Adam's Apples

In the last few years we've seen some new faces on the supermarket shelves. Kiku is sweet and crisp and juicy. Mahana Red is crisp and juicy and sweet. Kiku Mahana Red

Fooled again. It's not unusual this time of year to see one or two new kinds of apples in stores, fresh off the boat from New Zealand or other points south. So I pounced on Breeze when I found it last week in a local supermarket. To cut to the chase: They're Galas .

This cheerful yellow apple holds a surprise. Crisp and juicy, Blondee offers uncontroversial flavors in the early harvest. The surprise? The blond one is a sport of Gala, not the result of breeding. Gala is Blondee's sole parent. Sports usually entail only minor differences form the parent variety, but I think Blondee goes beyond that. It is truly its own variety, if not its own breed.

Despite the return of local apples last week, July was a month when I ate a lot of imports from the southern hemisphere . As it turns out, many of the apples that drew me last month—16 of them—were offspring of Gala and Braeburn, two New Zealand varieties that have become supermarket staples here in the States. Gala Braeburn (Yes, I am keeping track this year.) Maybe you've been making similar choices. Here are mine. Jazz , one of my favorites of the new breeds, is a Braeburn x Royal Gala cross. This means Royal Gala (a variant of Gala ) pollinated Braeburn. Envy on the other hand is a Royal G...

Researchers at Purdue university have discovered a giant Gala, a sport of the variety that is 15% larger than normal. The fruits, dubbed Grand Gala by Peter Hirst and Anish Malladi, weigh 38% more. As reported in Science Daily, Larger apples tend to have more cells than their smaller counterparts, so Hirst theorized that there was a gene or genes that kept cell division turned on in Grand Gala. Instead, he found that Grand Gala had about the same number of cells as a regular Gala, but those cells were larger. Maladi and Hirst's original research, published in last month's Journal of Experimental Botany, is available online, at least temporarily. This has nothing to do with the menacing reports of Honeycrisps as big as small pumpkins in the Boston Globe last year. Hirst predicted that Grand Galas would not be developed commercially because they are "slightly lopsided." Too bad, I'd like to try one.

G'day! The harvest is in Down Under, and apples from the Southern Hemisphere have arrived in our New England markets. The same varieties grow just fine here and many are available year round. However, I have arbitrarily waited until now before reviewing any of the many varieties that originated south of equator.