By Jamie Saxon

Photography by David Kelly Crow

Jennifer Esposito has fallen in love with jelly doughnuts -- twice.

Growing up in an Italian-American family in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn, actor/entrepreneur Esposito was immersed in a childhood defined by food—and her ravenous hunger for it. She ate everything in sight—bagels, cake, spaghetti, zeppolis at the Italian street fair, jam dot cookies she baked with her sister at Christmas. “Food is very tied to emotion and remembering events,” she says. “My dad and I used to go to the corner bakery and get jelly doughnuts on the weekend.” Her chalk-on-the-sidewalk years were colored in pastel memories of food and family, but also violently streaked with thunderstorm-dark memories of immense pain and suffering. She had her first panic attack at age 15, before a high school dance. She was plagued with unexplained symptoms: headaches, earaches, fever, extreme weakness, yellowing of her skin, numbness, debilitating stomach pain, pain that permeated her whole body. Sometimes she stayed home from school with her mother, who also suffered similar symptoms, as did her sister, aunt and grandmother. But no one knew the cause. Despite endless regimes of antibiotics, anti-depressants and anxiety medications, she remained uncannily optimistic.

Watching TV, with its beautiful actresses, helped her forget her pain and illness, and she decided she wanted to become an actress. After high school, she took acting classes at Wagner College on Staten Island, then at the Lee Strasberg Institute for Acting in New York while waiting on producers, directors, and celebrities at The Coffee Shop, Union Square's all-night eatery.

After launching her career on “Law and Order” and “Spin City,” Esposito got her first big film break in Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam, followed by the Oscar-winning Crash and I Know What You Did Last Summer. After three years playing the role of cop Jackie Curatola on the popular TV series “Blue Bloods” with Tom Selleck, she left the show, not without controversy, over contractual issues.

A MYSTERIOUS ILLNESS GETS A NAME

In 2009, she finally received a diagnosis: celiac disease, an autoimmune disease in which the body is unable to digest gluten—a combination of two proteins in certain grains and the stuff that makes bread dough sticky and elastic. The body sees gluten as an invader, which triggers an immune response: The villi in the small intestine begin to flatten, making it difficult for the body to absorb nutrients, compromising the production of vitamin D3, and inhibiting the body’s ability to manufacture the neurotransmitter, serotonin. The body then compensates by overproducing norepinephrine, which can cause severe anxiety—and panic attacks. This disease without a name, which Esposito’s doctors knew nothing about, had been plaguing her since childhood.

Her new book Jennifer’s Way, published in May by Da Capo Lifelong Books, is an utterly candid account of her battle with this illness and a harrowing board game of two steps forward, one step back. There are countless trips to the ER; debilitating, excruciating pain that sometimes lasted weeks; doctors who put her in a psychiatric ward; and directors and producers on the set who didn't believe her illness was real.

In the book, Esposito writes that she started doing her own cooking in an effort to make sure what she ate was gluten-free and dairy-free. Longing for the baked goods of her childhood, she took a gluten-free baking class at the Natural Gourmet Institute in New York, where she learned about alternative, high-fibrous flours such as quinoa and amaranth, and xanthan gum, which helps hold baked goods together without gluten. She writes: “I found a sense of peace in the kitchen. Food was a comfort to me…cooking became more than a hobby. It was pure pleasure.”

A BAKERY FOR "CLEAN EATING"

Last year, she opened Jennifer’s Way, a gluten-free, dairy-free, refined sugar-free, soy-free, peanut-free bakery at 263 East 10th Street, between First Avenue and Avenue A (jenniferswaybakery.com). Inside, wafts of cinnamon, cardamom and vanilla seduce your nose, and cupcakes, iced to a thickness that can only be done by hand, tug your memory back to the way elementary school bake sales used to be.

On a sunny morning, Esposito and I sit in wooden cane back chairs around an antique wooden community table with a wire basket of pads and crayons for kids to draw with, and she reveals how she fell in love with jelly doughnuts for the second time.

Shortly after opening the bakery, she says, “I had a dream of being diagnosed, I had a dream about a doughnut, literally, and I woke up crying. I woke up because it hit me: you’re never going to have a doughnut again. I wasn’t even a big doughnut person, but it was the fact I would never have a jelly doughnut again. It's the never again part."

It was a weekend, when she usually goes in by herself early in the morning to open up the bakery. “I always look at [new foods to bake] in my head like a map: OK, if I put this with this, and put this with this; if I do it that way, then I’m going to get that kind of shape, and if I make a hole and squeeze the jam and roll it, I’m gonna get a jelly doughnut,” she says. “And I did it. I literally did a happy dance.” She whips out her smartphone, scrolls through dozens of photos of baked goods she has made, and shows me picture-perfect jelly doughnuts.

Those walks Esposito and her father used to take for jelly doughnuts also included another ritual: buying a sleeve of Oreos, which they would eat on the way home. Now Esposito offers all her childhood treats at her bakery.

“I have recreated everything, including the Oreo, Pop Tarts—I used to love Pop Tarts—the Hostess cupcake with the cream inside and the squiggly line. The bagel is something I grew up on, I love it, the chocolate chip cookie, the jam dot, the chocolate chunk cookies, the doughnuts, oh my god."

She says the bakery is not only for those with celiac disease; it’s also for those with food allergies. There are no allergens in her bakery items, except for tree nuts. “You can come in here and eat something that’s good and healthy and nutritious and clean without having preservatives and GMOs and starches and sugars. On a weekend, it’s insane. Young mothers who want to feed their children better, and people who are just eating and aware of their food.”

The menu features breads, bagels, cupcakes, doughnuts, pies, and the ubiquitous cookies—hazelnut with raspberry jam (a throwback to the jam dots of her childhood), and at least three kinds of chocolate chip—pumpkin, quinoa, and zucchini double chocolate chip with walnuts (Esposito favors Life’s Way dairy-, soy- and gluten-free chocolate chips). Muffins—available in flavors such as cardamom-pear and orange poppyseed vanilla that vary with seasonal offerings and Esposito’s imagination—are served with vegan Earth Balance spread. Also for sale: pancake mix, granola, even celiac tea.

Specialty cakes include devil’s food with sea salt or without; carrot; vanilla with chocolate icing; zucchini bundt, lemon poppyseed bundt, apple crumb, and lemon chamomile.

“We made an ice cream cake with vegan dairy free ice cream for a woman who hadn’t had an ice cream cake in five years,” Esposito says. The bakery also makes custom birthday cakes; a recent order for a child’s first birthday was vanilla cake sweetened with cane juice sugar and topped with coconut icing (Esposito makes her own powdered sugar out of evaporated cane juice and arrowroot starch) and shredded coconut. The bakery also uses maple sugar and maple syrup as sweeteners—but no refined sugars.

Starting a bakery from scratch has taken over Esposito’s life, but she feels she is on a mission and is buoyed by the joy and thanks she gets from her customers.

“It’s been an incredible journey,” Esposito says. “It’s been trying—trying my patience, trying my faith, trying my belief in what’s good and what’s right. The stories I hear from children, from people, from all walks of life who are suffering with this disease, it makes me so upset.” She pauses and repeats, her eyes tearing up: “It makes me so upset.”

FRESH OUT OF THE OVEN GRATITUDE

Esposito has become the face of celiac disease. In October 2011, two years after her diagnosis, she announced the news on “The Late Show with David Letterman.” Her already robust following on social media—the Jennifer’s Way Facebook page and blog has nearly 13,000 followers; her Twitter account @JennifersWayJE, 30,000 plus—ballooned following her book tour, which included appearances on “Katie Couric” and a shout-out in Vanity Fair magazine.

People write to her from all over the world—and from right around the corner. One handwritten letter, taped in the bakery window along with customer photos, reads: “Dear Jennifer, I cannot thank you enough for proactively taking a stand and creating your amazing bakery for those of us suffering with celiac. Not only are your baked goods tasty, but you’re only three blocks away from my apartment…Thanks for making my life safer and sweeter."

Esposito says she hears stories from customers all the time. “It happens right when I need it. I can tell when people want to talk. They really want to talk because for so long they really probably hadn’t been heard. They don’t want to say much but it’s powerful. They come up, and they just say, ‘Thank you,’ with tears in their eyes.”

Relishing the gratitude from customers, she in turn credits her mother as the real champion of her life, supporting her desire to become an actress and helping her through her darkest moments, hundreds of them.

“My mom tells me, ’There’s nothing you can’t do.’ She’s told me that since I was a kid. She’s not church-every-Sunday religious, but she’s very spiritual, she has a lot of faith,” Esposito says. Although her mother was at first worried about her opening the bakery because of the stress, she now tells her daughter, “This is what you’re supposed to do, you’re supposed to be here.”

FROM THE EAST VILLAGE TO THE WORLD

As soon as Esposito stepped into the 400-square-foot space on East 10th Street, a former salon, she knew she had found a home for her bakery. She and her fiancé and business partner Louis Dowler completely rehabbed the space, tearing down sheetrock and dropped ceilings and scrubbing away graffiti to reveal original brick walls. They put white subway tile across half of one wall and added a big chalkboard. In her book, she writes: “The bakery is about relearning how to live and experience food, and the chalkboard is a reminder of that. We change what’s on there, from specials to facts about celiac disease or gluten."

They made the counter out of an antique wooden door—even keeping on the locks and hardware. They turned old potato sacks into cushions for the chairs, found a big table at an antique market for the community table and discovered the wood-and-glass bakery cases on Etsy.com.

From the 13,000-square-foot gluten-free facility she recently opened in Queens, Esposito is poised to take her next giant step. “I’d like to change the food industry,” she says. She wants to ship her baked goods to stores across the country and offer them online. Asked if she fancies herself the Paul Newman of celiac, she smiles and says, “That would be wonderful.” She also has a foundation to raise money for celiac education.

“The facility is going to enable us to get the product to everyone who wants it and needs it,” she says. “I definitely have become a name that people associate with the disease. To be able to get a product to them is huge for me. I want to be able to be in every store anywhere.”

A sign tucked in the bakery case, where bagels and tea-party-sized loaves of quinoa bread nest in calico-lined wooden crates, bears a Robert Tew quote that sums up Esposito’s philosophy: “Don’t let negative and toxic people rent space in your head. Raise the rent and kick them out.”