From gingerbread to Maria cookie spread, we tried all the cookie butter we could get our hands on and picked the best.
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What is cookie butter, you might be asking? The simple answer is that it’s a sweet spread made with crushed up, spiced Dutch cookies.
In the mid-aughts, some brilliant Belgian entrepreneurs took the cookies—known as speculoos, and spiced with ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves—and added oil, flour and sugar to create a soft cookie spread. It came to America in 2011 with a little help from Ben & Jerry’s, and the rest is history.
Commonly spread on waffles, slathered on crêpes and on toast, or eaten by the spoonful, cookie butter is an indulgent substitute for peanut butter—just without, you know, all the healthy protein.
The first cookie butter was the favorite of two Food.com editors. Trader Joe’s Speculoos Cookie Butter is one of the closest to the original. It has a classic, lightly-spiced taste, and we would eat a whole jar of it. Consensus? We wouldn’t kick it out of bed.
Exactly the same as the regular cookie butter, only with little, crispy bites of brilliance folded in. Three editors claimed this to be their favorite of the entire taste test. We were, as they say, “living for” the texture.
“Good God,” somebody said upon first taste. The Nuts ‘n More Cookie Butter Peanut Spread was polarizing. The “health”-forward, high-protein concept is a variation on whey-enhanced nut spreads that were once featured on the TV series Shark Tank. The texture was gritty, though some appreciated the developing flavors. Others referred to it as the “chalky paste from hell.”
The Walmart signature Great Value brand sells this classically flavored speculoos cookie butter. Darker in color than a lot of the others, it also has a rich, caramelized flavor. We were reminded of Graham crackers and s’mores while tasting it. Two Food.com editors labeled this as their favorite.
Image: metfood_nostrand_ave/Deskgram
While we couldn’t find this one anywhere online, it just happened to be on the shelf of the Western Beef supermarket next to the Food.com offices. Think of it as a mashup between dulce de leche and Maria cookies. Not everybody loved it, since it is not flavored with speculoos cookies, but it earned the approval of social media specialist William London, who commented, “j’adore.”
This German-made cookie butter was overwhelming, and tasted like straight, heavily spiced pumpkin purée. It could have potential to be mixed into your pumpkin pies this Thanksgiving, but we didn’t go back for a second spoonful.
After a few experimental flavors, we arrived at the original speculoos cookie, as served on Delta Air Lines flights. This was the cookie butter that started it all. And while it was delicious and solid, once the brands were unveiled, the Food.com edit team was surprised to find that it preferred the Trader Joe’s butter to the Biscoff butter. In an apt comparison, somebody said that the Trader Joe’s version “warms you up” while the Biscoff version “is like mmmmm.”
