Adam's Apples

Apples to the rescue!  ¶  Note (or, perhaps, Warning): The Music Appreciation Department at Adam's Apples has selected a recording to play in the background as you read today's report.  ¶  Click the play button below for the full experience. Mid-spring is the nadir of the apple year. The fall harvest is a distant memory and the first apples of summer are 3 months distant.

To the extent this blog has a message, it is appreciation of the many diverse kinds of apples that are still grown, enjoyed, and loved. Towards that end from time to time I take my best shot at pitching alternatives to fans of some of the standard popular varieties.

Sweetland Orchard (or perhaps I should say, @SweetlandOrchrd ) has won me over this week by tweeting apple blossoms straight from the Minnesota farm: #appleblossomjournal Tweets The best thing? Sweetland is going variety-by-variety.

Robots are battling for dominance of the orchard. Check out this fruit-picking robot under development by an Israeli company. Details are sketchy, but a promotional video shows two listless, sweaty apple pickers who are delighted to welcome their robotic overlord, which we are told can pick ten times as fast as humans. Meanwhile, the sound track and the lighting changes and a robotic arm deftly harvests the apples.

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.