If you take a look at the Larabar products website, you will see that they have A LOT of different flavors. Maybe someday I'll try them all out for this blog, but today I'll just stick with this one, the Peanut Butter & Jelly bar. Now, everyone (I hope) knows what a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is and studies show that the average person has probably eaten about a 1,500 of them by the time they graduate high school. I know I ate about one a day as a kid, so needless to say, I have a little experience eating them. Since I hold them in such high esteem, I had big expectations leading up to trying out this bar. So, before we start the review, let's get the hard facts out of the way: this one has 210 calories, 6 grams of protein, weighs in at 1.7 ounces and I picked it up on sale at Kroger for $0.99.
Okay, now that the hardcore stuff is out of the way, let's talk about this bar. Obviously you can see that this one looks like typical energy bar in that it is a mish-mash of all sorts of ingredients in the date and cherry puree. In terms of how it feels in your hands, it is kind of slimy, which is nasty, but whatever. Looking closer at the bar, you can see all the nuts from the peanut butter portion of the bar and if you look really close you can see the little berry packets, which I imagine are designed to simulate the "jelly" of this one. This jelly is made up of dates and cherries, so it's not the typical grape jelly that you would find in your classic PB&J. Boo!
In terms of taste, it's nothing like the old classic either. You can clearly taste the peanut butter flavor, although it is quite weak and disappointing. The energy mix (the brown stuff) does faintly resemble a bread flavor so they've hit two of the three components of a PB&J so far, but they haven't done them all that well. Now, where this bar really fails is the "jelly". Honestly, I couldn't taste it at all. I imagine it's physically in there because the label lists fruits in the ingredient list, but there is not any taste of it anywhere to be found. What a major disappointment and a major failure. Basically, all this bar really consisted of was a bunch of materials combined together that formed a soft, chewy texture in my mouth. Any sort of nice and powerful flavor was missing.
Buy It or Fly By It? FLY BY IT. This is a miserable flavor and does a very poor job of simulating what is a great sandwich and sullying what is a wonderful childhood memory. Don't ever consider buying this one unless you hate yourself or the person that you are trying to get to eat this one.
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| FLY BY IT!! |
The energy part of the bar is that it's a raw bar and the nutrition is coming from the whole ingredients...the "brown stuff" is dates. It only has four ingredients
ReplyDeleteI haven't had this flavor, but I do regularly buy and consume several other Larabar flavors. None of them taste all that great.
DeleteLike Jessie pointed out, the whole appeal of these bars is their limited ingredients and lack of additives. I can't eat sugar or flour or a ton of other things so these bars are really great.
It tastes like peanuts and cherries. Nothing wrong there.
ReplyDeleteI picked up a few of these at walmart because they were clearing them out at .63, so I figured why not. I actually really enjoyed the flavor. I didn't honestly believe I was going to mistake this for a real PB&J sandwich, but for a great snack bar with honest ingredients, I would totally recommend this.
ReplyDeleteI'm surprised this got a bad review. I'll agree that it doesn't taste like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich but it is completely delicious to me. I can taste the peanuts and the cherries and the dates (the base of all larabars) is the part that gets subtled out.
ReplyDeletePeanut butter cookie tastes delicously like peanut butter cookie dough, and this one is the same ingredients plus dried cherries. YUmyumyum. I'm addicted. AND I'm not vegan, healthy, or allergic to other options. :)
I guess it wasn't horrible, but when you promise something like peanut butter and jelly and don't even come close to delivering, you lose major points in my book. That's what happened on this one.
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