In various places online, they are talking about apples, in part because of the Apple Rankings website, whose weird and quirky rankings have earned it the enmity of cidermakers and apple lovers worldwide. I am certainly not an apple expert in anything like the way that a cidermaker would be, but I have eaten a lot of apples in my lifetime. I don't eat as many as I used to, but I have had all sorts of apples. So I thought I'd say a few things about apples.
(1) When it comes to cultivation, apples are immensely weird. The apple is an unstably reproducing fruit-bearing tree. If you take a variety of apple and plant it in your yard so that it grows into a tree, you will virtually never get apples of the same variety. In order to grow a variety of apples, you have to take apple branches of that variety and graft them into a new tree. Then every apple of that variety is ultimately from one tree whose branches were grafted into other tree, and then other branches from those branches and so forth. This also means that actual apple varieties that come from just growing trees are mind-bogglingly diverse. Virtually every natural-grown apple tree has a different variety.
(2) Almost everyone's sense of what apple varieties taste good is distorted. Most of the apples that most of us buy most of the time have been sitting around in cold storage for months. In order to store them for months, they are usually picked too early so that they will ripen off the tree. This a huge issue, because there is an immense difference, for any variety, between a ripe apple just off the tree and an apple picked early and stored.
(2) An excellent example of this is the much-maligned Red Delicious. Discovered by accident, coming into prominence in the 1890s, in the 1940s it became the apple, the favorite of all favorites. The Red Delicious became popular because it was -- in fact, still is -- one of the best sweet-tasting apples. It has a nice aroma, a balanced flavor that involves a nice sweetness without being crazy-sweet or very tart, and at the right time, it is very nicely crisp. It doesn't hurt that it's on the large side and that it spoils relatively slowly. It was the first really good apple that you could transport all over the country and put in grocery stores everywhere. Why, then, is it so despised today? Well, roughly, it's because even it has limits. A Red Delicious apple at its peak is an extraordinarily good apple. But it doesn't stay at its peak long; it relatively quickly becomes merely OK, and then goes into a long, slow decline. So as grocery stores relied more and more on apples stored for a long time before they even reached the shelves, Red Delicious dominated, but at the same time the Red Delicious apples most people were eating were farther and farther down the decline slope. Eventually it was overtaken by Gala and Fuji and Braeburn apples, and then it was all over. You can barely find them anymore.
(3) Lots of people enjoy a good Honeycrisp, to the extent that people often say it is the best apple. It is not, and they are very, very wrong. But it was an apple that was specifically chosen to be marketed for its juiciness; it has larger cells than most apples do. The relatively recent Cosmic Crisp (a cross between Honeycrisp and Enterprise) is probably the easiest to obtain improvement on it; essentially, it's a Honeycrisp that stays at its peak longer and declines in quality more slowly. It's also much less temperamental than Honeycrisp, which is why it's so easy to obtain -- as a decently sweet apple that lasts well and is easy to grow, the entire apple industry has reasons to market it as widely as possible.
(4) The Gala is the apple that toppled the Red Delicious, and while it's not the tastiest apple, I like it quite a bit, because it's a very good all-around apple. It doesn't excel at anything, but it does moderately well at everything: decent for eating raw, decent for baking, decent for sauce.
(5) The apple that has been near the top of the heap for the longest period of time is the Granny Smith. It was first discovered in the 1860s, and was the first of the great apple varieties, for the same reasons that led to the dominance of Red Delicious much later. Its great advantage is that was tart enough to be a decent baking apple, but unlike many cooking apples, it was sweet enough to eat raw. It's also crisp and has an unusually long shelf-life and -- a not inconsiderable point -- it's extremely easy to tell whether it's ripe. When it's good it's the healthy Granny Smith green; as it proceeds it becomes increasingly yellow. It is the Swiss Army knife of apples; it excels at almost everything you could want an apple to do, and is in many ways my personal favorite. There are other apples in its league -- Esopus Spitzenburg is a good one -- but in general they are all harder to get, precisely because very few apples are able to stay good as long as a Granny Smith.
(6) The Fuji is another popular variety; it makes a decent applesauce, although I don't favor it for much else. I've heard it described as the apple variety for people who like pears, and that seems probably about right.
(7) Apple fashions are unpredictable, but an apple that may be on its way to popularity is the Arkansas Black; a bit on the tart side, but also long-lasting, it was a popular roadside stand apple whose popularity spread by word of mouth before it started becoming available in supermarkets. In a way it's a lot like the once very popular Winesap variety.
(8) I always see Rome apples in the grocery store. Rome is not a very flavorful apple at all; the reason it stays around seems to be that it cooks very well, keeping a nice texture, and cooking brings out more of its apple flavor.
(9) Wickson apples are mostly used for cider, but they have an interesting taste -- they are very tart and very sweet at the same time, so that if you eat a good one raw, it's almost like eating sour apple candy. They are rarely in grocery stores, but cidermakers love them. I know very little about cider apples, really, but its a cider apple that I would bet is among the very best. The long-enduring champion among cider apple varieties is the Dabinett, which is still popular after over a century, and a lot of ciders are made with it.
(10) I eat a lot of Cripps Pinks these days; they are easy to get, and I like the taste quite a bit. They are almost never sold under their variety name, but under the trademarked name, Pink Lady. It was a cross between Golden Delicious and Lady Williams, and is basically a better version of Golden Delicious, although it doesn't look much like one. It's popular in supermarkets in part because it has a crazily long harvesting season.
What is your favorite apple variety?
