This Sesame Seed Butter Is Highly Snackable

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.