On weekends in the Arlington Forest neighborhood, locals may notice a pink bake stand loaded with fresh bagels, cookies and loaves of sourdough for pickup.
Isabella Fortunato started the stand, Crumb to Mama, about nine months ago from her home kitchen. A self-described “local sourdough dealer,” Fortunato runs the microbakery with Saturday morning pickups from her driveway.
Crumb to Mama carries a variety of Fortunato’s homemade sourdough creations, including a roasted rosemary and garlic loaf, blueberry muffins, savory jalapeño cheddar bagels and Pop Tart-esque “Mama Tarts” filled with cinnamon apples, strawberries or cinnamon sugar.
The business recently earned a feature video on @happy_dmv, an Instagram page highlighting “happiness in DC/MD/VA.” The bakery is now booked with orders until July 4.
“There is such a desire for fresh home baked goods with real ingredients from nice people,” Fortunato told ARLnow. “I have found … just so much love and support. It’s been really rewarding.”
Fortunato started the business earlier this year with her friend and media manager, Dana Barry, a corporal at the Arlington County Police Department. News of the bakery, which initially offered goods from a small end table on Fortunato’s stoop, spread through word-of-mouth, eventually gaining weekly customers as far as Maryland.
“I would give things to my neighbors, and my neighbors were always like, ‘You need to start selling this,’ and I was like, ‘no,'” Fortunato said. “Then I started becoming more familiar with microbakeries, and I was like, ‘This is so cool, it brings the community together.'”
A lifelong baker and event planner/fundraiser by day, Fortunato first tried her hand at sourdough in 2022. With the help of two pastel KitchenAid mixers and an oven, she can whip up as many as 22 sourdough loaves each week. Someday, she hopes to get a second oven installed.
Fortunato grew up helping her family in the kitchen. Her family’s strong Italian and Puerto Rican culinary traditions influenced her love of cooking and baking. So does her lupus, which she said requires an attentiveness to ingredients, so she can avoid flare-ups.
In addition to serving local customers, Fortunato says she hopes to share the joys and health benefits of scratch cooking with her daughters.
“My mom was always like, ‘one day you’ll understand why I make these choices when you’re a parent,'” she said. “Lo and behold, after I had my daughter, I just became very cautious about what we were eating.”
When Fortunato started Crumb to Mama, she’d sometimes awake as early as 3 a.m. on baking days, but today, she has gotten into a familiar rhythm. Thursday nights are reserved for dough prep, followed by baking and packaging on Friday, and pickups from 10 a.m. to noon.
Next month, Fortunato is participating in a “Little Garden Market” collaboration event with Cookbook Courtyard on Saturday, June 13. In the meantime, she is experimenting with baguettes — a potential future menu item.
“This was my dream,” she said. “It was just something I did for fun that ended up growing, and it’s been such a blessing.”
