Kirkland Macadamia Clusters Review

I've made it through the holidays and am just now coming down from the ridiculous sugar high a month later. Even the thought of anything sugary, sweet, and/or gooey makes my teeth hurt. That being said, there is one holiday gem that continues to enrapture the mind and tantalize the pallet. Kirkland’s Macadamia clusters with salted caramel from Costco have entangled my soul, and at this point, I'm not sure if there is any way out. These precious clusters come in 2lb bucket and don't seem to be just a holiday item at Costco anymore. What that means to a junkie like me is that there is a legal crack house one mile down the road. Let me repeat, an inexhaustible, dirt cheap, river of Crack within 5 min. My Crack just happens to come in the form of lumped caramel and nuts. Good luck getting through the tremors with that ease of access.

Every night, after gorging myself on dinner, I eat 2 and precisely 2 of these clusters. Yes, I said every night. Two is exactly the correct volume to satiate without overdoing but I’m worried about the collective; long-term effects of pounding clusters day after day. This could prove deadly. Further, my wife and daughter have braces which don’t go well with caramel, leaving the entire bucket to me and my son of 5… who obviously can't reach the top shelf where I hide these in the pantry. This burden is mine and mine alone. A week ago I finished off one bucket, and just happened to be in Costco for a replacement within a day. I didn’t make it a day! I have a problem, I know.

Now let me give you the breakdown of this naughty little minx.

Crunchy, nutty bite, silky chocolaty outside, and a gooey, caramel cement holding it all together. As Robin Williams once said,” we didn’t just read poetry, we let it drip off of our tongues like honey”. Just replace” read” with “eat and “poetry” with “cluster” and…ok that was a long way to go for a Dead Poet Society reference, and didn’t really make sense anyhow. How’s this? It is like a little piece of happiness bundled in cocoa.

I spend a lot of time thinking about food , and if you have read my other reviews, I think that fact has been well established. But, in trying to ascertain why I am drawn to these like a Priest to little league baseball game, I've decided that the magic comes from the least likely of ingredients. It’s the salt. The simple fact that the macadamia nuts are salted before being smothered in caramel makes these things unique and exquisite. The salt cuts the sweet and balances the caramel perfectly. In my mind, the marriage of salt and caramel now rivals that of peanut butter and chocolate, coconut and cream, yea even pork and beans.

This is a nearly perfect creation losing only one star because of my expanding waist and sludge filled arteries. At this point, at least I have completed step one in my recovery process. I’ve admitted I have a problem. From here, it is one day at a time. I may ultimately lose the war, but many a tasty battle there will be.