Superpower No. 2— Ultrafine Mold Detection

Until I was in my sixties, my nose would completely stop up and refuse to admit air if I entered the bread aisle at a grocery store. The mold* wafting off of the racks of store-bought bread was a cloying, unbearable stench to me. It seemed as if the fine mold filaments sought to inhabit my nose, and my nose objected vigorously by sealing itself off. Since most people do not react to store-bought bread in this ultra sensitive way, I can only assume that this is a superpower. :-)

Conversely, I have never been able to smell either paprika (which is finely ground sweet bell pepper) or saffron (the threads of stigmas and styles of crocus flower) which are highly valued spices. They just smell like dust to me.

So I learned to bake my own delicious breads. I enjoyed the feel of kneading the dough, smelling the yeast as it rose up the bread, seeing the various shapes and textures of my bread that people have created for millennia, and of course tasting and sharing the bread. Looking in my recipe folder I see that I found or created recipes for:

Milk And Honey White Bread

Caraway Seed Rye Bread

Simple Raisin Bread

Cranberry And Orange Sugar Bread

Buttermilk Cornbread

Banana Bread

Pumpkin Bread

My Elderly Friend Mrs. Sloan’s Breakfast Rollup of Maple Syrup, Sausage, and Egg (yummy)

Pizza Rollups

Baked Lamb Samosas, and other meat pies baked inside a moist, chewy bread crust.

I now find that baking bread is too fatiguing, but my old nose no longer registers the smell of mold, so there is a whole new world of store-bought bread for me to discover. So far none of them delight me like my home-made breads use to do.

... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

* “Mold vs. Yeast. Mold is a type of fungus that grows in multicellular filaments called hyphae. These tubular branches have multiple, genetically identical nuclei, yet form a single organism, known as a colony. In contrast, yeast is a type of fungus that grows as a single cell.”

Source: https://www.diffen.com/difference/Mold_vs_Yeast

How my super-powered young nose could tell the difference is a mystery to old me.