Apple Butter Syrup - Aldi

Apple Butter Syrup - Aldi 

Winter sucks, but big hearty breakfasts make leaving the comfort of a warm bed a little easier. Our weekend go-tos are usually pancakes, french toast, and waffles. To keep things interesting, while also pleasing even the pickiest of eaters, I usually don't mess with the batter recipe, instead, I change things up with different toppings and syrups, like this Apple Butter syrup from Aldi. 

It's been ages since I've had apple butter. My maternal grandfather (who is Hungarian) always had jars of this on hand and we used to eat it on everything. It's great on toast, it adds a ton of flavor to oatmeal or cream of wheat, and it makes a really lovely glaze for pork roasts and other cured meats, and I bet it'd taste AMAZING on breakfast foods, but it's a little too thick to be used as a syrup-replacement. Until now!

The bottle is made of thick sturdy glass, just like Aldi's year-round maple syrup bottles, so it feels really solid in-hand while showcasing the lovely spiced amber syrup within. On the other hand, the labeling is really generic and bland. They tried to amp it up with a hint of gold foiling, but it's not something I'd prominently display on the breakfast table. Aldi can do a lot better.

Once opened, the syrup inside smells sweet, like apple sauce, but there is a heavy handed spiced aroma in there that makes this distinctly apple butter, and not just apple syrup. I can smell cloves, nutmeg, and cinnamon. Normally cloves is a spice I use sparingly (if at all) but when it's mixed with apples it really shines! 

If you've never had apple butter, the best way I can describe it is pumpkin pie filling, but with pureed, caramelized, aged apples instead of pumpkin. It's a rich hearty flavoring that has this stick-to-your-ribs feeling that great for cold winter breakfasts.  

I poured some out, and it tastes WONDERFUL! All the sweet, caramelized, and spiced flavoring of the apple butter I grew up with, now in a handy pourable-form! What's not to love! 

On it's own, this stuff is fantastic (I licked it off my little photo plate. Don't judge me.), but when I served this up with Sunday morning's breakfast to the family, I found it to be a little lacking. 

The syrup is thicker than usual, so pouring it wasn't as easy as I had hoped, and even though the flavoring seems so bold and authentic on it's own, it isn't as prominent when it's soaked into whatever you've poured it on. (In my case, waffles.)  I could taste that I hadn't used the usual go-to maple syrup, but it wasn't the bold spiced apple-heavy flavoring I had hoped for. Even so, b/f really liked it, and said it tasted even better when his waffle was topped with this and whipped cream. For the record teenagers K and C (who joined us for breakfast) weren't interested in the slightest. (Then again, when I was a teen, I thought apple butter was "an old people food" too.)  

I love the idea behind this syrup, and it'll be fun to use this in other applications, like to sweeten my tea, or mix in to oatmeals and cream of wheat, but it wasn't the apple butter punch I was looking for when it comes to topping pancakes. We'll polish off this bottle, but I don't think I'll be stocking the pantry with more.

FYI: I was googling this stuff online and it seems to have a bit of a fanbase due to it's low sugar content. This stuff only has 11g of sugar per serving, vs the high sugar content of maple syrup, so this could be a really awesome breakfast option for diabetics and other people who need to limit their sugars. It may not have the apple butter pay off I had hoped for when applied to pancakes, but it's very maple-syrup-like. 

 © Maria Smith http://poison-and-antidote.net

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