Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Review: KIND Peanut Butter & Strawberry Fruit & Nut Bar


Let's not kid ourselves here.  When you saw the title/subject of this review, you could only think of one thing.  I knew that when I was on one of my rare trips to Earth Fare and saw this on the shelves, I could only think of one thing...a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  I've declared my love for peanut butter and jelly many times before on this blog, so the fact that something reminds me of that piques my interest to the highest degree.  Now, I prefer grape jelly in my sandwiches, but strawberry is a more than capable alternative and with that I was more than eager to dive into this KIND Peanut Butter & Strawberry Fruit & Nut Bar that I picked up on sale for $1.25 (that is cheap for an Earth Fare product!).  As prior reviews have shown, the bar itself is the KIND classic size 1.4 ounces and has 190 calories and seven grams of protein.  Also per usual, it's all natural and gluten free.



Like a broken record, I'll once again repeat my line that KIND takes the mystery out of finding out what these bars look like by wrapping everything up in clear packaging.  The one thing the clear packaging can't reveal is the smell of this bar and when I took it out of the wrapper and took a brief sniff, I was met with both the mild smell of strawberry and peanut.  Basically, it reminded me of the sandwich, which means we were off to a good start.  The components of the bar included a plethora of peanuts (DUH) and also almonds, both of which were healthily sized.  What was also healthily sized and spread, which was somewhat surprising to me, was the dried strawberries.  I didn't expect so many of them and I also didn't expect them to be so large.  That was a good thing.  The bar was then bound together with peanut butter and I will point out that there was so much of it that I could see it caked to the outside of the nuts.  That made me absolutely giddy.  Before I dove into the taste of this, I gave one last perusal of the ingredient list and what I found interesting was that this also included dried apples and when I took a second look at the bar, I could see small shards of them spread throughout.  Another thing I noticed on that second look was that this bar had a lot of airy gaps in it, so it wasn't a tightly compacted 1.4 ounces.  It was a loose mix of ingredients that were basically held together by peanut butter and honey.

Being that this wasn't tightly compacted, it wasn't surprising the that texture of this had some airiness to it.  That wasn't a bad thing though because there were certainly enough nuts and dried fruits to make this simultaneously crunchy and chewy.  Since there were so many nuts, the crunchiness gave the impression of crunchy peanut butter, which is my peanut butter of choice.  That made this very fun.  In terms of flavor, the peanut/peanut butter and the strawberries were both mildly flavored and worked in perfect harmony with each other, just like the sandwich does.  Peanut butter and jelly (grape or strawberry) were meant to be together and this bar did a good job of conveying this.  What was also interesting about this bar was that it didn't just have the peanut butter and jelly flavor, but the overall composition of the bar also gave off that bread taste as well.  It was more of a wheat bread taste and being one of those oddities that likes my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on wheat bread instead of white bread, I was quite pleased by that.

Buy It or Fly By It?  Bottom line...this bar was DELICIOUS and clearly gets a BUY IT rating.  When I finished this, I was happy and sad at the same time.  I was happy because I just had a delicious bar that reminded me of the sandwich (or perhaps flavor combination) that I absolutely love.  I was sad because I had finished the bar and didn't have any more and I wanted more.  This really is one of those things that you could become addicted to and as I am typing this review my stomach is growling just thinking about it.  Yep, that's pretty much a textbook example of a case of an addiction.  Grab this and I have a feeling that you'll find yourself developing an addiction too.

BUY IT!!

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