Celiacs get to partake of cuisine they crave

Gluten-free cooking is a sought-after specialty that Ferrara’s has embraced.

SHARON, Pa. — Consider your favorite bread — a warm, thick piece of it slathered with soft, sweet, creamy, drizzling butter.

Now think about pizza, with its tangy-sweet sauce, gooey cheese, crispy pepperoni, succulent mushrooms, or those flavorful nuggets of sausage.

How long has it been since your last slice of bread? How long could you go before you just have to give in to your craving for pizza?

For one out of 133 people in this country, that delicious piece of bread is only a memory, and though they crave that mouth-watering pizza, they can never give in. That’s because most pizza and breads are made with wheat flour, and wheat can make them very sick.

They have celiac disease, an autoimmune disorder that makes it impossible for them to tolerate gluten, a combination of proteins in wheat and other grains.

“What happens is, you have a really bad stomach ache,” said Kathy Hurdley, an Austintown woman who was diagnosed with the disorder two years ago.

“My pain was only in my left side. I became anemic. Your joints ache. You feel like you’ve got the flu.”

At home, Hurdley experiments with gluten-free recipes and makes her own pasta dishes,

She doesn’t make pizza though, because of its complicated ingredients.

As for bread, well — the grocery store offering she bought, at $5.49 a loaf, was like “swallowing a sock.”

Eating out, she said, was always a risk. People with celiac disease have to be careful about cross- contamination from pots, pans and utensils that were used to cook food containing gluten.

Some restaurants offer gluten-free menu items, but they’re limited. She remembered going to one chain restaurant where she ended up with black beans and a salad.

Now, however, she can eat out whenever she wants without worrying about it — and she has a lot of menu choices.

Ferrara’s A Taste of Italy on Hall Street in Sharon, Pa., has an extensive gluten-free menu. She’s been there a handful of times already since catching the restaurant’s TV commercial several weeks ago.

She gets her pizza fix there, munching on the gluten-free version while her husband, Ken, gets the regular one.

“It’s delicious,” she said, adding that their 13-year-old son, Kurt, likes to eat her pizza, too.

As for the bread?

“It’s as close to regular bread as I’ve tasted,” she said.

The Ferraras — Dave, Donna and their son Dom — live in Masury and have run the restaurant in Sharon for nearly five years.

About 18 months ago, they said, they began offering gluten-free food made with rice flour. Dave makes the bread, Donna said, to rave reviews. The pizza crust is made from scratch. It’s denser that a regular crust, she said, though flavorful.

Their friend Dan Pustinger of Sharpsville was their inspiration.

“He asked us if we’d be willing to, and at first, we weren’t interested,” said Donna. “We were so busy — to take on something else. But perhaps a year later, we got interested and experimented. We got really good suppliers.”

“I know there are a number of [people with celiac disease] within the immediate area of the restaurant, because of a support group,” said Pustinger, who has the disorder.

He said he “bugged Dave for a couple years” before Dave finally approached him for advice on starting a gluten-free menu.

“I got him a couple recipes and leads to other restaurants that are doing the same thing,” Pustinger said. “I taught him how to avoid the cross-contamination.”

“He’d come up and taste [new recipes] until we perfected it,” said Donna.

Now, the restaurant offers not only pizza and bread, but spaghetti, ravioli, fettucine, meatballs, subs, pepperoni rolls, calzones and paninis.

“They’re the only ones I know of that have practically duplicated their whole menu,” said Pustinger.

Ferrara’s cooks its gluten-free food in a separate room with separate utensils to avoid cross-contamination.

It costs a little more — that’s because the ingredients cost the restaurant more, Donna said.

A spaghetti dinner off the regular menu, for example, is $6.49, and its gluten-free counterpart is $7.99.

Their gluten-free business has taken off, becoming about 30 percent of their entire take, the Ferraras said. People come from all over the region and stop in from other states to take advantage of a chance to eat out again, and they take pizzas home with them to freeze for later.

It means a lot to them, said Donna, remembering the reaction of a man who ate one of the first pizzas they served.

“He hadn’t had it in 10 years,” she said. “He started to cry.”

With so many people affected by celiac disease, gluten-free cooking is not a fad and is not going away, Donna said.

The Ferraras are considering a shipping business and planning the opening of an Italian specialty store that would stock gluten-free offerings.

It’s really the story of a family business, Donna said. “The possibilities are endless.”