These two modern varieties rise to the top in the off season. Their distinctive flavors set them apart from the older Gala-Braeburn generation. But which is best?
April is the cruelest month for apples, so far from the harvest yet too early for fresher reinforcements from the southern hemisphere. But in April, two varieties stand out: Remarkable Lady Alice , which improves (to a point) in storage, and the phenomenal Gold Rush , perhaps the greatest keeper ever . Since I am lucky to have a supply of both this year, this head-to-head taste-off became inevitable.
It'll be many months before I eat anything fresh-picked from an orchard, so the topic of keepers , and of the long-lived varieties that do well in controlled atmosphere storage, has been much on my mind. I make a distinction between the old-fashioned meaning of "keeper" and the use of chemicals, precision chilling, and controlled atmosphere to arrest the ripening-rotting process. The latter is a kind of high-tech suspended animation for apples. At least some of these methods are applied to all of the industrial apples you'd find in your supermarket in the off season. Many of those are not naturally keepers and would not be good to eat if you just stashed them in your fridge for 4 months. They don't last long out of storage.