I LOVE Winesaps and they’re VERY hard to find, even at farm stands. They travel badly–thin skins and they bruise easily. The hybrid Stayman Winesap is sturdier and therefore easier to find, but not quite as good.
I’m a Macoun maniac myself.
I really have enjoyed Pampered Chef’s Quick Apple Crisp recipe over the last 3 years.
I usually make up the cake mix, sugar, cinnamon, and nuts (plus, I add some oats) ahead of time and keep it in a plastic storage bag. Then when I have a taste for some apple crisp or when I have company coming over, I just cut up my apples and pour some of the mix on top and then pour melted butter over that and bake until it’s bubbly.
I prefer Granny Smith apples.
edited to add preference of apples
Gravenstein is my favorite. It’s a fussy apple - short season, doesn’t keep well - but it has the best flavor of any variety I know. I get the feeling they’re almost unknown outside of northern California.
Other favorites include Pink Lady and Rhode Island Greening.
What? That goes counter to everything I have ever seen, heard, or read. Conventional wisdom is that hard sour apples are best for baking. OTOH, Golden Delicious are my favorite for eating out of hand.
Store-bought ones do. When I was a lad, we had had several Red Delicious trees that produced apples that were, erm, delicious.
Yes, I have some experience and opinions re apples, just thought I would reply to some posts before I submit my original material.
No, the best time to pick is when they are ready, and that depends on the variety, your climate, the weather in a particular year, your personal taste, etc. They may be totally shot by the time of your first frost, and you’ll kick yourself for your lack of vigilance.
To illustrate: when I was a lad we had a pear tree that had been planted by my great-grandfather. I have no idea what the variety was, but the pears were fairly small and quite firm. I would start sampling when my teeth could penetrate the flesh, and gorge when they finally became ripe.
Yay for apples! I’m looking forward to getting apple crisp at the fair next weekend, personally.
Speaking of apples, I’m going to attempt apple chips in the near future. Any advice on how thin to cut the slices beyond the recipes’ admonishment to “cut as thin slices as possible”? Is it possible to cut them too thin? That seems plausable to me, so you’d have a paper thin dried out ick instead of what you were aiming for.
This is the result of the Evil Food Merchants at work. Red Delicious used to be the #1 apple. So the EVM went to work making it bigger and more storable, and now it is unworthy of consumption. If you can’t get it at a pick 'ur own orchard, forget about buying them in a store.
Having spent the first 29 years of my life in Washington Stat I can attest that Red Delicious are in fact delicious. I refuse to purchase them in the store here though, as they are dry and mealy. When I was in Seattle in 1999 to spend Thanksgiving my grandmother had purchased Red Delicious apples, and when I walked past the dining table on my way to the kitchen I smelled them before I saw them. Rapture! Larger than both of my fists put together, juicy and sweet, what a gift that was!
Golden Delicious makes a good eating apple, but it also works well in applesauce, cobbler, and in cakes.
Winesaps were what my mom used to pack in my school lunch bag. Pretty wine red apples with stars of white sprinkled over the skin. I haven’t seen a winesap in decades.
My apple of choice here are the Granny Smiths. My aunt and uncle had a tree in their backyard back in Washington, and they are the only apple, imo, that stands up to shipping. Excellent for both eating out of hand as well as for baking.
I truly miss living in apple country.
Whew. I had no idea I had such issues about apples.
When I was a lad, I lived on a farm that has now been in the family for something like 115 years. We had an orchard of 12 to 15 trees. There were two Red Delicious trees, two Golden Delicious, one pear, and several apple trees of varieties I do not know.
I spent half of my youth climbing in those trees and eating their fruits.
My favorite apple for eating out of hand is Golden Delicious. But if you wait until they are actually yellow, you have waited too long. They get mealy and nasty. They have to be picked when they are still greenish. This variety will be ready long before the first frost.
As I have said, store-bought Red Delicious are to be avoided like the plague. But if you can pick them yourself, you may find yourself with an apple that is excellent to eat out of hand.
One of my uncles had a hand-cranked cider press. Every fall, he would bring it over and we would make up maybe 50 gallons or so of cider. Most of us would pick apples off of the trees, but my 80+ year-old 5-foot maybe Alsatian-heritage grandmother would pick apples off of the ground. She wasn’t particular if they were half-rotten, or had worms.
I have to admit, the cider made with Grandma’s apples was a bit sweeter, if cloudier.
We would store our cider on the back porch, and drink it until it turned to vinegar. I never had any digestive problems with our home-squeezed cider, but store-bought always gives me a belly-ache. Go figure.