Growing up in the 80s, we didn’t do much of “out of hand eating apples” because my parents didn’t like most apples that were available in the grocery stores Las Cruces. Mostly, it was as apple wedges with honey in Temple if anything. There was an exception though, about once a season my father had his friends back in MASS send a crate (the term he used, basically a hard cardboard box with individual internal wells) of 24 McIntosh apples to us in southern NM. He’d generally lived his life in the Northeastern US, and they were the only out-of-hand-eating apples he liked. My brother and I would normally get a couple, but the rest were binged by my father in relatively short order, as they were only at their peak for a few weeks.
I tried the Costco ones also which were my first try of a chestnut–they were repulsive and I suspected that they’d gone spoiled, but Mrs G insisted that they were supposed to taste that way. I don’t get the appeal, and it very well could be a chemical/genetic/cilantro thing.
More likely Stockholm Syndrome
In my (mixed US/UK) household Chestnuts are the reverse-root beer. Something you had to have growing up to enjoy. My wife loves them but I loathe the things as much as she does the taste of root beer.
Yeah, I usually have mine that way, and I coat the skin with olive oil and salt too. If you’re using the oven in your kitchen. that’s how to go. But I also say that potatoes allowed to bake in the embers of a campfire are wonderful. You have to brush off the ash, of course, but the charred skin and the sweet, smokey inside are lovely. Sprinkle on a little salt if you want, but I don’t think it’s even needed.
De gustibus non est disputandum. Or, as the Russians say, Na vkus i na tsvet, tovarishchey nyet.
Red Delicious apples weren’t always bad. When I was a kid, they actually were delicious-- crisp and sweet. I can still remember the crisp crunch and sweetness of biting into one. But they changed, eventually becoming mealy, bland and flavorless.
The reason for this, according to the article below, is that farmers began to breed Red Delicious apples for appearance rather than flavor-- they used to have some yellow striping, and farmers bred them to be bright red and non-striped. So more than ever, they were looking like the ‘Platonic Ideal’ of an apple. Problem was, the gene that caused the striping also brought the flavor. They also bred the apples to have a thicker skin so they shipped better, which also contributed to the falloff of flavor-- similar to thick-skinned grocery store tomatoes that are bland and flavorless.
When were you a kid? Because I was born in 1968 and I remember them sucking in the 1970’s in NYC when I was a wee lad. The shift towards uniform appearance and shipping durability apparently started in the 1940’s and the “modern” garbage Red Delicious dominated by the 1980’s. So it might have varied depending on market to market. I can imagine there were still quality apples to be had in apple-growing country where older cultivars were still being produced. But at least my experience was that Golden Delicious apples were still intermittently decent when I was young, but the red ones were already trash in the places I lived by the time I was having them foisted on me by parents and school cafeterias at an early age.
I was born in 1964, so my prime apple-eating memories as a kid were probably very late 60s to mid to late 70s.
That may be so. I grew up in Michigan, and looking it up, most Red Delicious apples were grown in Washington state, but Google’s AI tells me:
While Washington is the undisputed hub for Red Delicious production, they are also cultivated in smaller quantities in states like Michigan and New York. [1, 2]
So maybe I was getting Michigan cultivars, and they were still good at the time.
A lot of it is just freshness and ripeness- a couple of years ago, I had a ripe ‘Golden Delicious’ apple straight from a tree, and what d’ya know, the thing was actually delicious. Crisp, with a sweet, delicate flavour. I was shocked; I’ve never had one from the shop that wasn’t about as flavourful as tapwater.
Apparently they now routinely don’t even let some apples fully ripen on the tree, because they stay looking good longer that way, then what you buy in the shops may have sat around in storage for months. If they grow 'em locally, you’re maybe more likely to get them before all the taste has gone, if it’s in season, at least.
Having done apple picking in New Zealand, the ones eaten fresh off the tree were all far better tasting than the same fruit bought in the shops 6 months later in the UK (they grew Braeburn, Pink Lady and Cox).
Incidentally, it looks like one of my new trees will be producing five whole apples this year, unless something else snaffles them. They’re Winter Gem, which I haven’t tried before, I can’t wait to see if they’re another addition to this thread!