Follow Don Guerra through his baking education to discover how he came to bake with heritage wheat flour varieties ‘White Sonora,’ ‘Red Fife,’ ‘Hard Red Spring,’ ‘Khorasan,’ einkorn, and others to create delicious artisan bread.
Ask him what he’s excited to bake at Barrio Bread, his Tucson bakery, and his answer will transport you to the winding streets of Paris, the mountain hollows of New York, and a broad swath of the U.S. desert Southwest. His story will include an artist grandfather, more than a few famous chefs, and a Chinese American family with deep roots growing wheat in southern Arizona. You’ll quickly see that at Barrio Bread — and its companion company, Barrio Grain — a decade-long mission to preserve heritage grain varieties rolls history right into the dough.
When I talked to him, interested to learn how he used his businesses to revive a regional, heritage-grain economy, Guerra was on his way to the weekly Barrio Bread team meeting. I imagined a circle of bakers briefing each other not only on the week’s orders, but also on the temperament of Polish emmer during Arizona’s monsoon season and how to fine-tune the crumb in a pain au levain.
“Our style is artisan,” Guerra explains, leaning into the comparison people make of his bread as works of art. “People think that means ‘crusty bread.’ No! It means it’s crafted by a person, in their style, by their ideas and techniques.” Barrio’s naturally leavened breads display tans, rusts, blonds, and browns. He likens them to a Sonoran sunset — and his description is literal. Signature loaves include a round boule that’s flour-dusted on top to produce the image of a saguaro cactus, the sun above and ears of wheat below. Saguaros also appear on “Desert Durum,” a sourdough made from organic durum flour. “Pan de Kino” features a striking star design mimicking the Arizona state flag and using the region’s heritage wheat, ‘White Sonora.’
These offerings, along with an entrepreneurial spirit that’s unwaveringly friendly to partnerships, have made Guerra a legendary figure in Tucson, where he contributes to the city’s status as a United Nations-designated City of Gastronomy. More than bringing something new to the region, Guerra believes his bread and flour companies are carrying forward a rich Southwestern culinary tradition that began thousands of years ago with various Yuman-speaking Indigenous tribes.
Like any good local legend, Guerra’s origin story seems to morph to fit admirers’ idealized narrative. “People think it all started in my garage,” Guerra says, smiling. And while a garage startup does make an appearance in this story, Don Guerra’s baking history begins even earlier.
Making a Baker
Guerra grew up in Tempe, Arizona, a vibrantly cultural college city 10 miles east of Phoenix. The women in Guerra’s early life introduced him to bread. His mother made the family’s bread, while his nana turned out tortillas. By 13 years old, Guerra had been working in their kitchens for years. Outside the home, he’d help in his father’s barber shop, sweeping floors, opening doors, and shining shoes. “I learned baking from my mom and nana; my father taught me to run a business.”
The day after college graduation, Guerra started working at a small bakery in Flagstaff. There, he experienced his first ah-ha moment. “This is something that I loved to do with mom, but to do it for a living, using my dad’s lessons on entrepreneurship … ” Guerra’s words trail into somewhere between nostalgia and gratitude. It was 1991, and the internet wouldn’t become widely available for several more years. Guerra instead consumed every baking book at the Scottsdale Public Library. The books on European methods appealed to him so much that, before long, he sought out their authors.
The transcontinental pilgrimage Guerra embarked on during the next few years began in the San Francisco Bay Area. He felt he knew American bread as fast; composed of little more than flour, yeast, sugar, and a few hours. Despite being short on cash and never having flown in an airplane, he visited California to learn another way. Guerra made his way to Berkeley’s San Pablo Avenue and the Spanish-style oven nestled within Acme Bread Company. When founders Steve and Suzie Sullivan opened Acme in 1983, with the help of famed local-food chef Alice Waters, they were among the first bakers to bring European styles to the U.S. Guerra relates Sullivan’s pioneering work to “espresso in the early ’90s: We know it’s an EU offering with history and flavor, but we don’t know much about it.” The Sullivans showed Guerra that European styles of baking can produce loaves that are crusty, fragrant, lovely — and time-consuming.
European breads can take up to 36 hours to make. Traditional techniques are largely unmechanized, without conditioners or additives. A baker will combine flour with leaven, perhaps adding a little honey, and knead by hand. The process develops texture and flavor. At the time of Guerra’s visit to Acme, San Francisco was famously normalizing sourdough for North America, but sourdough still wasn’t the staple it was in Europe.
The same year the Sullivans opened Acme, another baker who influenced Guerra opened his shop on the other side of the country. Daniel Leader started Bread Alone in 1983, building one of New York’s first modern brick-oven bakeries in the Catskill Mountains region (constructed by fourth-generation Parisian oven mason Andre Lefort, no less). Guerra sent Leader a letter asking to tour his facilities. When he didn’t hear back, he “booked a ticket, went there, knocked on the back door, and walked in.”
Leader helped Guerra understand sourdough, which is known to produce low-glycemic and comparatively low-gluten breads, as more nutritious. Wheat varieties grown in the U.S. — about 65 percent “hard” red with a high protein (gluten) content — differ from those in Europe, which grows predominantly “soft,” or low-protein, varieties. These reported benefits rounded Guerra’s commitment to continue the tradition of heritage-grain bakers.

But could ancient grains thrive closer to his home? One day, while Guerra was working at an upstart bakery in Phoenix, a baking expert named Thom Leonard showed up to consult with the owners. Leonard had co-founded Wheatfields Bakery in Lawrence, Kansas, and had worked with traditional wheat varieties in the hot prairies of the Midwest for years. He gave Guerra hope that those varieties could commercially supply bakeries in the Southwest too.
To cap off Guerra’s education, he’d need to go on one more trip. He went to Paris to, at long last, view European-style baking firsthand. He sought out world-renowned Lionel Poilâne, who famously rejected the classic French baguette for rustic sourdough boules. A 1995 Smithsonian magazine cover features a deep mahogany Poilâne loaf scored and dusted with fresh-milled flour. Visiting the bakery was “mind-blowing” for Guerra and inspired the flour-dusted vignettes that adorn Barrio Bread loaves today.
Becoming ‘The Village Baker’
By the time he was 25, Guerra had assembled run-ins with a roster of bread-world luminaries that would make most bakers envious. These experiences made him feel adequately confident in both his skills and knowledge of the industry. It was time to start a bakery of his own.
“I opened in my hometown, and everybody knew me. I was quite literally the village baker,” he recalls of The Village Baker, which he opened in Flagstaff in 1995. Going against his father’s mantra to never spend a dime you don’t have outright, Guerra took out a loan from the bank to purchase equipment and secure the space. For six years, he built a reputation and his skills as one of the region’s best bakers. Yet turning out loaves didn’t allow for the other aspects of why Guerra got into baking: reviving tradition and sharing knowledge.
Guerra sold The Village Baker in 2000 (and it happily remains all these years later) to focus on earning his teaching certificate. For the next seven years, he taught in public schools, and his years as a teacher inform how he has run every bread business since. When opening his next bakery, Guerra did take his father’s advice to never take out a loan, which is how “Barrio Bread 1.0” came to be a literal garage startup. He invested about $25,000 into outfitting his garage as a bakery — and classroom. This time, education was his core function.
Heritage Wheat Flour
With Barrio Bread, Guerra was able to combine baking with advocating for locally grown heritage grains. He developed a relationship with Native Seeds/SEARCH, delivering bread to the legendary seed-saving organization’s staff lunches. One day, its directors approached Guerra with an idea: They wanted to apply for a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) grant that could support growing two heritage grain varieties, ‘White Sonora’ wheat and ‘Chapalote” corn. However, they’d need a customer to purchase the grain. Together with Guerra, could they revive something from the past fit for strengthening the regional economy?
While Guerra was mulling the grant application, Native Seeds/SEARCH founder Gary Paul Nabhan showed up at his house carrying a pillow sack full of grain. “Here’s the wheat we’ve harvested,” Nabhan said. “Make some bread!” Not all that pretty, the first loaves Guerra made with Nabhan’s grain offered him a second aha moment: He was able to make bread with grains produced right down the street, but to scale, he’d need more farmers to get on board with growing ‘White Sonora’ and other heritage varieties.
He found willing collaborators in Ralph and Ron Wong at BKW Farms; Jeff Zimmerman at Hayden Flour Mills; and James Beard Award-winning pizza chef Chris Bianco of Pizzeria Bianco. Over time, Guerra enlisted a local economy’s worth of farmers and restaurateurs growing and using 12 varieties of grains, cementing the place of ‘White Sonora’ in the community once again, alongside varieties of einkorn wheat and rye.
Barrio Bread and its many partners made for a compelling story that launched Guerra into grant-writing mode and a string of USDA awards that changed his operations in important ways. In 2015, Barrio Bread won a USDA Local Food Promotion Program grant that allowed the bakery to move out of his garage and into a larger facility. Using the expanded collection of regionally grown heritage grains, Barrio Bread now offered more than two dozen types of bread made using techniques Guerra had learned both abroad in Europe and from Indigenous knowledge closer to home. An additional USDA Implementation Grant opened Barrio Bread’s brick-and-mortar store location, “Barrio Bread 2.0.”
In 2018, Guerra secured a second USDA Local Food Promotion grant to launch Barrio Grains, his retail line of flour blends made from locally grown, heritage varieties of wheat and grain. For this project, he needed to work with regional farmers to develop a “grain chain,” growing enough ‘White Sonora,’ ‘Red Fife,’ ‘Hard Red Spring,’ ‘Khorasan,’ einkorn, and other varieties within 18 months to supply a commercial product line, including Barrio’s signature Pizza Crust Kit.
Culture at the Core
Wheat isn’t indigenous to the Southwest. Europeans originally brought wheat to the U.S. in the late 1700s, but for Guerra, how Native Americans used that wheat makes the techniques “indigenous.” Early in his grains project, he went to the San Xavier Co-Op Farm, run by the Tohono O’odham Nation. The farm agreed to grow ‘Pima Club’ and ‘White Sonora’ wheat, along with mesquite trees, which produce bean pods that can be ground into flour. Today, Barrio Bread bakes a seasonal loaf with the mesquite flour.
He also continued working with the Wong family of BKW Farms, who agreed to dedicate a portion of their nearly 300 acres to growing durum and ‘White Sonora’ wheat. The Wongs’ role in the region’s agricultural history began at the turn of the century, when Wong Yan and Moy Youk came from China to work on the construction of the Southern Pacific Railroad, ultimately owning a grocery store and securing farmland, which their family has farmed for four generations.
These partnerships were crucial to supporting jobs during the worst years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Six months prior to lockdown, Guerra had started Bread Lessons, an online teaching platform featuring video lessons. Guerra says he created the site as his “visual cookbook” in response to people encouraging him to write a book. “I sold $10,000 worth of classes in three months when COVID hit. It was just timing that people were needing this type of learning.”
A few years later, his video lessons remain popular, including one on making pizza dough using heritage-grain flour.
Vision for the Future
These days, Guerra seems to exist primarily in that liminal space between nostalgia and dreaming, deepening his lineage-informed vision for the future. He spends fewer hours with his hands in dough, leaving the day-to-day baking to Barrio Bread’s team of five bakers so he can engage with his community and grow awareness of heritage grains. He’s received quite a bit of media attention, with national newspapers and regional magazines alike profiling his path to creating one of the most popular bakeries in the Southwest (and he even had a guest judging appearance on Top Chef). He’s also picked up some of the culinary world’s most prestigious awards, including the James Beard Foundation’s Outstanding Baker Award for 2022.
“At 25, I wasn’t thinking, ‘I’ll work on the local grain economy,'” he says. “Instead, I thought, ‘I’ll start a bakery.’ The rest was pushing boundaries.” So, naturally, he’s pushing beyond bread, working with local brewers to produce beer using heritage grains that require less water, an important switch in the drought-prone Southwest. Two tortilla-manufacturing companies in town now work with Barrio’s grains, and he has a bagel project kicking off. Increasingly, Guerra sees his role in the community becoming more of an educator than a baker, never hoarding knowledge.
“A chef might keep a recipe a secret. For me, whatever I have, now you have it,” Guerra says. “I can’t possibly feed everyone in my community, but I can teach them to make a loaf of bread.”
Ancient Grains Pizza Dough Recipe
This simple pizza dough can be made a day ahead. Watch Don Guerra’s video lesson on how to prepare it. Purchase Barrio Grains flour blends.

Yield: 3 (10-inch) or 4 (8-inch) pizzas.
Ingredients
- 4 cups (plus more for kneading) Barrio Pizza Blend Flour or any high-quality, whole-grain flour
- 1-1/2 cups warm water
- 1 packet (10 grams) yeast
- 1-1/2 tablespoons kosher salt
- 1 tablespoon cornmeal or semolina flour (for sprinkling on baking surface)
- In a large bowl, mix flour, water, yeast, and salt by hand until no lumps of flour are left (about 3 to 5 minutes).
- Cover and let rest for 10 to 15 minutes.
- Using your hands, mix for 5 minutes in a bowl (a little water on your hands will prevent dough from sticking).
- Place dough on a floured surface and gently knead (use more flour to prevent sticking) for 2 minutes, then form a smooth ball, place it back in the bowl, and cover.
- Place the bowl in a warm area and let dough rise for 1 hour.
- Remove dough from bowl. On floured surface, stretch and fold for about 10 seconds. Let rest for 45 minutes.
- Divide dough into 3 or 4 equal portions and form each into a ball (at this point, the dough can be wrapped in plastic wrap and refrigerated for up to 24 hours). Cover with a moist kitchen towel and let dough rest for 30 minutes.
- Preheat oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit.
- Sprinkle a little semolina flour on a pizza stone or baking tray so the dough will slide off easily after cooking.
- Using your hands, flatten out and stretch one ball of the dough into an 8-to-10-inch round.
11. Cover with sauce, cheese, and your favorite toppings. Bake for 15 minutes or until the crust is golden-brown
Kale Roberts works with city governments to develop sustainability plans and teaches at Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley.