When I travel, I like to seek out different and interesting soda pops or chips I have never encountered. I was recently in Michigan and tried a variation on my norm by buying two types of peanut butter.
These two products are not national brands such as Jif, Peter Pan, or Skippy. They are both were excellent in their own ways.
I had purchased Cream-Nut Peanut Butter before. I had first seen it at Zingerman’s, the fantastic deli I have previously mentioned. The peanut butter is sometimes called Koeze’s after the family company that makes it. Its ingredients are literally roasted Virginia peanuts and sea salt. That’s it. It is not homogenized with emulsifiers so there is a layer of oil at the top of the jar that you have to be careful about when you first open it. You stir the oil back into the peanut butter but inevitably you get a creamier-than-usual peanut butter at first. As you work your way down through the jar, the oil that is no longer there thanks to the earlier servings makes for a dense peanut butter at the bottom. This is not a bad thing. Both are delicious. Cream-Nut is not a cheap product. It was especially pricey at Zingerman’s where I first bought it, I consider it to have been worth the money as you can count on Zingerman’s to curate only the best quality products. It is cheaper to buy it at a local grocery but is still more expensive than the national brands though I would argue it is worth it.
Not long before we went on the trip to Michigan, I had read about another peanut butter that was a fond memory for many Michiganders until a few years ago. Velvet Peanut Butter is made in Livonia, a town near Detroit that also happens to be the hometown of one of my son-in-laws.
Velvet Peanut Butter was developed in 1944 by Paul Zuckerman, an Ashkenazi Jew born in Istanbul. His family immigrated to the United States and Paul grew up in Detroit during the Depression. The new peanut butter was an early homogenized variety and the three freckle-faced boys on the label were part of the advertising campaign. The child’s face was modeled after Zuckerman’s son.
In 1948, Velvet was chosen by the government to provide one and a half million pounds of peanut butter annually for use in schoolrooms across the country. Zuckerman finally sold the company in the 1950s, He eventually bought the brand back as part of a new corporation involved in various foods, but then sold the entire business in 1984 resulting in Velvet no longer being produced. He died two years later.
So for many people of a certain age in Michigan, their favorite peanut butter from childhood was only a memory. However, in 2009, one of those people bought the brand and original recipe and re-introduced Velvet.
The peanut butter is closer to what the national brands produce than Cream-Nut but seems less sweet. I don’t know if the peanuts are actually roasted before being ground, but it does have the taste of roasted peanuts.
While different from one another, both peanut butters were excellent and worth trying if you are in the area.