Healthyish Loves It is our weekly column where we tell you about the stuff we can’t live without. See our past recommendations here!
Tahini is often a great sub for peanut butter in cookies, brownies, smoothies, and sauces. But there’s one arena where tahini simply cannot measure up: straight out of the jar snacking. While even the most natural of peanut butters typically contain salt (and sometimes also a sweetener), the best tahinis are made from sesame seeds and sesame seeds alone. So unlike the peanut butter that someone has already gone through the trouble of pre-seasoning for me, you won’t find me greedily dipping a spoon into a tub of tahini. Tahini is an ingredient; peanut butter is a meal.
Enter Seedible, a “sesame butter” that bills itself as a spreadable, spoonable alternative to peanut butter that isn’t forbidden at daycare. It has all of the earthy, bitter notes that I love in tahini, and the addition of salt and date powder make Seedible a ready-to-eat, savory-sweet spread—no doctoring required. Although I’m Team Creamy Peanut Butter, I find myself gravitating towards Seedible’s crunchy variety, which contains whole sunflower seeds. Chocolate sesame butter is launching soon—my smoothies are quaking in anticipation—and all varieties are organic, gluten-free, vegan, and completely nut-free.
Thanks to the addition of organic thickeners and emulsifiers, Seedible is also less runny than tahini and less inclined to separate in the jar. The texture still isn’t a perfect swap for a thick nut butter, especially a highly processed one, and my guess is that a Seedible and jelly sandwich left sitting in a hot lunchbox for hours would be something of a messy affair. But I’ve been storing my jar in the refrigerator, where it emerges thick enough to hold its own slicked onto apple slices or a piece of toast. Then again, who needs bread? I’ll eat it straight off a spoon.
