Setup: Recoil w/ flavor barrel, Dual 15 wrap 26g 3mm Nifethal 70 coils @.17 ohms. 60w power, 450F temp limit. Full Cotton Wicks.
Testing: FLV Peanut Butter @ 1.5%, 60/40 VG/PG, Steeped 30 days.
Flavor Description: Salty roasted valencia peanuts. In a way that's a whole lot better than that sounds. Decently fluffy, bordering on a bit grainy. Solid sweetness for a handful of peanuts, but undersweet for a peanut butter.
Inhale is moderately dense and suprisingly salty. Roasted peanuts on the beginning of the exhale. Sweetness seems pretty well integrated in the peanuts, more like Valencia peanuts than spanish or ballpark peanuts. Texturally, has some serious volume but not particularly smooth. That salt note comes back through and lingers on the tail end of the exhale. FWIW, the exhale leaves the room smelling exactly like roasted peanuts.
Off-flavors: At 1.5%, a light malt-liquorish note to that sweetness, sort of tastes like dark roasted peanut skins but just a bit fermented. The salty note can come off a bit cheesy. It tastes a good deal like iodized table salt. I've never really had the goiter thing going on, so I switched to kosher/sea salt a long time ago and tend to notice when using normal table salt. Probably just thinking too much about it, but I can swear I can taste some iodine.
Throat Hit: Light. A little harsh on the exhale.
Uses & Pairings: I don't think it's worth trying to turn this into a smooth sweetened peanut butter. You need some serious extra cream and sugar, and that weird malt liquor / peanut skin twinge and iodine burn is going to be fairly distracting.
The actual peanut taste here should work better for like a trail-mix or crackerjack kind of recipe. The texture here will also give you a lot of nice volume to play with.
I'd also consider this with nuttier, drier bakeries. Should have a place if you are looking for a shortcake cookie kind of vibe.
A nice textural element for sundaes. Just S&V tasting, but this sits on top of VBIC really nicely.
Nuttiness, volume, and restrained sweetness would work well as a tobacco additive.
Notes:
Potent stuff here. S&V concentration testing, it's fairly prominent as low as .5%. You definitely get more of a general peanut impression and it's a bit creamier at a lower percentage. The roastier notes are less pronounced but the mouthfeel is still pretty nice. If you're intent on making a peanut butter out of this, I'd start down here. In general, .5% seems to be the place to start with mixing this. Once you push towards 1% the saltiness really picks up. You can avoid most of the off-flavors and weirdness by staying under 1.25%. I'd use that 1% as a primary peanut note.
Second Opinions:
Fair amount of Reddit love here, here, and here. Common thread is unsweetened natural peanut butter.
Yo River, do you work in the food industry?
Nah. Pretty dedicated home cook but nothing professional.
what do you think of this compared to other peanuts? , i've tended towards hazelnut myself just because I go for more of that "smooth / sweet" but I do find a lot of value in say...fw salted caramel so i'm not against a good salty peanut
The only other peanut specifically I've dried is TFA Peanut Butter, and this is actually a whole peanut as opposed to the slightly weird take on finished commercial peanut butter in TFA's version. In terms of other nut flavors, I'm a big fan of FW Hazelnut and FA Almond but both of those are pretty soft and almost creamy compared to this. Really, I haven't had anything else that tastes like whole roasted nuts, especially with the salt. I think FA has a nut mix that should have some of the same effect, and I just had a chance to try TFA Pecan in a recipe and that has some full nuttiness too.
Another excellent review, thank you! I wonder whether this would make a good start for a recipe inspired by one of those pinkish-red peanut patties you can get at the gas station checkout counter.
I know my junk-food but I had no idea what you were talking about before the google spit this out. Looks like it's just a kind of brittle. So yeah, probably. This is definitely close to whole red peanuts.
> gas stations throughout Texas.
Ah, apparently it's a regional thing. PM me if you'd like me to send you one. I'd hate for such a hole to remain in your junk food body of knowledge when it's easily within my ability to fill it. Definitely falls into the brittle family of candy, but it's not exactly a brittle.