Our Story

Lola & the Loaf is a Miami-based cottage bakery, started in 2020 by me, Antoinette (aka Twon, Annie or even Lola these days) as a quarantine past-time that evolved into a curiosity into the art and science of naturally-leavened bread. Cottage bakery means I bake from our home kitchen - no frills, regular ovens, no professional mixers. Just my hands and heart.

As the Cuban mom of 3 boys, baking was always second nature to me but the pursuit of the perfect loaf of flour, water and salt was a different game. After searching high and low, artisan bakeries were few and far between in this town of glitz, given rampant carb-phobia and a penchant for novelty.

There, my friends, lies the enigma of what I call good bread - that is, bread that takes you back to simpler and slower times, full of natural nutty flavor, fermented carefully and intentionally, satisfying in an intangible way.

Amazing restaurants abound in Miami, Cuban bakeries too (yum) but our quest for authentic sourdough bread, not mass produced, led me to say I will bake it myself.

Good bread is so simple, and yet so complex.

Flour, water and salt are all it requires. This simplicity is what makes artisan bread so fascinatingly captivating and deceptively difficult to make.

Our baking subscribes to a philosophy that respects naturally-sourced ingredients and flavors, age-old hand-made baking techniques, and the power of inspiration and passion as the engine to creativity.

Baking has become my art and my craft of late (my husband calls it my 4th career) - the results of which I want to share with friends - old and new - who value the beauty of baking as nature dictates. No frills. No sugar. No yeast.
Just time and patience.
Both of which were non-existent in my past careers!

Today. I invite you all to break bread with us if you are curious to reconnect with what fresh, homemade bread tastes like, which differs wildly from what we find in store aisles. Our bread will make you happy. It is healthy, organic, highly digestible due to its slow fermentation, and most are even vegan. Again, flour water salt. That’s it.

I thank so many of you who have been eating all my bakes this year and supporting this new chapter of mine.

Marie Antoinette said, Let them eat cake!
and I say, Life is short. Eat good bread.

xo me.

Our approach: less is more.

Many don’t realize that sourdough is not a type of bread; it is a way of making bread that does not use commercial store-bought yeast. Any bread product can be made via sourdough using hand-made naturally-fermented starter that colonizes wild yeast. Commercial yeast was invented to speed up and economize factory bread production, at the cost of flavor and digestible quality.

Making bread with only sourdough-leavening requires meticulous precision in the growth and fermentation of wild yeast with obsessive attention to temperature, time, water and flour. Sourdough does not necessarily mean bread with a sour or acidic taste (it can be but needn’t be); sourdough is a method to manipulate flour, water and salt to create unlimited types of bread products that are healthier, more digestible (even for gluten-sensitive) and infinitely more flavorful.

The majority of Lola’s Loaves are made with sourdough as we believe that nature’s way of slowly fermenting bread is superior to speedy commercial yeast. Note however that we do bake certain enriched breads with yeast but always supplement with our sourdough starter to enhance flavor.

Lola & the Loaf is different.
Try it and you won’t go back. Why would you when Lola is around to bake for you?