Bubble bread.

Against my better judgment I took one of those online quizzes, one that purports to tell you how OCD you are. They show you a series of pictures where something is a little off or very messy, and ask how much it makes you crazy. I scored 30%, which seems entirely too non-OCD for the way I feel. 

I think it means that things make me only a little crazy, but I feel very, very certain about that little bit of craziness. 

Take bread. I love bread. Bread bread bread. I loved the old Clinton-era USDA food pyramid that told us to eat tons of bread and made everyone fat. Because I love bread. 

But when I buy a loaf of the beloved foodstuff and find a big air bubble has compromised the structural integrity of some slices, my OCD level climbs. 

I suspect it may be a particular problem of swirled breads like the rye/pumpernickel shown below. Using two doughs together seems like an invitation to separation. But it's a problem with all yeast breads.

NOW what do you do? You can carefully smear the bread with mustard or mayo, having to avoid the hole so you don't break an axle on the knife or, actually, wind up with condiments on the plate and on your hands, defeating the purpose of the neat, portable sandwich. PB and/or jelly are right out; it's bad enough to leave this as a little meat window, but you can't have a sandwich made of condiment-like material when you have a hole in your bread. If the slice next to it has an identical hole, which it likely will, I guess you could go around both holes and have a sandwich that looks like it failed to save your life when it was in your pocket and you were shot. But you know it would be a problem. Anytime you picked up your sandwich your finger would go straight into the hole.

Okay, toast then. Except for the butter leakage!

A slice of bread with a hole in it would make Bruce Banner go green and smash things. It is a food menace, and we need to find a way to resolve this. CT scan each loaf before it ships? Ah, that could solve it. Send the faulty loaves to the stuffing factory before they get sliced.

Oh, suck it up, it's just a hole in the bread, says the 10% OCD guy.

Yeah, well, it makes me nuts. The thing is, I suspect that we've each got something that makes us nuts. The guy who laughs at my bread dilemma has probably wrapped a sand wedge around a tree somewhere, or thrown a fit because his velvet Elvis painting was five degrees off square after his girlfriend vacuumed it. It's not that some people are not obsessed about anything; it's that some people are just obsessed about fewer things.

At least that's what I'm telling myself. Over and over and over.