GOING FOR THE GOLD
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Hint: These are not Granny Smith.
They are Golden Delicious.
As Orange Pippin explains,
Fruit picked for supermarkets is often picked when still green, and then stored for months before sale.
That is not just an aesthetic shift:
In contrast, when allowed to ripen to a golden-green color on the tree the true flavour [of Golden Delicious] is revealed: exceptionally sweet and rich, almost like eating raw sugar cane.
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| Nom! |
Why sell unripe fruit? It keeps better in storage, even if it isn't as good. (Picking early also gets the crop safely off the tree and away from hail, bugs, disease, and other hazards of nature.)
They're all like that
Popular red-blushed varieties develop sports selected because they show color earlier. These can be picked earlier without looking unripe (even though they are).
If you've noticed a drop-off in the quality of your favorite apple, that could be the reason: growers have optimized early picking over taste and crunch.
It certainly helped to do in Red Delicious.
Arguably, ripe fruit might fare worse in storage, come February. I don't know, except that I've probably never had a ripe Granny Smith.
Speaking of Granny, there is one lurking among the "golden" delicious in the photo above. Can you find her?
Orange Pippin again (the whole thing is worth a read):
Golden Delicious is also a versatile apple, and can be used both for dessert and cooking purposes, and it has an attractive appearance—which can indeed be golden if left to mature on the tree.
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| Granny Smith |
Both photos taken on February 18.
I love your commentary on the red sports and your essay about how the Red Delicious apple was destroyed. In mid-December, I stopped by an orchard in southern MN to pick up some Evercrisp apples (for my children, who like sweet apples) and Ludacrisp (for me and my wife, who prefer apples with a more balanced flavor), both of which are good winter storage apples. In the course of my conversation with the orchardist, he mentioned that he had just purchased a few trees of the new red sport of Evercrisp to try it out, but he was hesitant to plant many of the new Evercrisp sport until he got a chance to taste the apples. He explained that none of the red sports of Honeycrisp tasted as good as the original Honeycrisp, at least when grown on his land. I personally haven't done any comparison tasting of the original Honeycrisp versus the red Honeycrisp sports, but it sounds a lot like the Red Delicious story.
ReplyDeleteI have heard this about the redder Honeycrisp variants.
DeleteHard to know if poorer eating quality is really bred in the bone, or because they can be (and thus are) picked too soon, or another reason.