A hotel in Dublin where I was staying earlier this month packed picnic breakfasts for us: yogurt, a Danish, a banana, an apple. The apples had thick green skin, looked like small Granny Smiths but I don’t think they were Grannys since they tasted sweeter than I would expect.
I don’t think they were Golden Delicious: too green, skin too thick.
They probably weren’t Crispin / Mutsu since those tend to be big and these were on the smaller side, just 3 inches tall.
So what kind of apples could I have eaten in Ireland? Of course it’s possible that they weren’t local apples, in which case the question would be, what kind of apples does Ireland import?
I don’t know whether someone in Dublin can tell you what apples are common there; but there are probably ten thousand or more varieties of apples in the world, so this is going to be a difficult question to answer with any certainty.
You could try asking the hotel. They’d be the most likely to know.
I would! Bramleys are cooking apples not eating apples. Not the sort of thing you’d eat raw at all, too sour. Plus they’re big, easily 1.5-2 times the size of a standard eating apple.
I’m not Irish but I imagine the standard varieties of eating apples there are much the same as the UK. Granny Smith and Golden (not)Delicious are the most common green skinned eaters. If this was neither of these I would think it likely a locally grown heritage variety, but couldn’t hazard which.
Assuming Hotels in Dublin, Ireland get their snacking apples from the same place as anyone else, I looked for grocery stores with online ordering. Dunnes Stores has “Green Apples”, Granny Smith Apples, and Bramley cooking apples. We’ve already established that they were probably not Bramleys so my guess is a local-ish variety of Granny Smith or whatever those “Green Apples” are:
Looking at the picture of Bramleys, the apples I had were taller and smoother looking, more symmetrical.
They were smooth skinned and shiny. I like Golden Delicious and these were quite a bit greener than the green Golden Delicious I’ve had. Maybe a local variety of Granny Smith that’s smaller and a bit sweeter than the ones we get in the US? @Dorjan they looked like the “green apples” on the Dunne’s webpage, whatever variety they may be.
Some early varieties are ready in August. Some apples will also keep quite a long time in cold storage and might still be good in August. But you do have a point that apples get shipped all around the world these days, including to other places where they’re grown.
LOL, the only place I’ve encountered medlars is in Shakespeare, As You Like It, and they don’t sound appetizing:
“you’ll be rotten ere you be half ripe, and that’s the right
virtue of the medlar.”
And @thorny_locust those heirloom apples look interesting, but the ones I ate looked much more mass-market. These are the green ones on the Dunne’s website posted by @Dorjan that look like them:
I see the description specifies that they’re from France?
It’s possible there’s a variety of apple called “Green”. There’s certainly one called Greening – in fact there seem to be at least two, Rhode Island Greening and Northern Greening – , but the Greenings I’ve had from a friend’s orchard didn’t look much like the picture, ripen in October, and were quite large.
However, I wonder whether that’s not a description instead of a variety name, and the company’s just selling whatever green-skinned apple they can lay their hands on at the moment.