Chocolate Peanut Butter Gloop Bowl
2/5. Having had a good run with the berry gloop bowl, I tried a chocolate peanut butter version: cottage cheese instead of yogurt, chocolate whey, Ghirardelli Dutch-process cocoa, PB2 peanut butter powder, frozen dark cherries, oats and chia.
It tasted chemical. There’s a metallic edge that sits on the tongue and stays there after the bite is gone, and once I noticed it I couldn’t stop noticing it. It’s not a spoilage thing and it’s not a texture problem — the consistency was the same thick, pudding-like batch the berry version makes. It just tastes faintly like something manufactured rather than something mixed.
I don’t know what caused it. My first instinct was the PB2, but I can’t justify singling it out, because two of these were new to me: the PB2 and the cocoa. Dutch-process cocoa is alkalized, which makes it a distinctly flavored cocoa rather than a neutral one, and this was my first time using it. The chocolate whey I’d had before, but I’d never paid enough attention to its flavor on its own to vouch for it either. Worth saying the cocoa was Ghirardelli, so whatever this is, it isn’t a story about cheaping out on ingredients.
Three candidates, then — two first-timers and one I’d never really examined. I could work out which it is: taste them separately, rebuild the batch a component at a time. I’m just not invested enough in the answer to spend another week of breakfasts getting it. That’s a choice, not a dead end.
I finished all seven servings, because throwing out a week of breakfast over “faintly unpleasant” felt precious. But I ate them the way you get through something rather than the way you look forward to it, and that’s the difference between this and the berry one.
Two stars rather than one because it’s edible, the macros are genuinely good, and somebody whose palate doesn’t catch that metallic note would probably rate it much higher. Mine does, so: not again.
Drafting assistance for this piece was provided by Claude (Anthropic). This review describes a personal experience rather than a claim resting on external sources; the opinions are my own.