Our Story, Baked Slowly

BOCA RATON, FLORIDA

Naiara has been cooking since she was small enough to need a stool at the counter. Forty years on, the stool is gone and the instinct hasn't changed: feed the people you love, and mind what you feed them. For most of those years the table was three — her husband, their son Lorenzo, and whoever else turned up hungry.

It began, the way these things do, with bread. Sourdough, slow and stubborn, filling the house before anyone was awake. The crackers came from the edges of it: the trimmings, baked thin until they snapped. Those never made it to dinner. A hand always found the bowl first.

Bread is a love with a short memory. It goes stale by morning. So Naiara kept the love and lost the clock — she wanted something she could bake fresh every day and send well past her own kitchen. It took a while to get right. What finally came out of the oven was a tapioca cracker: light enough to disappear, loud enough to hear across a room, grain free and baked with gluten free ingredients, no seed oils, real parmesan, real herbs. Nothing in it she wouldn't set in front of Lorenzo.

That is the whole company. One woman, small batches, years of practice, and a simple belief: good food is just care you can taste.

— NAIARA CERVO · FOUNDER, OPEN OVEN BAKERY