The Good: Does not taste bad, Good ingredients
The Bad: Very expensive, Virtually unspreadable, Perishable nature
The Basics: While I was excited about PB Crave Choco Choco Peanut Butter, it turns out to be exceptionally difficult to use and not flavorful enough to recommend.
Every now and then, I find a food product on clearance that I get unusually excited about and I pick it up without knowing much about it. That is exactly how it was with the PB Crave Choco Choco Peanut Butter. Actually, what happened was my wife and I were out and found the PB Crave banana peanut butter on clearance and I picked it up because she seemed intrigued and I took the intrigue as desire for the product while forgetting that she is allergic to bananas, so I rushed out to buy her the Choco Choco Peanut Butter to make up for my mistake. Sadly, though, the Choco Choco Peanut Butter turned out to be a real dud.
Choco Choco Peanut Butter is essentially peanut butter with chocolate in it. The chocolate seems like chocolate chips the way the product settles and the chocolate is so hard in it, but this is basically a natural peanut butter with chocolate in it.
Basics
PB Crave Choco Choco Peanut Butter is a flavored nut spread produced by PB Crave. It seems to be a new peanut butter that is part of their expanding line of flavored peanut butters. Given, though, that I already found the PB Crave Choco Choco Peanut Butter on clearance I, suspect that PB Crave might not be finding their flavored experiments too successful.
PB Crave’s Choco Choco Peanut Butter comes in the company’s standard 16 oz. plastic jar. The Choco Choco Peanut Butter is a brown and black somewhat spotted-looking peanut butter. It is slightly creamy, but because the chocolate in it is poorly spreadable, it ends up much more crumbly than creamy. The container comes with an easy to unscrew lid that keeps it fresh use after use!
Ease Of Preparation
PB Crave is a peanut butter, so there is not much needed in terms of preparation. Simply unscrew the plastic cap, tear off the foil safety seal below that and consume! It should be that easy. Unfortunately, the PB Crave Choco Choco Peanut Butter is incredibly difficult to use. Trying to mix the peanut butter and settled chocolate at the bottom of the jar does not really work. Instead, the two main components of the PB Crave Choco Choco Peanut Butter crack apart and separate. The settled chocolate settles into an unspreadable mass broken up by veins of peanut butter. The result is a spread that is exceptionally difficult to actually spread. Lack of ease of use is the biggest detraction to purchasing and trying to enjoy the PB Crave Choco Choco Peanut Butter.
Taste
Opening the container of PB Crave Choco Choco Peanut Butter, the special peanut butter emits a smell strongly and distinctly of peanut butter. The scent is all nutty, without a hint of cocoa to the aroma that one might expect (or hope for).
On the tongue, PB Crave Choco Choco Peanut Butter is very, very dry. The cocoa in the chocolate in the Choco Choco Peanut Butter only accents the dryness of the peanut butter. There is nothing creamy to the texture and while dry and nutty are the dominant flavors, every now and then there is a slight bit of sweet in the chocolate (which is a mix of dark and sweet chocolates). The sweetness that comes up very occasionally undermines the overall burnt nut flavor of the peanut butter. Because the chocolate does not blend into the peanut butter well, the flavor is inconsistent and changes with virtually every bite. Unfortunately, the dominant flavor is very dry and the flavor of very roasted peanuts.
The flavor of the Choco Choco Peanut Butter is easily sublimated to anything sweet connected with it. In a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, the PB Crave Choco Choco Peanut Butter loses on the taste front to virtually any jelly overwhelms the peanut butter. On the plus side, that does make the net flavor less dry. For just a peanut butter sandwich, some breads overwhelm the peanut butter flavor, but interestingly seem to bring out the sweetness of the chocolate in the PB Crave Choco Choco Peanut Butter.
The aftertaste of PB Crave Choco Choco Peanut Butter is dry and has a slight burnt quality that lasts for about fifteen minutes.
Nutrition
Obviously, as a nut spread, PB Crave cannot do much about the lack of nutrition with their peanut butter. Given that the spread is made largely of peanuts, sugar, and chocolate liquor, this was never going to be a nutritious product. There is nothing terrible or unrecognizable in this spread, though. It is, in fact, almost entirely natural!
It is also not the best product in the world for you on a nutrition front. A 2 Tbsp serving of PB Crave Choco Choco Peanut Butter has 180 calories, 130 of which are from fat. Those 14 grams of fat represent 22% of one’s RDA of fat. Unsurprisingly, one serving is 3% of your RDA of carbohydrates, though there is a wonderful 6 grams protein in this spread. There are 125 mg of sodium in the nut spread. This is not a food to try to live off of, even with its smattering of Iron.
This Choco Choco Peanut Butter is not marked as kosher or vegan compliant. Oddly, it includes no allergy warnings.
Storage/Cleanup
Keep the peanut butter sealed and it still has a fairly limited shelf life. The container we bought in mid-November would have expired by February 7, 2014, had I not eaten it all up! This spread does not blend well to appear even more usable as time goes by.
As a product made mostly of nuts, the PB Crave Choco Choco Peanut Butter is very easy to clean up. Simply washing it off with hot water helps clean off anything this gets on. Hot water is recommended because of the oils in it.
Overall
The PB Crave Choco Choco Peanut Butter is not incredibly usable or as flavorful as one might hope. The potential PB Crave had in its concept is not realized by its flavor.
For other food spreads reviews, please check out my reviews of:
Jif Creamy Cashew Butter
Nutella Hazelnut Spread
Jif Mocha Cappuccino Flavored Hazelnut Spread
2/10
For other food reviews, please visit my Food Review Index Page for an organized listing!
© 2013 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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