Trader Joe’s Speculoos Crunchy Cookie Butter

Oh my god… seriously? Seriously? Ohmygod.

Folks, it may seem easier than ever to focus upon the dark spots in our lives nowadays, but not all is blight and sorrow. I, for one, am sitting here buoyed up with the elation of having spotted the first, incontrovertible signpost that the year of 2013 will be humanity’s greatest to date. I speak, of course, of the new variety of cookie butter our good pal Trader Joe has put on the market.

Crunchy cookie butter. Crunchy. Crunchy Cookie Butter. In retrospect, I suppose it’s obvious that they’d come out with something like this. Nevertheless, I was utterly gobsmacked when I rounded the corner and found it sitting there, gussied up in burgundy and yellow, proclaiming itself to the world.

There’s not much new to say about crunch cookie butter that I didn’t say about it’s older brother before. It’s still incredibly tasty, still better than anything on the market, still ten times tastier than the tastiest peanut butter and still a must-buy for every household interested in treating taste buds right. There are only two changes the game – one, the aforementioned new packaging, and two, the alteration in texture.

As for the much showier packaging, I can’t help but speculate that this might be Trader Joe’s way of taking squarer aim at it’s rivals in the condiment market. After all, the jar now matches, almost exactly, the look of the classic Peter Pan peanut butter jar, giving it much more of an “everyday essential” sort of feel. Have the shadowy marketing managers in the TJ’s corporate offices decided to play off our preexisting preconceptions in a bid to insinuate cookie butter into cupboards? I have no idea and, what’s more, I can’t possible prove it either way. Let’s move on.

Texture. Without mincing words, what does crunchy cookie butter taste like? Well, if you’ve left cookie crumbs in your regular cookie butter before, you actually have a pretty good idea. Crunchy cookie butter has the same creamy feel of regular cookie butter, but with the extra grit of sprinkled speculoos crumbs mixed in. It is very much a different sort of “crunchy” from crunch peanut butter, which tends to be more lumpy, with large chunks of peanut, than crunchy. The crunch in crunch cookie butter is a much smaller crunch, but quite satisfying.

Is it a superior texture? The Crunch v. Smooth debate is one that has raged for many years before I was born and where you fall on it depends, ultimately, on personal taste. I will say this however, I found it a welcome change to the silky uniformity of the smooth cookie butter. The granularity of the tiny crumbs lends the butter a sort of heft and substance that makes a spoonful feel like a bit more than a spoonful.

Would I recommend it: If it’s down to the cable bill or this, choose this.

Would I buy it again: Yes, in regular intervals, alternating with smooth cookie butter.

Final Synopsis: Cookie butter with a little more cookie.

Trader Joe’s Speculoos Crunchy Cookie Butter – Nutritional Information