Crunch Time

A packet of crunchy goodness

We’ve been in the Deep South: Savannah, Georgia. Georgia is famous for its peanuts, for Planters Peanuts, for Jimmy Carter, Peanut Farmer. Savannah, meanwhile, is an old, stately, coastal and port town. It still has a large fishing fleet and huge container boats coming in along the river. It’s stunning to look at, full of trees covered in Spanish moss and old brick pavements (sidewalks for the Americans). Its wealth originally came from its place as the export port for all the slave picked cotton.

So, in a world of peanuts and boats, what better way to honour where I am than eating a bowl of Cap’n Crunch Peanut Butter Crunch. The original Cap’n Crunch is one of Beth’s absolute favourites, the only cereal that got shipped back to the UK with us. We’ll no doubt come to Cap’n Crunch Original later, but it does mean that I had some preconceived notions. These weren’t so much about the taste than about the Captain (or, I think I mean, Cap’n). In my mind he was a pirate. I would think kids would be excited for Pirate Cereal. It turns out that the Cap’n is a more modern seafaring Captain, and looks like he’s on a fishing boat (for British readers, he has more of the disturbing Captain Birds-Eye tendency than the violent Blackbeard tendency).

I’m not sure that the kids really want fishing boat cereal. The idea of stinky fishing boats, of rotting herring, just won’t lure in the children, I’d have thought. But the brand seems to be massively popular.

Rightly so, it turns out. Cap’n Crunch Peanut Butter Crunch is pretty much delicious. It’s by far the best of the fake, fun, kiddy cereals I’ve had so far. It lives up to its name, too. The crunch is spectacular. I think I disturbed the neighbourhood eating my way through it.  I don’t quite know how it’s achieved, but the cereal seems to be very dry as a basis, and not nearly as absorbent as some, so it remains very, very crunchy in milk.

The flavour is great, too. It’s peanutty, perhaps more peanut than peanut butter, but I’m not going to fuss about those kinds of details – we’re again, as we were with the Reese’s Puffs, in the same flavour space as the cacahuette puffs that you get in French supermarkets and on bars in Germany. It’s a good peanut, too. There may be lots of sugar in the cereal, but it’s acting as a flavour enhancer, I’d say, rather than as a flavour disguiser.

A bowl of crunchy yum

Somewhere beneath the sugar and peanut is a cereal base, but it’s too swamped by all the other stuff for me to really be able to identify it. Whatever it is, and I’m sure I’ll get to it when we get around to the real Cap’n Crunch, it’s not detrimental to the whole.

One really nice thing about the Cap’n Crunch experience was the aftertaste. For once I wasn’t left with the brutal acrid acid burn in the sides and back of the mouth. It actually felt fairly benign.  I do suspect, though, that if I hadn’t had a second breakfast I would have suffered from a chronic sugar crash.

A good way of overcoming this was to mix the Cap’n Crunch Peanut Butter Crunch in with the Wheaties Fuel mentioned in an earlier posting. Mixed together they make a really fantastic breakfast cereal, a mix of fun, sugary, serious, healthy and filling.

All told, the Peanut Butter Crunch turns out to be surprisingly and genuinely nice.