Andres Cano bakes your favorite chef’s favorite sourdough. His secret is in the simplicity.
Sourdough requires very few ingredients: salt, water, flour and sourdough starter, which is itself just water, flour and a yeast. When Cano posts videos on social media of finding off-the-shelf sourdough bagged with a Doritos-esque list of ingredients — palm oil, ascorbic acid, calcium sulfate, on and on — you can feel the sadness radiate out of your phone.
The bread looks pasty and morose compared with Cano’s absurdly gorgeous loaves. Simple ingredients and the single oven in his home kitchen are all the young baker needs to kick out savory, symmetrical golden brown loaves.
"My dream loaf," Cano says, "is when it has that perfect sourdough shark fin, that crunchy crust with a tender interior, and it opens up to this airy, warm, lovely open crumb. That is my favorite loaf."
Cano has gathered a devoted following in the Valley for his dreamy breads. He sells his artisanal batches under the banner Andres Candough Doughvine Bread, baking every loaf at his home in Laveen and delivering them in his car or handing them to customers on his porch. If you’re not ready to hit him up on Hotplate or on Instagram, you can find him at Scottsdale Farmers Market on March 8 and 15, as well as the Laveen Farmers Market on April 5.
He has tentative plans to expand: a food truck to help him serve farmer’s markets, different sorts of loaves. For now, though, Cano is purely a cottage baker who, in less than a year, has gone from total unknown to low-key Phoenix bread celeb.
It was last July 4 weekend that he, his partner and some friends rented a vacation place in Heber, Arizona. A friend brought along some sourdough starter that tempted Cano to experiment in the kitchen. Over the course of a week of baking, he became obsessed.
All summer, Cano threw himself into baking, researching and testing recipes, and experimenting with water ratio, starter fermentation, room temperature and rising times. At first, he shared the loaves only with his partner. Then he posted a sourdough selfie that soon caught the attention of a family member who tried the bread and insisted: This is totally good enough to sell.
By September, Cano’s bread was on point, and he worked up the courage to put it in front of an even more discerning audience. He was a regular at Chilte, the highly decorated Mexican restaurant by James Beard-recognized chef Lawrence “LT” Smith and his partner, Aseret Arroyo. On a whim, Cano brought the chef a loaf. Smith soon texted him.
“Thank you so much for the bread!" he wrote. "Flavor is nice and picks up great when toasted with some butter…can I share with you a couple of notes?”
Cano took the chef’s tips to heart. He made his starter stronger, kneaded the dough longer and tinkered with moisture levels. Soon, he was leaping into his first big sale, of more than 20 loaves at Sander’s Coffee Company in Heber. He was, for the first time, officially in business.
"Andres is a friend and a badass, and I love the passion he puts into his project," Smith says. "He genuinely lights up when he’s sharing it and is getting better and better each batch."
Cano kept dabbling. He now has 14 rotating sourdough recipes, including a Columbia chorizo loaf with queso Columbiano, a Greek loaf with olives, sun-dried tomatoes and feta, a muffuletta loaf, a loaf with brie and nuts, a rosemary garlic loaf, a raisin cinnamon brown sugar loaf and holiday season cranberry walnut and pumpkin spice loaves.
"I keep a strong starter," Cano says. "I don’t have a name for it like some bakers do, but it’s my baby, and it definitely has to be taken care of. I feed it daily, just to make sure it is strong and punchy."
If you want to hear Cano nerd out, get him talking about his pepperoni loaf or his jalapeno cheddar loaf.
"The pepperoni is very much like a calzone or a good slice — crusty dough with a soft give, loaded with cheese, pep, herbs, and red pepper flakes,” he says. “The jalapeno cheddar is just a perfect combination. The sweet heat of the jalapenos brings out the punch and the cheddar leaves this amazing cheesy crust that just amplified it."
Cano charges $8 for his "OG" plain loaf and up to $18 for the specialty flavors. He sources local, organic ingredients whenever possible. It only takes him a couple of weeks to burn through 100 pounds of Elevated Red Fife Flour, made by Gilbert’s own Hayden Flour Mills.
As Cano's baking expanded, his profile followed. Bryan Soto, a Phoenix food influencer who posts as Señor Foodie, met Cano through events Smith threw. But at first, he didn’t realize the source of the sourdough at Smith’s parties.
"Finally I broke down and asked if it was cool if I sampled some of the pizza loaf," Soto says. "I was blown away. I asked LT where he bought the stuff, and he just pointed to Andres. His flavors, his creativity, his attention to detail — he’s really doing something cool with the bread. It has this wonderful snappy crust, crunchy outside and that soft interior. It's great bread."
Soon Soto was sharing Cano’s bakes with more than 100,000 followers on TikTok and Instagram. In a flash, Cano went from 35 customers to 70.
If you want to try his bread, you still have to seek him out. He isn’t selling in supermarkets, or even at scale. He’s still making every loaf at home, for a small number of customers. And he rather enjoys it that way.
"Bread makes people happy — it’s just a perfect thing," Cano says. "And my bread, with my Colombian heritage, with my influences, it connects people to my life and mine to theirs. In that sense, breaking bread is really bringing people together. And that is divine."
