When an airy, chewy sourdough loaf with a crispy, golden-brown crust is placed in front of you, the possibilities are endless.
Crunchy croutons in a fresh Caesar salad, a toasted slice covered in a mixture of diced tomatoes, basil and garlic with a drizzle of olive oil on top or two pieces of soft, tangy bread with meat, cheese and lettuce bundled inside.
It’s even good plain, as you pick at the loaf throughout the day when your stomach starts to rumble for something.
A meal isn’t complete without the company of a warm, tender carbohydrate. Can you imagine going to a certain Italian chain and not having a never-ending basket of steaming, garlicky breadsticks placed in front of you? It would be a crime to be stripped of that crucial part of the meal.
Bread, specifically sourdough, is an important part of our diets and the last thing you want is to pick up a hard, stale loaf from a grocery store that scratches the roof of your mouth after every bite.
On the other hand, who has the time to make a fresh, homemade loaf of sourdough every week?
Sure, you may have seen one TikTok tutorial and feel like you can mix a few ingredients together and the perfect bread will pop out of the oven. The reality is, you have a jar in your fridge that has a sticky mixture pouring out of it AND you need to feed it? Now you’ve committed to keeping a living thing alive and it's way past lunch.
Thankfully, Tucson has come a long way since 2009, when Don Guerra, the James Beard Award-winning owner of Barrio Bread, was making bread in his garage — when you had to track him down to get your sourdough fix.
Fast forward to 2025 and there are countless community members who have also perfected the craft of bread making, doing so all from the comfort of their own homes.
Below are three microbakeries that can get you delicious sourdough loaves without the stress of having to feed your own sourdough starter.
A year ago, Hailey Duffy started microbakery Sonoran Sourdough Co., where she makes homemade sourdough loaves.
Sonoran Sourdough Co.
Baking runs in Hailey Duffy’s family. Her great-grandmother, grandmother and mother always baked for family get-togethers or for the local community.
So when Duffy was pregnant with her twins, she and her husband decided to eat healthier and try to make more dishes from scratch. Since she had a famed sourdough starter recipe from her great-grandmother, Duffy gave it a try.
In just a year, Duffy had started her own microbakery and left her teaching job.
When she first began making bread, Duffy was only making sourdough loaves for friends and family. As word got out, people started offering to pay Duffy just to have one of her delicious loaves. That’s when Sonoran Sourdough Co. was born.
Duffy’s guest bedroom is where all the magic happens. She and her husband turned it into the ultimate bakery, complete with a commercial fridge. It’s here where Duffy makes around 150 to 200 loaves each week.
To make her coveted loaves, she first starts with her great-grandmother’s starter. The starter, a combination of water and flour, grows overnight. When it’s done fermenting, it’s ready to be added to the dough. After the dough is mixed together, it needs several hours to rest and rise, which is known as bulk fermentation.
“This time of year, the bulk ferment goes really slow because it's a lot cooler, where in the summer, when I'm doing that many loaves, it'll be ready in three hours flat,” Duffy said.
Once that’s done, Duffy then shapes the loaves and puts them into the fridge overnight to cold proof. This step is what gives the bread its sour flavor and helps break down the gluten even more, Duffy said.
The third day is finally bake day. Duffy wakes up at 2 a.m. to turn her oven on, waiting about an hour and half for it to get it warmed up.
By 3:30 a.m., she is ready to start baking. This is also when she scores her dough, creating beautiful symmetrical lines on the bread that look like intricate designs after baking.
At Sonoran Sourdough Co., you can get various flavors of sourdough.
Once the bread is fresh out of the oven, she lets the loaves cool, places them in bags and then they are ready for her porch pick-up or farmers markets.
Duffy’s porch pick-ups are located at her house in Vail and over the past year she’s garnered a dedicated following. In fact, her customers are so dedicated, many make the drive from Marana to Vail just for a loaf of sourdough.
From artisan loaves to jalapeño cheddar, Duffy likes to experiment with all kinds of flavors that she rotates through.
As Sonoran Sourdough Co. continues to grow in 2025, Duffy is planning on hiring another pair of helping hands to help with the demand. She also plans on adding new flavors to the menu and to continue doing what she loves: baking.
“I feel like it’s doing something that's for me, not just being a mom and a wife,” Duffy said.
For more information on ordering, check out Sonoran Sourdough Co.'s website.
Sebastian McCallum is the mastermind behind Doughjo, a microbakery that makes homemade gluten-free bread.
Doughjo
When Sebastian McCallum turned 18, he had to learn how to bake all over again.
Coming from a long line of cooks and bakers, McCallum remembers always being in the kitchen with one another making delicious food. But when he was 18, he was diagnosed with celiac disease and could no longer digest gluten.
“I had to learn how to cook and bake all over again,” McCallum said.
After starting with box mixes, McCallum wanted to try to recreate the loaves he remembers growing up with. He started experimenting with different gluten-free recipes, trying to find the one that would blow all the others out of the water.
Throughout his research, he would get feedback from his family and friends. Then in 2019, he took the next step and debuted his bread at a local farmers market.
Slowly but surely, McCallum’s gluten-free bread business began ramping up and he decided to start his own micro-bakery, Doughjo.
“It was a bit of a slow process, but it took a year and a half before it was to the point where I was happy to be eating my loaf of bread every week. That was almost a decade ago now,” McCallum said. “Once I started getting feedback from people at the farmers market, the bread hit the springboard and just launched. The quality became much better as I was able to bake more frequently.”
McCallum makes all his flour blends from scratch and focuses on offering a variety of flavors since grocery stores usually don’t carry many gluten-free options. Five-seed, buckwheat, millet, pumpernickel and cinnamon raisin are a few of the loaves you’ll see from Doughjo.
McCallum even has a few sweet options like cinnamon monkey bread, blueberry muffins and pancake mix.
Doughjo also offers sweet options like cinnamon monkey bread (pictured here) and blueberry muffins.
For porch pick-ups, McCallum has two days to freshly bake his breads for customers. When it comes to markets, he’s baking for about 15-17 hours. His hours-long baking process pays off at the end when he sells out after only being there for an hour and a half.
Not only is McCallum hard at working crafting mouthwatering gluten-free bread, he’s also finishing his college degree and graduating in May. Once he’s done with that, he’s hoping to have more time to devote to Doughjo, ensuring that everyone gets the chance to have tasty bread with every meal.
“The priority is to make the best possible bread, so that people don't feel like they're missing out anymore,” McCallum said. “You know, gluten-free kind of has a bad reputation for tasting like cardboard and being crumbly and things like that so I wanted to change that narrative.”
For more information on ordering, check out Doughjo’s website.
Kaitlin Porter Cortes, owner of Raison Pan, scores a mini loaf of sourdough in her home bakery on Jan. 17.
Raison Pan
For Kaitlin Porter Cortes, it all started with an Easy Bake Oven.
She loved baking and would often help her dad in the kitchen when he whipped up cinnamon rolls and pies.
While those baked goods were great, she was drawn to bread. During Thanksgiving, she would just stare at the bowl of dinner rolls, repeatedly asking permission to snag a piece.
Her love for bread only intensified when she lived in France years later, growing an appreciation for the accessibility they had to bread, something that wasn’t seen often here in the United States.
A fresh sourdough loaf made by Raison Pan on Jan. 17.
In 2021, Porter Cortes had just given birth to her first child and was in the midst of finishing her doctorate at the University of Arizona. Despite having all that on her plate, she wanted another challenge. She took her passion for bread and turned it into a business.
At Raison Pan, Porter Cortes makes nutritious sourdough loaves in her kitchen, using only local ingredients such as heritage grains from Hayden Flour Mills.
“My goal is just to bring mindfulness back to eating and slow, real food that's hyper-local and sustainable,” Porter Cortes said.
When it comes to baking her artisanal loaves, Porter Cortes likes to bake different sizes. That way, there won’t be too much waste for those who maybe don’t know what to do with a whole loaf of bread.
“Since I’m so familiar with bread, I can take a loaf and make an entire loaf into crackers, or French toast or all these different things because I'm familiar with bread,” Porter Cortes said. “But I do think a lot of the average consumers of bread maybe don't know what to do with extra bread and instead of letting bread go to waste, I think it'd be really ideal to have smaller loaf options. So we do mini rustics, which are just like about 150 grams of dough that you can use for, like, a sandwich for lunch or something like that. And then we also do a smaller, traditional loaf.”
Kaitlin Porter Cortes, owner of Raison Pan, hand-carves stamps for customers' bread bags.
Being sustainable and local are the two major focuses for Porter Cortes and Raison Pan. She even crafted her own stamps so she can decorate the compostable bread bags with her own art. The flower-stamped bags only add to the beautiful loaf of bread that’s inside.
Taking care of two children, being a professor and being the head baker and owner of Raison Pan, there truly isn’t anything Porter Cortes can’t do. This year, she will continue making sure Tucson has access to fresh delicious sourdough loaves that not only taste great but are great for you.
“This is not just my job; it's also a passion and letting my daughter see that passion and be a part of that passion feels really fulfilling for me,” Porter Cortes said.
For more information on ordering, check out Raison Pan’s website.
