We are happy to announce that over the past few years we’ve been mentioned in a few different publications.

The Bread Has a Buddhist Spirithungryghost

photo by Christopher Churchill

“…The beloved Hungry Ghost Bakery in Western Massachusetts reflects the region’s hippie values, with wood-fired sourdough bread, local grain, and living wages…

The Hungry Ghost Bakery in Northampton, Massachusetts, is not quite like other bakeries, with their lacquered-wood counters, tidy, brightly lit shelving, and spotless floors. Outside, a winding slate pathway leads upward through a garden of tiered herb beds to the front door; the scent of wood smoke and warm yeast permeates the air.

On the front of the building is a hand-painted mural of a fiery sun, a sleepy-eyed moon, and an array of golden wheat stalks amidst bursts of orange and purple flowers. Painted at the bottom of the mural is a fragment of a poem: “we planted wheat / it was so sweet / they felt the heat / up there in the skies.”

The bakery’s name, Hungry Ghost, is a reference to the spirits of insatiable desire in Buddhist theology reimagined as the bakery’s sourdough starter.

Inside the bakery, it is hot and dark. Just past the counter and bread racks is an open work area, where bakers roll out masses of canvas-hued dough on a large, rough-hewn table, fold them, cut them, tuck them into baskets, and eventually push them into a black, wood-fired Llopis oven from Spain that dominates the space. Notes from a Coltrane tune or Cecilia Bartoli opera rumble out from a boom box jammed on a windowsill. It feels as raw as a workshop, the cement floor dusted with flour instead of wood shavings…

Read the whole article by Mari Uyehara on TasteCooking.com.

 

See us in Saveur’s “Great American Bread Bakeries” article:

“The Hungry Ghost feeds more than spirits with its spectacular breads, among them French, organic raisin, and a dense rye topped with toasted black kalonji seeds. Baked in a wood-fired masonry oven baker/owners Jonathan Stevens and Cheryl Maffei helped build themselves, many of Hungry Ghost’s breads are made from locally grown, freshly milled wheat and spelt, cultivated as part of the bakery’s “Little Red Hen” project to restore grain-growing in the Pioneer Valley. Like the Johnny Appleseeds of wheat, Stevens and Maffei started several years ago doling out handfuls of wheat berries to eager customers to plant in their yards and gardens. By now, one local farmer delivers 400 pounds of flour to Hungry Ghost each week. Try the Hungry Ghost’s Trinity bread, made from local spelt, wheat, and triticale (a wheat-rye cross). Another curious specialty is annadama, a corn flour-and-molasses New England bread born, the legend goes, when a hungry fisherman, tired of the cornmeal and molasses porridge his unimaginative wife served him day after day, added yeast and flour, muttering “Anna, damn her” as he baked the concoction.”

In Yankee Magazine’s 2014 Editors’ Choice Awards:

“The whole-grain breads crafted from locally grown grain are eye-opening taste sensations. Customers in the know return at the end of the day Tuesday through Sunday when the bakers throw some extra logs into the wood-fired oven and make Neapolitan-style thin-crust pizza with local cheeses and veggies.”                                                                                                      (Our pizza now available Wednesday through Sunday, after 5pm.)

In Modern Farmer’s article “Local Grain“:

pic“Bread’s flavor has to do with many things: the ratios in the recipe, the timing and nature of fermentation, the presence or absence of fat and salt. But mainly it has to do with the type and quality of the flour. “The great virtue of using local grain for flour is that you get a superior flavor, one you can’t get with commercial whole-grain flour,” says Jeffrey Hamelman, certified master baker and head of the King Arthur Flour Bakery in Norwich, Vermont, where he often chooses to use local flours in production. “Commercial flour has been sitting around for some time. With white flour, that can be a good thing. But for whole grain, the aromatic components that make up the flavor start oxidizing. This means the germ can go rancid and produce off-flavors.” Read more ……

Featured image via Modern Farmer.