The article seems oriented toward raw consumption, I like to experiment with food canning and I've made many single variety batches of applesauce to experiment with. Pure grannies are a little acidic to me. My kids like red delicious applesauce, for something thats basically sweet with a texture its not bad. Ida Red results in an extremely pale nearly white applesauce which is interesting looking but the taste is boring. I'd have to find my notes I've experimented with most every variety at one time or another. Its a fun relaxing hobby.
Something I like about home canning my own applesauce is bug-leg-free applesauce is commercially unavailable in stores, its safe to eat buggy applesauce but pretty gross once you have a source of bug-leg-free applesauce. Also if you follow the USDA/BallBook you can't vary lemon content for food safety reasons but you can vary cinnamon and its an eternal experiment to try different ratios. Also there are USDA approved low/no sugar applesauce recipes but in the store you can only buy corn syrup or artificial sweetener applesauce.
Anyway to make a long story short, store applesauce is gross, few hobbies are as delicious as home canning applesauce, and I've had "OK" results with red delicious in applesauce form. Its not pure red evil or whatever as the article claims.
Next story, lets debate Concord grapes, vs Flame seedless, in raw and home canned jelly form.
"Also there are USDA approved low/no sugar applesauce recipes but in the store you can only buy corn syrup or artificial sweetener applesauce."
I don't understand what you're saying here ... there are many, many national brands of applesauce that consist of just a single ingredient - apples. Santa Cruz is one, as is Cadia, as is the Whole Foods "365" brand ...
We make apple sauce using our pressure cooker from the tart apples that grow in our area and freeze it instead of canning it. The taste is phenomenal, rendering store-bought inedible.
I've made apple sauce a few times for near-immediate consumption (over the course of maybe a week). There is a big, notable difference in taste and quality from the store-bought. Might be time to try canning it for longer term consumption.
However, stores near here do carry a no sugar added bottle of applesauce. That's all we ever buy, and I can't imagine why they would even consider adding sugar/corn syrup. I like making it at home because I can play with the tartness a little more by adding in some grannies, and I like to leave in the skin for the added nutrients.
My grandmother always used to make applesauce with Winesaps. There's a little orchard around here that always kept a couple trees for her and they're still there. Every season we go and get some to make applesauce out of em. Always better than store-bought, plus I can't for the life of me find a store-bought chunky applesauce that doesn't have sweeteners and all that in it.
Honey Crisp Apples are the best tasting apples I have ever eaten but they cost almost triple the price. Pink Ladies are also phenomenal. My 6 and 10 year old like them better then candy.
Fuji are also good, but yeah, honeycrisp are definitely the tastiest apple I have ever eaten... I was brought up on galas and golden delicious and I had no idea that apples could taste as good as a honeycrisp does
Unfortunately, though, a large percentage of Pink Ladies offered in stores around here (Germany) come from New Zealand... and that even though apples are among the fruit that grow well in Germany. I like Pink Ladies, especially for the texture, but I prefer to buy fruit that does not have to be shipped half way around the globe.
As did I. In fact, because of how to felt about Red Delicious apples, I thought that I just didn't like apples until I was in my 30s and tried Granny Smith apples.
With the realization that I just hated Red Delicious apples, I tried a few other varieties. I really like Fuji apples too.
When a new variety is on sale, sometimes, I like to buy a bag and try them out.
The article mentioned that thicker skins on the apples make them less palatable when the interior is soggy/grainy textured.
Personally, I like thicker skins but only on Jazz apples, which are tart and sweet. Red delicious are inferior in that the thick skin indeed covers an undesirable mouthful of mush.
They're not always available, but I've found that I like Envy apples almost as much as Honey Crisp. And when they show up in stores, Envy tends to be quire a bit cheaper.
Their availability might depend on location, though. I only see them in Toronto for 2-3 months every year.
I'm not an apple snob but if you have a chance (and live in the right temperature zone) visit a local orchard and pick some random varieties to try.
Here is Western Massachusetts you can get Cortland, Macoun, Empire, Mutsu, Spy, Spencer, Ida Reds, Paula Reds, Jersey Mac, Gravenstein, Redfree, Gingergold, Suncrisp, Rom Beauty, Jonagold and (probably) hundreds of other varieties. Some might be better for baking or cider but hey, maybe you'll like them to eat in-hand.
I feel like apples are an appropriate thing to be a little bit snobby about. There just really is a lot of difference between cultivars, and some of them are legitimately gross.
I think it would be one thing to be a snob to the extent of "I'll only eat this one cultivar from New Guinea which costs $30 apiece and must be ripened individually under a swan's left wing", but it's another to say "I only care for a few types of apple, and also screw the Red Delicious".
I feel like those of us from the Northeast or from Washington actually are apple snobs. It's just so easy to be one if you've ever actually lived close-enough to orchards that big picked bags and baskets became your main apple supply for the whole early fall.
I lived not too far from where Red Delicious was originally bred, and I can say from personal experience the original Red Delicious is not the Red Delicious that is typically sold in the grocery store.
Of course, I've never had the original one, but the heritage Red Delicious apples from multiple small orchards within a certain radius of where it was developed all taste totally unlike the ones in large groceries elsewhere in the US.
The ones from Iowa you would probably recognize as Red Delicious if you were told that, and if you were not told their identity you probably wouldn't. They're much smaller, rounder, more variegated in color, and have a much more complex flavor. Many people would probably guess McIntosh, but probably would say they have no idea.
My experiences have left me with the strong impression that some kind of subsequent genetic drift/inadvertent selection occurred, or that there's such a dominant set of horticulture protocols with the apple that the original characteristics of the apple have been washed out.
I don't think circumstances around your anecdote leave room for it to be factual. "Red delicious" isn't simply a breed of apple — they're all trademarked clones. The offspring of an apple tree won't produce anything like the fruit of the original apple. In fact, the overwhelming majority will be inedible and only suitable for cider. Genetic drift isn't really plausible because there's no mechanism by which these trees would drift genetically.
New apple strains are, as far as I know, not really bred for. They're found in the wild.
I may be wrong, but I'm pretty confident that an apple that isn't a strict clone of red delicious can't be marketed as a red delicious. It's also possible that growing conditions now have changed enough to alter the fruit, but I'm not positive that it would be a large enough difference to notice.
We had a bunch of apple trees when I was a kid, including a red delicious tree that was probably planted in the 1920s. Its apples were my favorite, especially when they became crisp and sweet after a light frost. Perhaps store bought red delicious suck but I think this hate is just misplaced elitism from people who've never had one off the tree.
> Perhaps store bought red delicious suck but I think this hate is just misplaced elitism from people who've never had one off the tree.
I've had Red Delicious both directly off the tree and reasonably fresh from the farm, and they are, in either of those cases, generally far better than from the supermarket, true.
Even so, they aren't now as good as I remember them—even from the supermarket—from 30-35 years ago (they seem to be on average a lot more mealy now), and, even back then they were a middling variety for eating without preparation, and not particularly outstanding for any preparation I can think of.
It's not elitism - the problem is virtually nobody has access to the quality of apples you did. Generally speaking, we are limited to what is at the store, and they taste like shit.
I happen to like Red Delicious since they produce a satisfying crunch without being tart (like green apples) or mushy (like gala). I'm surprised this article is using a personal preference to criticize an entire variety and industry.
As someone who loves textures of foods, I empathize with the 'crunch' comment - though I will note that the only commendation you made about the flavor was expressing the Red Delicious's lack of flavor...
I liked Red Delicious back in the early 80s, but I noticed by the late 80s that they were becoming less flavorful, and tougher skinned. Now, the crunch and the visual is about all the red delicious has going for it.
I haven't seen Jonagold mentioned, but it's another one I like (though it doesn't store particularly well).
I was put off apples throughout childhood because of the taste of the Red Delcious, my mother only bought those, and I only returned to apples after working at a software company that supplied free apples (of various different types). Until then I had not known how tasty apples could be, now I eat a couple everyday.
Overall I just buy the cheap apples; the differences aren't significant except to a connoisseur (easily adjusted for with supplements), and I prefer to spend my money on startups.
The most interesting part of this article is the last bit about China. It reminded me of an earlier article I saw on HN concerning the Asian market for wild ginkgo harvested in Appalachia.
It's becoming clear Chinese and American consumer behavior concerning food are vastly different from one another, and globalization has not eliminated all of those differences. Food is still one of America's biggest exports, so there may be a lot of undiscovered opportunities here for smart entrepreneurs in the food manufacturing industry to take advantage of these differences.
Politicians can create and trade restrictions and tax breaks, but they can't wave a magic wand and move consumer markets around more to their liking. The presence or absence of a market is what decides the viability of a business. Either the market's there or it's not.
I agree that red delicious are terrible eating apples but most of the newer varieties seem to be a bit on the sweet side for my liking. Braeburn has the perfect balance of tart and sweet while being consistently crisp.
Red Delicious are very sweet without much actual flavour. Granny Smiths are very tart and I can't understand why people actually like them (I have a theory it's because they consider them medicine rather than something to actually enjoy). I do like to use Granny Smith's for cooking, though. They are very flavourful and don't break down, but I add extra sugar, of course.
Cox's Orange Pippin is surely the ideal eating apple. A wonderful, complex flavour without being too sweet or too tart and it has an almost non-existent core. The seeds seem to just rattle around in there.
I like these ones - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Transparent
Unfortunately they are hard to come by even locally in ex-USSR because they are extremely fragile and no market want to handle their transportation or storage.
If you'll ever visit ex-USSR in late summer or early autumn ask for "byeliy naliv" apples (meaning something like "white shine"). They are green to white in color (more white as they are more ripe) and not very hard when ripe.
So, since it's spring - what's the good apples that are ripe first? Because basically I only buy Galas rather than figure out the complicated list of apples that are good for each season.
I never thought my taste for red delicious apples were something I'd have to feel about the way people did about eating McDonald's(I mean obv they're different, but..)
Interesting read, I have always preferred green apples to red apples. I even distinctly remember a day in kindergarten where we did a taste test - almost everyone in the class picked the green apples. I had never really understood why red apples were so popular, I hadn't realized there was a dominant type of red apple or what it's backstory was. I'll have to try a Honey Crisp or Gala next time I'm at the supermarket.
My son and I have settled on Gala and Fuji as our go-tos are the farmers market. I actually arrived at the same conclusion as this article about "Red Delicious" - it certainly is red and that's the most that can be said of it.
[+] [-] VLM|9 years ago|reply
Something I like about home canning my own applesauce is bug-leg-free applesauce is commercially unavailable in stores, its safe to eat buggy applesauce but pretty gross once you have a source of bug-leg-free applesauce. Also if you follow the USDA/BallBook you can't vary lemon content for food safety reasons but you can vary cinnamon and its an eternal experiment to try different ratios. Also there are USDA approved low/no sugar applesauce recipes but in the store you can only buy corn syrup or artificial sweetener applesauce.
Anyway to make a long story short, store applesauce is gross, few hobbies are as delicious as home canning applesauce, and I've had "OK" results with red delicious in applesauce form. Its not pure red evil or whatever as the article claims.
Next story, lets debate Concord grapes, vs Flame seedless, in raw and home canned jelly form.
[+] [-] rsync|9 years ago|reply
I don't understand what you're saying here ... there are many, many national brands of applesauce that consist of just a single ingredient - apples. Santa Cruz is one, as is Cadia, as is the Whole Foods "365" brand ...
[+] [-] MegaDeKay|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cooperadymas|9 years ago|reply
However, stores near here do carry a no sugar added bottle of applesauce. That's all we ever buy, and I can't imagine why they would even consider adding sugar/corn syrup. I like making it at home because I can play with the tartness a little more by adding in some grannies, and I like to leave in the skin for the added nutrients.
[+] [-] donw|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Angostura|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alistoriv|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] phaus|9 years ago|reply
For raw grapes, there's no debate, thick-skinned grapes are amazing.
[+] [-] baldfat|9 years ago|reply
Honey Crisp Apples are the best tasting apples I have ever eaten but they cost almost triple the price. Pink Ladies are also phenomenal. My 6 and 10 year old like them better then candy.
[+] [-] tetraodonpuffer|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kleiba|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LordKano|9 years ago|reply
With the realization that I just hated Red Delicious apples, I tried a few other varieties. I really like Fuji apples too.
When a new variety is on sale, sometimes, I like to buy a bag and try them out.
[+] [-] Para2016|9 years ago|reply
Personally, I like thicker skins but only on Jazz apples, which are tart and sweet. Red delicious are inferior in that the thick skin indeed covers an undesirable mouthful of mush.
[+] [-] rpeden|9 years ago|reply
Their availability might depend on location, though. I only see them in Toronto for 2-3 months every year.
[+] [-] acchow|9 years ago|reply
One day, Royal Gala started showing up and I basically just ate those exclusively until this new wave of "designer Apples"
[+] [-] grogenaut|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] legohead|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway7645|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mc32|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seansmccullough|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WhiteOwlLion|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dugmartin|9 years ago|reply
Here is Western Massachusetts you can get Cortland, Macoun, Empire, Mutsu, Spy, Spencer, Ida Reds, Paula Reds, Jersey Mac, Gravenstein, Redfree, Gingergold, Suncrisp, Rom Beauty, Jonagold and (probably) hundreds of other varieties. Some might be better for baking or cider but hey, maybe you'll like them to eat in-hand.
Life is too short to eat crappy apples.
[+] [-] mistercow|9 years ago|reply
I think it would be one thing to be a snob to the extent of "I'll only eat this one cultivar from New Guinea which costs $30 apiece and must be ripened individually under a swan's left wing", but it's another to say "I only care for a few types of apple, and also screw the Red Delicious".
[+] [-] eli_gottlieb|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dhfhduk|9 years ago|reply
Of course, I've never had the original one, but the heritage Red Delicious apples from multiple small orchards within a certain radius of where it was developed all taste totally unlike the ones in large groceries elsewhere in the US.
The ones from Iowa you would probably recognize as Red Delicious if you were told that, and if you were not told their identity you probably wouldn't. They're much smaller, rounder, more variegated in color, and have a much more complex flavor. Many people would probably guess McIntosh, but probably would say they have no idea.
My experiences have left me with the strong impression that some kind of subsequent genetic drift/inadvertent selection occurred, or that there's such a dominant set of horticulture protocols with the apple that the original characteristics of the apple have been washed out.
[+] [-] stouset|9 years ago|reply
New apple strains are, as far as I know, not really bred for. They're found in the wild.
I may be wrong, but I'm pretty confident that an apple that isn't a strict clone of red delicious can't be marketed as a red delicious. It's also possible that growing conditions now have changed enough to alter the fruit, but I'm not positive that it would be a large enough difference to notice.
[+] [-] bsk26|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxerickson|9 years ago|reply
I would think the elitism is insisting that the only way to truly judge them is straight off the tree (after a spell of opportunistic weather).
[+] [-] throwanem|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dragonwriter|9 years ago|reply
I've had Red Delicious both directly off the tree and reasonably fresh from the farm, and they are, in either of those cases, generally far better than from the supermarket, true.
Even so, they aren't now as good as I remember them—even from the supermarket—from 30-35 years ago (they seem to be on average a lot more mealy now), and, even back then they were a middling variety for eating without preparation, and not particularly outstanding for any preparation I can think of.
[+] [-] Justin_K|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colordrops|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orky56|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kbutler|9 years ago|reply
I liked Red Delicious back in the early 80s, but I noticed by the late 80s that they were becoming less flavorful, and tougher skinned. Now, the crunch and the visual is about all the red delicious has going for it.
I haven't seen Jonagold mentioned, but it's another one I like (though it doesn't store particularly well).
[+] [-] r00fus|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajeet_dhaliwal|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mathnerd314|9 years ago|reply
Granny smith have more fiber: https://olumialife.com/knowledge/are-granny-smith-apples-the... Red delicious (particularly the dark red) have more antioxidants, although Granny smith is also high: http://www.healthextremist.com/comparing-apples-apples-antio.... Most of the antioxidants are in the skin, hence peeling / juicing tends to reduce them. But of course the antioxidants are also the bitter taste. Golden Delicious and a lot of others are high in sugar and not much else, closer to candy in terms of food group: https://furthermore.equinox.com/articles/2013/10/apples
Overall I just buy the cheap apples; the differences aren't significant except to a connoisseur (easily adjusted for with supplements), and I prefer to spend my money on startups.
[+] [-] tboyd47|9 years ago|reply
It's becoming clear Chinese and American consumer behavior concerning food are vastly different from one another, and globalization has not eliminated all of those differences. Food is still one of America's biggest exports, so there may be a lot of undiscovered opportunities here for smart entrepreneurs in the food manufacturing industry to take advantage of these differences.
Politicians can create and trade restrictions and tax breaks, but they can't wave a magic wand and move consumer markets around more to their liking. The presence or absence of a market is what decides the viability of a business. Either the market's there or it's not.
[+] [-] tmnvix|9 years ago|reply
I agree that red delicious are terrible eating apples but most of the newer varieties seem to be a bit on the sweet side for my liking. Braeburn has the perfect balance of tart and sweet while being consistently crisp.
[+] [-] torrent-of-ions|9 years ago|reply
Cox's Orange Pippin is surely the ideal eating apple. A wonderful, complex flavour without being too sweet or too tart and it has an almost non-existent core. The seeds seem to just rattle around in there.
[+] [-] Yizahi|9 years ago|reply
If you'll ever visit ex-USSR in late summer or early autumn ask for "byeliy naliv" apples (meaning something like "white shine"). They are green to white in color (more white as they are more ripe) and not very hard when ripe.
[+] [-] Pxtl|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] artmageddon|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ktRolster|9 years ago|reply
Same thing with mangoes you find in the store.
[+] [-] patorjk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gammarator|9 years ago|reply
As production has increased I have noticed an uptick in mealy Ambrosias, but they can usually be identified by a slight softness.
https://www.orangepippin.com/apples/ambrosia
[+] [-] artursapek|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] minikomi|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sov|9 years ago|reply