What Do You Do With Butter Powder?

Welcome to installment two of "What the Heck Wednesday." Today we are going to take a look at what might be considered a peculiar product: Butter Powder. This stuff wasn't quite as puzzling as the Whole Egg Powder, but it still seemed a little odd. It's powdered, and it's butter, and it's in a can. Really.

The first thing you will notice upon opening your can of Butter Powder is that it actually smells really yummy - like butter (woah). It has a nice soft texture to it and measures easily. How often are you cleaning up butter smears off your kitchen counters after slicing, melting, softening, creaming and blending butter? With Butter Powder, you don't have to worry about those messes anymore. Just measure out the amount you need and mix it into your recipe. Butter Powder works perfectly with casseroles, cakes, muffins, cupcakes and soups. It can be sprinkled directly on your freshly popped popcorn, roasted veggies and braised chicken. You can also use it like you would regular butter - just mix it with water to your desired consistency and chill before spreading on the toast/muffin/corn cob of your choice.

Butter Powder also allows you to be super creative! Instead of (or in addition to) water, try mixing your Butter Powder with honey, agave nectar, flavored extracts, jelly or peanut butter. Blend it with Whole Egg Powder and milk for the richest french toast dip you have ever tasted. Add in a little powder from the bottom of any Thrive fruit cans for a fabulous flavor and color - strawberry powder makes for an amazing flavor and looks beautiful on cornbread or muffins, blueberry would be an excellent addition to a big stack of Blueberry Pancakes.

What is your favorite way to use Butter Powder?

Fruit Snacks

Let's examine some fruit snacks, shall we?

 

On the left we have the contents of 2 bags of Sunkist snacks. These "fruit" snacks contain ingredients like corn syrup, modified corn starch, dextrose, sodium citrate, malic acid, mineral oil, carnauba wax, colors red 40, yellow 5, blue 1 and beeswax. I guess they can call them "fruit snacks" because they roughly resemble some shapes that might be considered fruit-like. The orange ones look like orange wedges, the blue ones look like pineapple, the purple ones look like cherries, and the green and yellow ones look like blobs. They pretty much all taste the same. There are 8 pieces in each package (less than 1/4c), totaling 80 calories of pure sugar junk. I paid $2.69 for a box of 10 packages, 8 ounces total. This equals out to be about $0.34 per ounce.

On the right we have Thrive freeze dried fruits. Clockwise from the top are strawberries, mandarin oranges, raspberries, pineapple, blackberries, bananas, and blueberries in the middle. They contain absolutely zero added ingredients - no salt, no sugar, no additives, no preservatives. They are shaped like fruit, they smell like fruit, and they taste like fruit!

You could probably make 10 packages of these real fruit snacks in about five minutes, with as much of each fruit as your child would like. You might even be able to sneak in a few veggies! There is quite a large weight vs volume discrepancy because the Thrive fruits are freeze dried, so it is difficult to do an accurate price comparison. Just for the heck of it, I filled a Sunkist "fruit" snacks bag with Thrive fruits, then weighed it and did the math. It cost me $0.23 to fill that tiny little bag with REAL berries.

Which fruit snacks would you rather pack in your child's lunch box?