Jonathan Stevens of Hungry Ghost Bread in Northampton has much to celebrate. The bakery he owns and runs with his domestic and business partner, Cheryl Maffei, marked its 20th birthday this spring. His “Hungry Ghost Bread Book” (Chelsea Green, 208 pages, $24.95) will be published on Sept. 5.

The bakery plans to celebrate the anniversary and the book’s publication at its “quasi-annual Wonder Not! Bread Festival” on Sunday, Sept. 29, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. in and around the Bakery at 62 State St.

The day will include a puppet parade, vendors, and live music, plus the opportunity to purchase lots and lots of bread, odds and ends of Hungry Ghost paraphernalia, and signed copies of the book.

When I spoke to Stevens recently, I realized that although he is proud of this year’s milestones, he is perhaps proudest of the way in which he and Maffei have constructed a life around kneading their bread into the community.

The book itself is part primer, part philosophy. It leads the reader through the necessary tools, ingredients, and steps in basic sourdough bread. It goes on to present variations on the sourdough theme, from loaves to muffins to flatbreads.

The book’s message is simple and is stated in the introduction. “This is absolutely critical to understand: sourdough bread is not merely a ‘style’ of bread. It is bread,” Stevens writes. He argues that the fermentation involved in sourdough baking creates loaves that are more natural and more digestible than yeast breads.

He carefully differentiates among white, whole-wheat, and bolted flour. He tends to use the last of those in his baking. Bolted flour is flour out of which the largest bits of bran have been sifted. He emphasizes the importance of purchasing grain that is grown and milled as locally as possible.

The rationale behind using local grain is not just that it supports nearby farmers and millers; it also is less likely to have sat around long enough to go rancid. (He notes that much store-bought whole-wheat flour is rancid before it ever enters a baker’s home or business.)

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Stevens’s bread-making method is complex and takes time, ideally at least a couple of days. It can intimidate people. Nevertheless, he told me, “It’s a stop-and-start thing. You can work it into the rhythm of your day. It can fit into your schedule … It’s a commitment, but not a monogamous commitment.” He likened bread baking to practicing yoga or the piano. “You’re not going to do it all day,” he pronounced.

I asked Stevens, who grew up in Canada, whether he baked bread as a child. “We didn’t really do food in my house, like a lot of people my age with professional parents who were busy,” he said wryly. “They liked good food, but they didn’t make food. I grew up in the suburbs. I ate crappy white bread, like a lot of people.” He explored bread baking a bit as a teenager but let the idea go until he was 30.

Then “I had a baby I had to entertain at five in the morning,” he recalled. At that point, he dipped into Richard Espe Brown’s “Tassajara Bread Book.” Stevens called it “the first hippie bread book.”

He started with a mostly yeast bread from the book and slowly weaned himself off yeast as he learned to make sourdough starters. “It all came very piecemeal, bit by bit,” he remembered. “I was a parent at the time so it’s a little blurry.”

He moved on to other cookbooks, picking and choosing useful information from several of them. He confessed that he had never been a fan of “coffee-table bread books — you know, the ones that never get flour on them.”

As he honed his sourdough skills, Stevens began to sell some of the loaves he created. He started, he told me, by taking orders from parents at his children’s daycare center. When that proved less than successful (“It turns out that parents of small children are extremely spacey,” he observed), he moved on to CSAs. “It was a lot of trial, and it was a lot of failure or near failure,” he said of the process of establishing the business.

He recalled that he and Maffei almost situated their bakery in Shelburne Falls. This move would have delighted me (I live closer to Shelburne Falls than to Northampton) but would not necessarily have found a large enough audience to support the business.

The stand-alone brick building they discovered in Northampton was perfect for containing the heat from their ovens. And they quickly found their way into the community.

Stevens noted that the bakery has been relatively immune to the move of much retail shopping to the internet over the past couple of decades. “Every other storefront is empty because of Amazon,” he said. “You can’t do that with bread. That’s very good news.”

I asked who the audience for his book might be. “In a way, I’m writing for my former self. I’m writing for myself 30 something years ago who set out to do bread and take it a little further. That book didn’t exist,” he explained. “But I’m also writing for other people. I know I’m not the only person interested in bread. I want to encourage people to bake their own bread. Human beings have been baking bread for 10,000 years at least.”

“A lot of people want to push forward, and they don’t know how to do that,” he added. “I want get people thinking about the grain and thinking about the water and the salt and the timing of it all, and engaging with the dough in a little collaboration, in a kind of choreography.”

Stevens described the process of finding a publisher for his manuscript as long and educational. A poet and a musician, he originally wanted to accompany his recipes with a lot of poetry.

“The superpower of poetry is that it repels money,” he sighed. “I finally got around to a place where I could communicate the information and do it in a way that was subjective but not overwhelmingly so.”

The book certainly has its poetic moments. It doesn’t minimize the work involved in crafting a loaf of good bread. Nevertheless, it reflects Stevens’s passion about his work and about his community.

When I first started baking and even at the start of the retail bakery, I was focused on the product,” he stated. “[Over time] I’ve realized that the end product isn’t the loaf of bread. The end product is the set of relationships that are intertwined within the making of it and the exchange of it.

“I have kind of accidentally and remarkably become a sort of village baker in a way that I couldn’t have imagined earlier in my life.”

“The Hungry Ghost Bread Book” is available for pre-order at Broadside Books in Northampton and at Bookshop.org.

When asked for a simple recipe from his book, Jonathan Stevens volunteered to walk readers through the creation of this Passover staple. Note that his recipe follows his general philosophy of feeling rather than measuring.

The white spelt flour he requires may be purchased at health-food stores, he says, or from Bob’s Red Mill. A pastry docker is a “spiked roller mounted on a handle” that can be used to prick holes in the matzoh.

What follows is in the baker’s own words.

Not just “matzoh” really, but Passover Matzoh, which is in a category by itself. The special thing about Passover Matzoh is that there is of course no leavening or salt (it’s the bread of Exodus: the Egyptian Army was in pursuit!), and it needs to be in the oven within 18 minutes of mixing.

Why 18 minutes? Because Maimonides, back in the 12th Century, calculated (correctly) that it took about that long before wild yeasts would begin to colonize the dough and render it Chametz (Kosher for Passover).

Of course, in a tradition of vigorous debate, everything is debatable, including the luxury of fermentation or debate itself. Whatever the case, 18 minutes is the accepted standard, and it gives an element of playful challenge to making these crackers.

While this is all in the spirit of being Kosher, it will get you nowhere to the real law. True Shmurah Matzoh, kosher for Passover, would necessitate a wheat harvest and milling that has been “watched over.” Plus, a certified kitchen and oven.

Making this matzoh every Spring is a very fun and rewarding ritual: it could be part of any family’s holiday preparations, a precursor to hiding the Afikomen. I must make an admission at this point: I never measure the flour or the water! I mean, they were in a hurry, right? Did they bring scales and measuring cups?

Far more important to me is queuing up the right music: Charles Lloyd’s “Go Down Moses” (from 2010), Leonard Cohen’s “Story of Isaac,” and Bob Marley’s “Exodus” (original studio version): they magically add up to just under 18 minutes!

Next in importance is the flour: it’s got to be white spelt flour. While some believe this is one of the Biblically-sanctioned grains, see the note above on such debates.

It just plain tastes good and its gliadin-heavy protein profile lends it to stretching out easily into thin crackers. Don’t use whole or bolted spelt: white will get you to the Seder table on time.

Grab a large bowl, fill it halfway with white spelt flour. Have a large pitcher of clean, cold water at hand, plus a dough scraper, rubber spatula, dough knife, extra flour for kneading, rolling pin, wooden peel or sheet pan, a long-handled offset spatula, and a pastry docker (Miriam must have brought those along!).

Set your oven to 300 degrees.

Cue the music, start your timer, and begin pouring water into the bowl and mixing with the spatula. Don’t flood the flour, but incorporate it as quickly and dryly as you can, graduating to the plastic dough scraper when needed.

Add water if there’s loose flour, and if not, then dump the contents of the bowl onto a floured countertop and start kneading it, smoothing it out, and working as much flour as you can into it.

Your hands will get sticky and gummy: don’t wash them! Rub them together and keep kneading. Knead until the dough gets less and less sticky. You’ll be into the second song, by now.

Use the heels of your hand to get maximum leverage and pressure, folding the dough over onto itself, repeatedly. Still dipping your hands into the spelt flour and sprinkling it around, get a good, stiff ball of cracker dough. Cut it in quarters.

If you can work with a wooden peel that will transfer to a pre-heated pizza stone or hearth, roll it out on that. Otherwise, use a sheet pan with some parchment paper.

Roll it out, first in one direction and then in another. Keep the flour flying, to keep things from sticking to each other. Use the offset spatula to unstick it from below.

When it is as thin as you can get it, and loose, brush it off quickly and score it with the docker (that will keep it from bubbling up while baking). Put it in the oven, and do the next cracker.

When the timer goes off, don’t stop: just know that that was just Maimonides, looking over your shoulder. Keep going! Watch the crackers in the oven: they will brown up within about 10 minutes or so, and you don’t want them burning.

Once they’re decidedly stiff, not floppy, and browning up, put them on a rack to cool. You’ve just had your 40 seconds in the Wilderness. Most matzoh, taste-wise, is indistinguishable from the boxes it comes in. This will have the flavor of liberation instead.

Tinky Weisblat is an award-winning cookbook author and singer known as the Diva of Deliciousness. Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com.