Absence of banana. Should I even look at it?
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I donāt get the Honeycrisp fervor, and the premium price. Sweet, one-dimensional. Crisp, sure - but pretty boring.
I love Roxbury Russets for baking, pies, and cobblers as well as eating out of hand. Bramleyās Seedlings are great pie apples, as well. Arkansas Blacks are fantastic eaters if you like a bit of tannic bitterness. I also love Calville Blancs. But my hands-down favorite for slicing up with a jack-knife on a hike in the woods is the Stayman Winesap.
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Ashmeadās Kernels, when I can find them, which is seldom. Honeycrips are excellent, and Salish, the new Spartan cross formerly known as SPA-493, is a wonder. Pink Pearmain for the colour when cooking, Bramleyās Seedling and/or Braeburn for pies. I likes me so many cultivars of apple itās crazy.
Iām from Western New York and lots of apples are grown there (and upstate). Grew up eating more than the usual share of apples, of all varieties.
Never been a fan of Red Delicious (I ālikedā the dig on them above), but I concede that when freshly picked, theyāre quite excellent (if one-dimensional). Since most people donāt have the chance to go freshly pick them every day, they get stuck with nasty grocery store ones. You can taste the delicious part way down in there, but itās overwhelmed by bitterness.
I tend to like the random varieties that show up in the grocery store sometimes, the ones colored similar to Fujis (which are my baseline standard), green with pink blush. A great one is Pink Lady, which is subtly tart over a lightly sweet, pear-like base.
Pears are by far my favorite fruit, actually, and anything pear-like is my preference for apples. It may just be because Iām so used to them from my childhood but apples arenāt something I really eat much, usually.
Itās so nice to see some real apples, rather than the bland apple-like things the supermarkets seem to like.
We went scrumping at the weekend. We found a selection of rather battered windfall apples of I think three varieties, of which I didnāt recognise any. We also found a couple of damson trees, some pears, a few sloes and a single walnut. I like autumn.
Thanks, Xeni for picking up my post. There were lots of crates with assorted apples, all different, mostly to the initiated however I must say. I quite agree with some of the commentators about supermarket apples. I donāt understand how it is possible to find apples from New Zeeland, South Africa and South America in our shops in autumn when the fruits are rotting in the fields here in Britain, a country with a wealth of historic orchards. Thanks goodness it was a well visited event in Cambridge, it gives hope to local producers who have to compete with the big chains.
Hubertus
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Arkansas Blacks. No question. Best eating apple ever. But I feel remiss not mentioning Banana Popsicle Apples. I grew up in a overgrown 120 year old heritage orchard in northern Oregon. We had about 25 apple trees of various kinds, mostly unknown by name to us. There were three trees with yellow thin skinned fruit that tasted just like a banana popsicle. Iāve had produce folks try to convince me that they were Winter Banana Apples, but the flavor is still a bit wrong. Perhaps a crossā¦ But nothing has ever tasted quite as good as our long-lost Banana Popsicle Apples.
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I had them for the first time last year and LOVED them. Iām not crazy about Macintosh so I was surprised as Cortlands are a Mac offspring. They have a similar consistency but WAY more flavor, and when they are really deep red the flesh is so bright and white it looks like heaven.
Someone mentioned Pink Ladys and those are boss too. Honeycrisps are sweet but bland, as are Galas. Fujis can be quite nice too. The classic Red Delicious are really great as well though Iāve had them so many times they are a bit boring.
Iād love to try some of these other varieties mentioned in this thread. Iām gonna try to find a tasting farm or something nearby.
Michael Pollanās documentary āThe Botany of Desireā has a great section on apples. They are really fascinating fruits in that the seeds donāt have the same qualities as their parents (extreme heterozygotes ā yay Wikipedia!). So unlike most other plants cross-breeding is tricky and often results in substandard fruits. Basically you plant 'em and pray, and when you find one that is tasty (very rare apparently) you can graft their branches to other trees to replicate them. Thatās why Johnny Appleseed planted so many of 'em. Though nowadays it seems they are doing some cool things with SCIENCE in Minnesota somewhere.
Are you doing anything for pest control? My Akamas were almost completely infested with codling moth or like creatures this year.
Sadly, the apples we get here have to be shipped in; our climate is no good for them. The ones we get have been days if not weeks in transit, and the flavor reflects that. Every once in a while we get something unusual like a Pink Lady or a Macintosh, but even there, not impressive.
My favorite game growing up in northern WI was semi-wild-apple-tree roulette ā a bite might be the best thing ever or it might make you want to cut out your tongue.
The previous owners of our place had a well-maintained little orchard ā 50+ years of not maintaining anything led to some interesting hybrids.
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