Even Red Delicious apples can be good if purchased at an orchard. They’ll only stay good a few days off the tree, however. People have mentioned Winesaps and Granny Smiths. Winesaps are the clearly superior apple between those two. One apple that makes both of them pale in comparison is the King David! If you can find those anywhere, it’s worth a quest to get them. Grimes Goldens are what Golden Delicious weakly aspire to be.
Seriously, if you haven’t gone to an orchard for apples and have only eaten supermarket ones, you haven’t really had apples. Also, some articles on the internet say you shouldn’t refrigerate apples. The authors are fools.
However you want to know one of the best smells in the world? As a 20-something I used to deliver produce in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Our warehouse was this gigantic building with gigantic refrigerated rooms for storing fruits and vegetables. It is indescribable how good it smells walking into a huge walk in cooler the size of a 10 car garage that is filled to the brim with boxes and boxes of apples.
October Apples: Northern Spy - best eating, good pie, good in the cider mix, keeps till April in the fridge. I store a bushel in the work shop fridge every year, late October. They get better in storage. Winesap good eating, and cider, keeps well. My favorite till I discovered Northern Spy. Golden Russert excellent eating, stores well. I have read they make a good cider, but I save them for eating.
Mid September is time for Macintosh.
For August apples, Gravenstein is good for eating and pies. Yellow transparent are great if dead ripe. Paula Red is also a good eating apple for mid August.
Fuji was the one that first provoked that response in me. (Growing up, it had been Red Delicious only, all the time. And those things should be sued for false advertising and change their name.)
But right now, my heart belongs to Cameos. mmmmmmm… those are objectively the best apple.
Ayup. I usually eat Pink Ladies, because they’re easier to find, but this year I discovered Envy apples and they are awesome. Sweet, crisp, not mealy or too firm, and they cost less than Honeycrisp. I think I read somewhere that they’re from New Zealand…?
With my current dental situation, I am not able to eat raw apples very easily. I can chop one very fine for my ham and apple salad (ham, pink lady, arugula, parmesan, balsamic, pecans). But this is the time of year where I make apple cinnamon oatmeal. I make batches of steel cut oats and freeze them in portions. I take an apple to work, dice it, sprinkle it with cinnamon, nutmeg, and a touch of brown sugar and nuke it in the microwave til tender. Mix in oatmeal. For that I use Braeburns, Envy, Gala, Fuji, Granny Smith, Empire, Cortland, just about any of them.
I’m working on a recipe for baked salted carmel oatmeal. Most I’m finding are too sweet. I’m not sure what apple is best for salted caramel.
Now, a nasty nasty surprise was the grapple. What. The. Hell. Right up there with the cotton candy grape. Barf.
I know that I had a Honeycrisp a year or 2 ago and didn’t really remember much about it. So today when I saw a tray of them when attending an event I remembered this thread and grabbed one…and was disappointed. It wasn’t as good as the Galas and Fujis and Jazz that I had last week.
Has anyone had a Crispin Mutsu lately? I remember enjoying them 10+ years ago but haven’t seen them in the store for a while.
And yes, fresh-picked apples can have a flavor much more intense than store-bought ones. Years ago I went apple-picking with family and had a Jonagold fresh from the tree–best apple I ever had. When I bought one from the store the flavor was just a faint shadow of the fresh one.
Just bumping this up 'cos I just found Honeycrisp apples (apparently French grown), in Aldi. Not that impressed, if I’m honest, though it is quite possible that they’ve not been stored for optimum flavour. Nice texture, very juicy, but compared to the heritage local ones I’ve tried lately, nothing exciting taste wise.
Not as good a name as Pig’s Nose Pippin, which I discovered last week.
I personally find Honeycrisps to be really mediocre (though I know a lot of people who love them). There are really much, much, much better apples out there.
My favourite apple ever is the Ashmead’s Kernel, an old heritage variety (sort of copper-coloured) that isn’t grown commercially. Winecrisp is a great apple too. In terms of the ones commercially available in stores, “Smitten”, “Envy”, and “SweeTango” are all amazing and much better than the Honycrisp.
I know a professor who does this in his hobby orchard- he has about 50 trees and over a hundred apple varieties b/c each of them is grafted with multiple “scions”.