Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Not Enough To Entice: Peanut Butter Toast Crunch Underwhelms!


The Good: Nutritious enough, Comparatively inexpensive.
The Bad: Not strongly flavored, Very grainy
The Basics: General Mills Peanut Butter Toast Crunch cereal is a cereal dud, despite being surprisingly nutritious!


Lately, it seems like breakfast cereals have been disappointing me. It has been a while since one wowed me and when I picked up Peanut Butter Toast Crunch, I had hopes that it would, at least, live up to the execution of Frosted Toast Crunch (reviewed here!). It, alas, did not. My wife and I love peanut butter and while she thought Peanut Butter Toast Crunch was okay, I found it to be thoroughly underwhelming. Initially, the big strike against Peanut Butter Toast Crunch was that it was not very strongly flavored; the more I consumed, the more troubling the fact that the underlying grains from the cereal are the dominant flavor became troubling.

Basics

General Mills Peanut Butter Toast Crunch cereal is a new twist on a familiar old cereal – Cinnamon Toast Crunch has been around almost my entire life! It looks like a baked square flake made of baked wheat and rice and generally sprinkled to look as if it was lightly frosted with some strange powdered peanut butter. Each Peanut Butter Toast Crunch flake is approximately 1” x 3/4" and less than 1/8” thick. The brown squares are fairly uniform in their appearance, though they do not particularly look like toast wedges (they do, however, look like a powdered version of Golden Grahams!).

The standard box of Peanut Butter Toast Crunch cereal is 12 oz. That represents approximately eleven servings and my box came out to just about eleven servings. This cereal is comprised of just the square cereal bits themselves, with nothing else in them.

Ease Of Preparation

Peanut Butter Toast Crunch cereal is a breakfast cereal, so this is one of the low-impact breakfast options as far as preparation goes! Simply open the box of Peanut Butter Toast Crunch cereal, pour out three-quarters of a cup (I’ve taken to using a measuring cup) and add 1/2 cup of milk to it. I have discovered, as part of getting healthy, that one of the biggest challenges one might have with breakfast cereal is actually eating the serving size recommended by the manufacturer.

For the purposes of my reviews, and my regular consumption, I only use skim milk (fat free) milk with cereal.

Taste

Peanut Butter Toast Crunch smells strongly enough of peanut butter. The aroma is simple, slightly sweet, and very nutty. The aroma prepares the consumer for a cereal that is far more flavorful than this cereal actually is.

Dry on the tongue, Peanut Butter Toast Crunch has real hit or miss flavor delivery. While most of the squares are sweet, few actually pop with the real and genuine flavor of peanut butter. Instead of the vaguely sugary and somewhat nutty flavor, most of the squares of Peanut Butter Toast Crunch just taste like wheat and rice. The dry, grainy flavor dominates the palate as the sweetness of the coating wears off in the mouth.

With milk, Peanut Butter Toast Crunch becomes even drier (if that’s possible). The mild peanut butter flavor washes right off, leaving a wheaty flavor behind. Oddly, the powder that washes off the cereal into the milk does not sweeten the milk much. The result is a shockingly bland grain cereal.

Other than leaving the mouth fairly dry, Peanut Butter Toast Crunch does not have a strong aftertaste.

Nutrition

General Mills Peanut Butter Toast Crunch cereal is fairly nutritious on its own and with skim milk! Made primarily of whole grain wheat, sugar and rice flour, the Peanut Butter Toast Crunch ingredient list degenerates into a chemistry equation after “rice bran.” This cereal has some preservatives in it, but it also has a separate list of vitamins and minerals, which implies that this is another cereal that has nutrients sprayed onto it. That makes it very important to drink the milk after one has consumed the actual cereal.

A single serving of General Mills Peanut Butter Toast Crunch cereal is 31 grams, 3/4 cups. In that serving, there are 130 calories, with 25 calories coming from fat. There are .5 grams of saturated, 1 g polyunsaturated, and 1.5 grams of monounsaturated fats in this cereal, but there is no cholesterol. With 140 mg of sodium and only a gram of dietary fiber, this is not a terrible dietary choice for those striving to improve heart health. With two grams of protein and 80mg potassium, Peanut Butter Toast Crunch has some decent nutritional elements other cereals do not. On its own, this cereal has significant percentages of eight vitamins and minerals, though none only Zinc has greater than 25% of the RDA!

Storage/Cleanup

Peanut Butter Toast Crunch is a cereal, so as long as it is kept sealed in its box, it ought to remain fresh for quite some time. The box of Peanut Butter Toast Crunch cereal I purchased on February 1, 2015 had an expiration date of September 16, 2015, but my wife will eat it up well before then! Obviously, when you are done pouring the cereal from the box, fold down the plastic inner wrap to help maintain the cereal’s freshness.

Cleaning up after Peanut Butter Toast Crunch cereal is simple as well. Simply brush away crumbs left by it and you are done! It is that simple! This cereal does have dry peanut butter powder that easily comes off its squares and that might need to be wiped up. If you get the colored milk from this cereal on your clothes, be sure to consult a fabric guide for how best to clean it out of your garments.

Overall

Peanut Butter Toast Crunch cereal was primarily bland and were it not for its nutritional benefits, it would be utterly unworthy trying.

For other cereals, please be sure to check out my reviews of:
Kellogg’s Cinnamon Jacks
Fiber One Honey Clusters
Post Grape-Nut Flakes

2/10

For other food reviews, please visit my Food Review Index Page for an organized listing of all the food reviews I have written!

© 2015 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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