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My medium-large Golden Delicious is a cheerful yellow tinged with green. It has distinctive dark green lenticels that fade to nearly nothing on the blushed area, which is a faint orange pink.
My example is ribbed and conical, with a round ridge of chins at the bottom, and theres a small stellation of russet radiating within the stem well.
I think of Golden Delicious as having a characteristic sweet fragrance, but my sample has almost no aroma at all.
Its flesh is crisp and juicy, a fine-grained light yellow. Golden Delicious is sweet and though there is a little balancing tartness—more than I'd expected—individual flavor notes are difficult to tease out. It is mild but flavorful.
I was surprised, however, to find a hint of the same vegetable tobacco note that is also present in Arkansas Black. (It would be an understatement to say that these are very different apples.)
There is also a bit of pear and honey. The texture is quite firm.
This variety is a classic, flavorful and easy to eat.
Golden Delicious is a giant among apples, popular with growers, eaters, and breeders, who mine its genome for this variety's even mild sweetness, attractive appearance, and durability.
Golden Delicious was originally a chance seedling found more than a century ago in West Virginia, where it has been the state fruit since 1995.
What are you going to do when you run out of apples to review? Golden Delicious are my favourite. My parents used to have an organic orchard and that was always the best one :)
ReplyDeleteMiss--Your question is rhetorical, but there are more apples than I could ever taste.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of rhetorical questions: Golden D is a truly great apple, isn't it?
This September is the 100th anniversary of the Golden Delicious apple, at least by that name. The apple was first "discovered" about 20 years earlier on the Mullins farm in Clay County, West Virginia. For several years the Mullins family sold the apples locally under the name "Mullins Yellow Seedling." It was in September 1914, however, that PaulStark of the Stark Brothers Nursery traveled six hundred miles by rail from Missouri to Charleston, West Virginia, and the last 25 miles to the Mullins farm by horseback to not only buy the tree and the sole right to propagate it, but a square of ground on which it stood, plus the right to give it a new name, Golden Delicious. Stark did no bargaining, but paid Mullins five thousand dollars in cash on the spot. The next day he had huge woven wire cage constructed around the tree -- not to protect it from deer and other predators, but to keep anyone from pruning any limbs or taking any cuttings. The cage not only had a lock, but an alarm. Thus 100 years ago this month, the Golden Delicious was born.
ReplyDeleteWe don't grow any, but we have several trees for which the Golden Delicious is one of the parents.
John, thank you for remembering the centenary! The apple's numbers, and children, have certainly increased.
DeleteMuch as I admire Golden D, I find I like Grimes Golden, thought to be a parent, even more.
When I was thirteen my family moved to a home in the middle of an old golden delicious orchard in the lower Yakima valley in Washington. The apples were an old type that bore smaller, rounder fruit than was currently popular commercially (Washington growers don't seem to be able to market on a small scale as well, at least in the big apple-growing areas like the Columbia basin and Yakima), and the owners eventually took the whole orchard out because they said they couldn't get enough from the apples to pay for the upkeep. Those apples, when at their prime in late October or November, were some of the best I've ever had. They were beautifully balanced in flavor, with a sharpness almost like carbonation and lots of aroma. Goldens mellow a lot after harvest, but there's nothing like a freshly-picked, golden-ripe golden delicious. I was so sad to lose that orchard--and so glad, a few years later when I lived in Tennessee to find that I could buy bagged apples at Walmart from Pennsylvania that came awfully close!
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