Three generations of hands in the masa
"Every loaf carries the memory of the hands that shaped it." — Abuela Consuelo, 1962
It began the way all sacred things begin — quietly, in a small kitchen with clay walls and a wood-fired comal. Consuelo Reyes woke before the sun every morning to grind corn by hand, mixing water and lime with the patience of someone who understood that bread is never rushed.
Her pan de yema was legendary in the village of San Bartolo Coyotepec. Neighbors would follow the scent of anise and orange blossom down the cobblestone callejón to her doorstep. She never measured anything. "The masa tells you what it needs," she would say, pressing her thumb into the dough the way her own mother had taught her.
Those recipes — scrawled in pencil on the backs of prayer cards and tucked between the pages of a water-stained Bible — would travel north with her daughter decades later, across a border and into a new life. But the hands remembered.
Rosa Reyes — Consuelo's youngest daughter — arrived in the Pacific Northwest with two suitcases, a six-year-old son named Miguel, and a bundle of prayer cards wrapped in a cotton rebozo. She carried dried chiles, vanilla beans, and piloncillo packed between folded clothes. She carried the memory of her mother's hands.
Those first years were spent in the kitchens of others — washing dishes, prepping line stations, learning the rhythms of American restaurant life. But late at night, in a studio apartment that smelled of cilantro and longing, Rosa would make conchas for Miguel. The same recipe. The same gentle folding.
"We bake to remember," she told him. "Every concha is a letter home."
Miguel grew up between two worlds — the scent of his mother's kitchen and the sourdough starters of the Pacific Northwest. He apprenticed at artisan bakeries, studied fermentation, and traveled to learn from bakers in France and Japan. But he always came back to masa.
In 1998, with callused hands and his grandmother's prayer cards framed above the register, Miguel opened La Masa Sagrada in a converted garage on Hawthorne Street. The name came to him in a dream: the sacred dough.
The garage had one oven, room for twelve customers, and a hand-painted sign that Rosa made on a Sunday afternoon. By the second week, the line stretched to the corner. By the second month, the neighbors were bringing their own pans for Rosa to fill with leftover bolillos.
The oven wasn't just an oven. It was a gathering place. A hearth for a community that had been waiting for exactly this.
"We don't just feed the neighborhood — we are the neighborhood." — Miguel Reyes, Founder
Miguel opens La Masa Sagrada in a 400-square-foot converted garage with one oven, his grandmother's recipes, and a hand-painted sign. The line forms on day one.
After six years outgrowing the garage, Miguel signs a lease on Division Street. Three ovens, a proper display case, and a mosaic mural by a local artist grace the new home.
La Masa Sagrada is recognized as an Outstanding Bakery semifinalist. Rosa cries. Miguel frames the letter next to Abuela Consuelo's prayer cards.
Miguel opens a second location with a dedicated teaching kitchen and community space. Classes sell out within hours. Abuela Consuelo's techniques are now taught to hundreds each year.
Miguel's daughter Sofía joins the bakery full-time, bringing new recipes that bridge Oaxacan tradition with modern technique. The prayer cards now share wall space with Sofía's culinary school diploma.
We know every hand that touches our ingredients before ours do.
Our masa begins with heritage maize varieties grown by small farmers in Oaxaca's Central Valley. We nixtamalize in-house daily, grinding on volcanic stone metates — the same method Abuela Consuelo used.
Partner: Colectivo Maíz Criollo, Oaxaca
Our wheat flour is stone-milled from grain grown within 200 miles of the bakery. The terroir of the Willamette Valley gives our sourdoughs their distinctive character — earthy, sweet, alive.
Partner: Camas Country Mill, Junction City
Canela from Veracruz, vanilla from Papantla, piloncillo from Michoacán. Our chocolate comes from single-origin cacao processed by women's cooperatives in Tabasco.
Partner: Cacao Prieto & Rancho Canela
"The oven is the oldest gathering place. Older than the church, older than the plaza." — Rosa Reyes
She breathes in flour and breathes out gold. She has a mouth of fire and a heart of stone and clay. She has fed this neighborhood for twenty-six years without once asking for thanks.
Our original brick oven was built by hand in 2004 by Maestro Arturo Méndez, a third-generation horno builder from Puebla. Every brick was laid with the same care you'd give to setting a table for family. The interior curves were shaped by hand — no two ovens Arturo built were identical.
The oven holds 120 loaves at a time. She reaches 700°F at her peak. She cools slowly through the day, and each temperature stage bakes something different: bolillos at dawn, conchas mid-morning, pan de muerto in the low afternoon heat.
We call her La Abuela. Because she is warm, and patient, and she feeds everyone who comes to her.
The oven does not distinguish between stranger and neighbor. She only knows hunger, and she answers it.