How to Bake Whole Grain Sourdough Bread

Don Guerra is a James Beard Award-winning community supported baker from Tucson, Arizona. He founded Barrio Bread in 2009 and slowly built a dedicated clientele by baking hundreds of loaves a week in an oven installed in his garage. He operated this way for seven years, selling at farmers' markets, schools, and community drop-off points around Tucson before opening a retail bakery in 2016.

Don is an internationally recognized baker, educator, and advocate for local food systems and the production and preservation of heritage grains. He has become an integral part of a collaboration between farmers, millers, bakers, and seed savers working to bring native and heritage grains back to southern Arizona farms and tables. As farmers have learned how to grow heritage grains and millers learned how to process it, Guerra has had to figure out how to make bread from that which is harvested locally.

He spends 70 hours a week baking bread with his team of bakers. His process is slow—the life cycle of a loaf is 24 hours—but his work is quick. He mixes flour into dough, shapes dough into loaf, bakes loaf into bread—time after time, 4,000 loaves a week. As Edible Baja Magazine wrote, "Barrio Bread’s Don Guerra does more than bake slow-fermented, heritage-grain artisan breads — he also cultivates belongingness.”

Don also loves to share his passion for bread and bread baking with others who want to learn. Join him for this course and learn from one of the best bakers around!