I love unconventional pairings.

Sure, peanut butter & honey might not be that strange, but compared to those square food pairs—PB&J, Chocolate & Peanut Butter, Chocolate Strawberry: you know I love you, but it’s been done, mate—PB&H belong more with other alt combos like Banana Maple, Raisin Walnut & Honey, or Coconut & Caramel.

Hey, I guess Quaker Oats is pretty good at this. I predict if oatmeal flavor permeations are going to keep up this rate of release, we’ll see a flavor like this mutate into Peanut Butter & Pickle Oatmeal by 2020.

But until then, let’s dive into a piping hot bowl of freshly microwaved Honey Butters & Oats.

Two words: err, wait, no: Three words: actually, hmm, how many words is it if there’s a hyphen? Hold on.

…

TWO words: I was right. I’ve flirted with enough college paper word counts to remember that grammar rule.

Oh, right: Two words: Honey-roasted peanuts.

No, really, that’s almost exactly what Quaker’s newest oatmeal tastes like. Yes, Peanut Butter & Honey Oatmeal may look like molten Nutter Butter paste, but its scalded sienna-colored oats taste more like the actual browned legumes than their amalgamated groupthink form.

This means earthiness (with the oats’ help) and near-saltiness over fattiness and well-oiled sweetness, and you’d think this is where the honey taste would come in to irrigate such a delectably dry desert, but the honey experience here is more of an outgrowth of the peanut taste. Like honey-roasting, the honey flavor here is toasty and caramelized, yet still a bit golden sugary.

Sure, it does get a little deeper than that: the flavor distribution here is unnaturally good for its brand, but sometimes more peanut flavor bursts in a specific spoonful, making the collective taste remind me of magmatic Quaker Peanut Butter Chip Granola Bars. And sometimes the honey begins so darkly sweet that the sum of each part reminds me of peanuts & crackerjacks, instead.

Which gives me the Pavlovian urge to wash this oatmeal down with a hot dog.

Sure, there are things I don’t like about Quaker Peanut Butter & Honey Oatmeal. The texture feels gummier than the average oatmeal—I really recommend using milk, to mitigate it—and it can get a bit too dry at times, but overall this is one of the best new oatmeal flavors I’ve tried in a long time, and certainly the most innovative since Apple Cheddar Rosemary.

Sometimes I dock points from a review if I feel the product detrimentally failed to live up to its namesake promise, but this is about as good of an oatmeal, if not more, than I could have expected: it’s just a different, charcoal-tinted lens on Peanut Butter & Honey.

Now if I were to roast this oatmeal over a bonfire…

If you don’t hear from me within 3 days, alert Smokey the Bear.

The Bowl: Quaker Peanut Butter & Honey Oatmeal

The Breakdown: Honey-roasted peanuts with a dash of bubbling granola and a sprinkle of America’s greatest past time: a solid, yet strangely semisolid oatmeal that nevertheless benefits from whatever additional moisture you can provide for it.

The Bottom Line: 8.5 Peanut Instrumentality Projects out of 10