Eastwind Nut Butters Company

Dear Eastwind Nut Butters Company,

You don’t know me or my wife, but let me tell you that my wife, Kris, is your fan. She’s recently taken a liking for almond butter. She’s the sort of informed person who studies up on things so much she’s right there at your level, and that means she’s raised her liking for almond butter to the point of liking organic almond butter. The sort that doesn’t mix well, and you know what I mean.

I’d like to make a suggestion for you, and mind you this comes from someone who only rarely eats her almond butter. I admit to liking it, but that’s not important.

You’ve got a crink in your system when it comes to jarring your fine-tasting organic (non-mixing) almond butter. Here’s what we are finding, and I’m betting you’ve heard this before. But I’ve got a solution you perhaps haven’t thought about. I’m not charging you for my counsel, but someday you might want to buy me a cup of coffee.

The crink is this: at the bottom of the jar the almond butter is dry and sticky and not very buttery, sort of like some of my mom’s roasts back in the 60s when we had been at church on Sunday and the preacher got himself worked up into a long sermon. But at the top of the jar the almond butter is moist and almost gooey, but at any rate it’s too oily and too much butter and not quite enough almond. The middle, of course, is perfect, but it’s hard to get to.

So what we have to do is stir the stuff, but that always reveals another crink. The oil spills out, and it’s the sort of oil that is messy and not easy to clean up from our counter. (There’s another problem here; our counter is dark, we are not young birds, we don’t get into bright lights at breakfast time, so we don’t always get it all cleaned up, which makes for problems later, say at lunch. But I digress. Back to the point…) The almond butter in the middle is the best but it’s not easily accessible, and the jar’s shape makes it hard to stir the almond butter into an even consistency. (My friend sometimes pronounced that word “constituency,” and I pointed that out once but he never learned and it got quite fun to hear him get the words confused.)

Anyway, I think I fixed both crinks with one trick. Someday grab yourself a medium sized tupperware bowl (with a lid, of course) and put all of the contents of said almond butter in the bowl, and put the bowl in the refrigerator over night, and then the next day at breakfast you’ll have the middle of the jar everywhere. I don’t know why it works, but my wife knows it works. She gets a bit of a kick out of this every morning when she has her English muffin (the sprouted whole grain kind) with some almond butter and a scrape of jelly (organic, too).

My suggestion for you: spread out the jar so the oil can spread more evenly.