Several years ago, I was introduced to dutch crunch bread.  I thought this bread was great- tasty with a pleasing texture.  However, the more I had it, the more I realized the bread was flawed and I couldn’t bear to order it anymore.  The texture that was initially so appealing had a nasty consequence.  It would tear up the roof of my mouth.  That is a most unpleasant feeling. 

The problem is in the location of the “crunch” and the mechanics of eating a sandwich.  The “crunch” is the crackly top portion of the loaf.  The loaf itself is decently sized and often contains a healthy stuffing of fixin’s.

Now to the eating.  First, you bring the sandwich to your mouth.  Then open wide in order to measure out a good chomp.  Once you’ve anchored your teeth into the desired portion size, you bite.  As you bite down, the space in your mouth in which the sandwich is sitting gets smaller.  During the bite, the sandwich first slides straight up against the inside of your top teeth and then curves into a trajectory against the roof of your mouth.  Upon completing the bite, you merrily chew, enjoy, swallow, and repeat. 

Except when you constantly repeat this with dutch crunch bread, each bite makes a gravelly scrape across the roof of your mouth.  If you’re not paying attention, you end up with a pulpy roof at the end of lunch.  If you are paying attention, you modify as follows.

You squeeze the sandwich to flatten it as much as possible without squirting out the contents from the sides.  You eye a controllable portion size and anchor your teeth accordingly.  Then you bite down as vertically as possible.  It’s less like biting and more like you’re mechanically trying to pinch off a piece of the sandwich with a precise chop using your front teeth.  When the bite has been successfully detached from the mother ship, you perform a little oral gymnastics to transfer it carefully to the back teeth, where you can merrily chew, enjoy, and swallow. 

What a pain.  Well, I suppose either way you end up in pain.  

You could turn the sandwich upside down.  That would alleviate this path of destruction.   But then you risk looking like a tool for eating your sandwich upside down.  What if they could embed the crunch within a layer of the bread?  So that the top is still soft, but the texture is available inside – you know, like a bonus treat!

This roof-mauling problem is true of any bread whose exterior gets hard and scrapy in some way, such as overzealous toasting or simply getting a little stale.   It is also exacerbated by very tall sandwiches which force the aforementioned trajectory. 

In the end, I decided that I don’t like dutch crunch bread enough to deal with the nuisance.  My true love has always been fresh, white French bread.  There’s nothing more irresistible to me than its combination of sweet, unadulterated flavor and fine, pillowy softness.  Wouldn’t you rather sleep on a pillow-top mattress with a goose-down comforter than a bed of nails with a burlap sack?  Sorry dutch crunch, it’s been nice knowing you.