WORCESTER, Mass. – One native baker has remodeled her enterprise over time from a conventional bakery to at least one with a really distinctive menu.
“We’re, so far, fully freed from all high 9,” Jennifer Lee’s Bakery proprietor Jennifer Lee mentioned. “Gluten, eggs, dairy, peanuts, tree nuts, fish, shellfish, soy and sesame seeds.”
It’s a bakery the place many conventional substances by no means even enter the constructing. With two places in Boston and Worcester, Jennifer Lee’s Bakery eliminates the 9 commonest meals allergens. In 2014, a extreme damage led to Lee discovering her area of interest in vegan and allergen-free baking.
“I fell and I fractured my neck at work. I used to be popping out of a walk-in freezer and I slipped on ice,” Lee mentioned. “Whereas I used to be recovering, I broke out in hives throughout my physique. And so they saved telling me it’s a gluten and dairy allergy. It was truly the opioids they have been giving me.”
By going gluten and dairy-free, Lee found recipes, and a brand new course for her baking.
“So I needed to assist folks with meals allergic reactions as a result of no person understood them in 2014, and the gluten-free choices have been cardboard,” she mentioned.
She says quite a lot of trial and error went into discovering the precise substitutes for her recipes. A part of her work contains calling distributors to verify the substances meet her high 9 allergen-free requirements.
“As a result of it’s not simply, oh I’ve a abdomen ache, for some folks,” she mentioned. “It might kill a few of my prospects.”
Throughout the pandemic, her bakeries began making deliveries, and Lee employed associates who had been laid off.
“As soon as they began going again to work,” she mentioned, “I noticed I needed to do all of it myself, or we wouldn’t make it.”
After placing hundreds of miles on her automobile, typically working greater than 20 hours a day, Lee is opening a bigger house. It is quite a lot of laborious work, however she says it pays off when prospects with allergic reactions uncover her bakery.
“It’s emotional,” she mentioned. “It’s my favourite half, watching mothers cry. They arrive they usually’re like, their youngster can lastly have a cupcake. That is their first time ever in a bakery at 14. After they come to the bakery, they’re sobbing as a result of they are saying, ‘My youngster can have something!’ For that temporary second, they could be a regular youngster and simply expertise it.”
Lee plans to maintain the menu increasing at 127 Cambridge Avenue in Worcester. She’ll add much more breakfast, lunch and dinner choices. She additionally plans on internet hosting allergen-free occasions. The grand opening is scheduled for Saturday, Jan. 29.
