Meet the Maker – Big Spoon Roasters

Kim will be here as our Meet the Maker. Come by to try all of the flavors we have in stock from our favorite nut butter company! We will be introducing the newest flavor added to the Big Spoon Family: Vanilla Peanut Sorghum!  Read about the newest flavor below:

Lemur Center gifted us a bundle of freshly cured, whole vanilla pods brought back directly from Madagascar during a research trip. The flavor and aroma of this vanilla were so amazing; we had to make a nut butter with it. After dozens of test batches with different nuts, we kept coming back to a combination of ingredients that could just as easily be found at a roadside growers’ market in Sub-Saharan Africa: vanilla, coconut, and sorghum.

Where Mark grew up in the Appalachian foothills of East Tennessee, sorghum syrup is a pantry staple used to smother pancakes and biscuits, sweeten sun-brewed iced tea, and drizzle on backyard ice cream made in a tin drum. Indigenous to Africa (where Mark was a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer in Zimbabwe) and rich in protein, vitamins and minerals, sorghum grain has been a source of sustenance for rural communities in sub-tropical Asia and Africa for centuries.

Our Vanilla Peanut Sorghum Butter combines fresh-roasted Runner variety peanuts, sorghum syrup, pure ground Madagascar vanilla beans, virgin coconut oil, and sea salt. More assertive and darker than honey, the sorghum syrup enhances the roastiness of the peanuts while the coconut and vanilla magnify the sorghum’s natural, dark rum-like sweetness.

Located in the hill country between Knoxville and Nashville, the Guenther family farm, which produces our sorghum syrup, makes sorghum syrup the old-fashioned way with a wood fire and a mill drawn by some of the happiest horses you’ll ever meet. From Muddy Pond: Sorghum syrup is made from the juice of sorghum cane. Muddy Pond Sorghum is pure sorghum syrup with no additives. Don’t mistake sorghum syrup for molasses. Molasses is the by-product of the sugar making industry. Sugar cane juice is boiled down to make sugar and the syrup that is left is called molasses. It is usually strong and dark.