Criterion **

This foundling apple can be large, but the ones I bought are medium sized.

They are classically conical and tapered with pronounced ribbing, a pretty light yellow with an attenuated red-orange blush. The peel is smooth and glossy.

Click the photo if you like for a closer look at lenticels, streaks, and tiny stipples of flyspeck.

The blush on my second sample is smaller and fainter, and the lenticels stand out in it as darker red dots.

Biting in to Criterion meets medium-coarse flesh, light yellow and juicy, with a nice breaking crunch.

The flesh, however, is not super hard.

Criterion's flavors are mellow and mild, a lighter brighter Golden Delicious.

It is ever-so-slightly spicy, with a tiny suggestion of vanilla honey. There's a little cane sugar in the finish.

This apple is refreshing and has a wholesome feeling, but there is almost nothing to it.

There seem to be two different apples called Criterion. I take this one to be the seedling found in an orchard in Washington State in the late 1960s.

The National Fruit Collection (UK) calls that Criterion a Golden Delicious x Red Delicious cross.

That is entirely credible, based on how it looks and eats. Yet absent genetic sequencing I don't see how we can know what sap flows in Criterion's veins.

The other Criterion is described by All About Apples as having "dark red skin underlaid with stripes" and "crisp pure white flesh." Other sources mention this apple too.

That Criterion is much older and is kin to Cortland.

(Note that All About merged with Orange Pippin in 2011. The description lives on at OP's Criterion page.)

If you search online, you'll find other websites that confidently assert that my Criterions have "Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, and Winter Banana as close relatives."

Also entirely possible, but it's not as though you can look it up in Burkes or Ancestry.com. Chance seedling means the parents are unknown.

Links

• Criterion at National Fruit Collection
• All About Apples Criterion (the other one) at Orange Pippin
• 2008 review of All About Apples
• Its 2011 merger with Orange Pippin