to know that it has a life of its own. If we want it to feed us, we have to really give it what it needs every day.
AH: I think you do a really good job of verbalizing this relationship.
JS: Thank you. We talk about all of this in the bakery a lot. We do a lot of shadowing. So, people come in just for a day, which is a pretty effective way of teaching because you've only got one student. Whether they're a home baker or a professional, they're just jumping into your context and you're not trying to teach in a kitchen you're not familiar with, which is my idea of hell. Somebody comes in, they throw an apron on, they wash their hands, they're observing, and then they jump in, and they ask questions. They put their hands on the dough and what I really like is letting younger coworkers teach people, because they're learning how to articulate what they do through teaching. So that's a way of spreading the expertise around. I don't need to be the only teacher, and it allows young coworkers to step up and be the expert. It kind of democratizes the teaching a little bit and also speaks a little bit to the various learning styles that that people may have. Some people need to hear it, some people can see it, some people need to touch it, some people need to do all three.
At the shaping table we're touching it, we're talking about it, and doing it. Your hands are on it, you're seeing it, and you're hearing all about it so regardless of whatever learning style you might have you're going to absorb something. Sometimes there's stuff that I forget and I'm hearing somebody teach, and I think, oh right. You know I don't even think about things anymore but for somebody who hasn't been doing it that long or has never done it, it's a radical experience, wrestling it into the oven or scoring it or pulling it out of the oven, tapping it, listening to it. I mean you do that thousands of times and you start to develop instincts, but having to articulate it to people and think about OK somebody's going to be reading a book—like my father taught me this: when you when somebody asks you for directions you have to put themselves in in their shoes, you have to actually put yourself in their perspective and think. It gives perspective on what it is you take for granted.
AH: I love the way you talk about the regional grain economy and the mills you use, La Milanaise and Ground Up Grain. And I wish I could be at the bread festival on the 29th, but I can’t, so tell me what you have in store.
JS: Sure. So, it's a revival of a once annual event that got interrupted by the pandemic and other things. Our bread festival is essentially an autumn equinox planting festival. In front of the bakery is a very beautiful garden with an amphitheater. We have live music there for about 6 or 7 hours, including a bunch of musicians who either work at the bakery now or have worked there including yours truly, so there’s a lot of secret songwriters and guitar thrashers and stuff. We have a big puppet parade, large Papier-mâché kind of Bread-and-Puppet-style puppets that our neighbor does. We have a parade through town with a big brass band, the Expandable Brass Band, and everybody comes along with us. We've got some people handing out bread samples, and we parade through town and generally make fools of ourselves dancing around. I'm sort of the marshal of the parade, wearing an apron and using a peel like a baton. We do a planting we do a wheat planting in part of the garden. We also have other vendors there: The Bakers Pin is a kitchen store and Ground Up Grain, and we usually have some jam and cheese vendors. I'll be signing copies of the book and we'll be making pizza.
AH: Sounds like a blast. Sorry I can’t make it. Thank you for talking with me, Jonathan and Cheryl.
JS & CM: Thank you, goodbye.
Recipe: Khorasan Kalonji Crackers
Like spelt, khorasan is an older cousin of wheat, with a somewhat different protein makeup. Named for its land of origin in present-day northeastern Iran, it is a hard durum wheat with a beautiful yellow tinge. Many Americans are familiar with a trademarked version of it called Kamut, though that sports a supposed Egyptian provenance. Also like spelt, khorasan has good extensibility, so I recommend using white rather than whole wheat. Unlike spelt, khorasan also has quite a bit of elasticity and can handle a remarkable amount of hydration, both in cracker and bread dough. Kalonji seeds are little flavor bombs that are used throughout Central Asia and beyond. They are also known as nigella, charnushka, black cumin, or Roman coriander. They are the seeds of a flowering plant known variously as love-in-a-mist or devil-in-the-bush—depending on how you feel about the taste? Or perhaps it’s not an either/or, but rather love-in-a-mist-with-a-devil-in-the-bush. Spicy stuff, anyhow. We use half as much as we do sesame seeds in the Sesame-Spelt Crackers. Otherwise, this cracker has similar proportions.
Makes 2 large (40 oz) batches
Ingredients
White khorasan flour 1 kg
Salt 40 g
Kalonji seeds 70 g
Sourdough starter 240 g
Water 1 kg
Instructions
Mix the flour, salt, and seeds together in a large bowl, big enough to hold at least twice the volume of these ingredients. Swirl them around with your fingers. Make a little crater in the middle and add the starter. Slowly pour in the water as you mix with a silicone spatula, eventually graduating to a stiffer and wider plastic dough scraper. Add whatever water seems necessary, then turn everything out onto a clean working surface and knead until it is cohesive, uniform, and barely sticky at all. Use extra flour as needed. Flour the bowl, return the dough to it, and cover. Let it rest for a couple of hours in a warm place. Preheat the oven to 425°F (218°C), with a baking stone (if available) inside. Divide the dough into four manageable pieces and roll them out with a rolling pin as thinly and evenly as possible. A long, offset metal spatula will help you get the dough unstuck from the table. When it is all stretched out, roll a docker all over it and, if you have one, a pastry roller. Slide it onto the pizza stone with a peel or transfer to a parchment-lined sheet pan and bake for a well-watched 8 to 10 minutes. Remove when it is barely browning but stiff (rather than floppy). Allow to cool before gorging.
Excerpted from Jonathan Stevens' new book The Hungry Ghost Bread Book (Chelsea Green Publishing September 2024) and is printed with permission from the publisher.
For a birthday gift, I once spent a day shadowing Jonathan at the Hungry Ghost. It was a fun, very interesting experience, and what I remember most is him telling me that baking at home seemed more challenging than what he does every day in the bakery. I've paged through the book, but wouldn't say no to winning a copy!
Sounds like a great read and interesting bread book!