Dos Hermanos: the wholesale country loaf, now sold on Stark

For years, people in Portland ate Dos Hermanos bread on other people's sandwiches and had no easy way to buy it themselves. Then the Azcorra family moved the operation off North Williams into a much bigger space on Southeast Stark in Buckman and opened the doors to the public. Gabriel and Josue Azcorra, whose family roots are in Mérida, Yucatán, started in 2018 in a tiny wholesale space after years of working in other people's bakeries. The Stark location opened in 2023, and it's a production bakery with a cafe, a panadería-style pastry case, and the same country loaf Portland restaurants were already using, so now you can take it home instead of finding it under a burger.

Inside the door at 1015 Southeast Stark, terracotta-colored tile runs underfoot and a mural of Chichén Itzá stretches across the wall, a nod to where the family comes from. You can hear the hum of a 7,000-square-foot plant with its own grain silo, because they bake at restaurant volume, and Fracture Brewing and the Pan y Pueblo food-cart pod share the development. Behind the glass are conchas in pink, yellow and chocolate, their sugar crust cracked into its seashell pattern, and next to them sit flaky hojaldras, cream-cheese-and-jalapeño mante conchas, ham-cheddar-jalapeño pies, seasonal danishes and the hearth loaves. The chopped-sandwich board is right there too, which makes it very hard to leave with only bread.

The country loaf is the reason to go, so ask for it at the counter and then look over the rest of the rack. Dos Hermanos is a sourdough bakery that kept making the French loaf after the Mexican pastry program got more room. They've sent something like 18,000 ciabatta loaves a week out of this plant, their buns show up on burgers around town, and the English muffins are sold in grocery stores, and now anyone can buy that bread where it's made.

The bread has company, too. The Papa Gabe is the family sandwich, with ham, escabeche, queso fresco, salsa verde, chicharrónes, cilantro, crema, lettuce and tomato, and it's named for Papa Gabe, who works on site with Elodia and a lot of extended family at the bakers' tables and the farmers-market stalls. Breakfast starts at 7 a.m. on English muffins and ciabatta, and the chopped sandwiches run until close. If there's a concha left once you've picked out a loaf, take one of those too.

The public counter is on Stark in Buckman. They've left Williams, and there's a Beaverton shop now as well. Since the Stark shop is the public side of a wholesale plant, it feels like a production bakery with a cafe attached, and there's real pleasure in standing in the room where the bread gets made. They open at 7 and close mid-afternoon, and Willamette Week readers have voted it the city's best bakery three years running.

Regulars keep coming back because Dos Hermanos put a great wholesale loaf in reach of everybody, and the shop turned out to be a lot more fun than it needed to be. Take the country loaf home, and a concha if there's one left. This is a family bakery that also supplies more than a hundred other businesses, and buying straight from them is part of the appeal.

The short version lives on the Dos Hermanos Bakery page.