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I love apples, and am very excited to try this new one. However... it's tough to beat the humble Fuji, IMO. At peak freshness they are sweet, a little tart wi
by toddsiegel 7y ago
I love apples, and am very excited to try this new one.
However... it's tough to beat the humble Fuji, IMO.
At peak freshness they are sweet, a little tart with hints of honey, and last pretty long. I feel I can find decent Fujis into late winter, at my local grocery.
I was briefly enamored by the Honeycrisp, but they are not as consistently good as Fujis and almost twice the price.
This winter I discovered Jazz apples. They taste good, but more importantly they are often hard like rocks. I detest even the slightest bit a mealiness, and Jazz are a great late season apple. When the Fujis looked shabby, I'd pick up some Jazz.
Incidentally, this is why I'll never use a grocery delivery service. I love food, I love cooking and am choosey about what I eat. I actually like going to the store and looking over the fruit, and chatting up the person behind the meat counter, etc. It'd be a shame if this ever went away. Don't disrupt grocery distribution. Disrupt whatever incentives that took carrots and made them taste like cardboard, instead of the sweet carrots I remember from my childhood.
- mc32 7y agoMy one gripe with Fujis is if not at perfect point can taste “green”. Like a kind of really light sap taste.
- mikeash 7y agoI’ve become a recent convert to Envy. They seem more robust than Fuji and taste at least as good. With other varieties, I’d always go though a cycle where I liked them for a few weeks, then got a few gross ones and I’d give them up for a few weeks, and repeat. I haven’t had a gross Envy yet despite going for several months. The price is decent too!
- 6thaccount2 7y agoTo me, Envy is considerably better than Fuji.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- toddsiegel 7y agoThanks for the tip!
- dbg31415 7y agoCouldn't agree more about Envy... and that said, I was at an event where I got to sample a Cosmic Crisp apple and happy to say that it's pretty good. Not sure if it's better than Envy, but... it's very close. Currently, when shopping I'd go with Envy > Braeburn > Honeycrisp (seasonally, the go off so quickly) > Cameo > Gala... Courtland are somewhere in there. Also I live in Texas and all the apples here taste bad compared to Washington and New York and New England. Apples, bagels, and pizza... you just can't get good ones in Austin... and it sucks.
- ozzmotik 7y agoas someone who also lives in Austin i have certainly found this to be the case. the only places that one can get a reasonably decent apple seem to be either sprouts, central market, or whole foods, but the problem there is the whole "we're all natural and responsibly sourced" tax that raises the price significantly and makes it an untenable position to maintain for someone like me who tends to have a lot of trouble generating reliable income
- NikolaeVarius 7y agoHm I'm a Fuji/Gala guy and never even seen an envy. I usually like to try out different varieties when I get fruits though. I'll have to keep a look out
- cycrutchfield 7y ago>Don't disrupt grocery distribution. Disrupt whatever incentives that took carrots and made them taste like cardboard, instead of the sweet carrots I remember from my childhood. Isn't it precisely modern grocery distribution that gave us carrots that taste like cardboard and tomatoes that taste like water? These fruits and vegetables were bred for storage and transport, not for flavor.
- toddsiegel 7y agoHa. Yes. Fair point. I was not precise in my wording. I was specifically referring the "last mile" of distribution that gets it to my front door. I want to go to the store, and pore the produce. I don't think Amazon, or grocery-start-up-of-the-month is going to fix that by removing people further from their food. They seem to optimizing for convenience, not the problem I referred to.
- KC8ZKF 7y agoThis cries for blind taste tests.
- ravedave5 7y agoSomething's going on with honey crisp. For the first few years it was VERY consistent. Large crispy apples that were juicy. Now sometimes I go to the store and there are Honeycrisps half the size of what they used to be. I stick to the large ones and they seem better.
- zwily 7y agoAgreed, when I see a batch of large Honeycrisps I pick some up. I’m excited to try this new Apple, given its lineage.
- hosh 7y agoBack when I lived in Seattle, the Honeycrisp at the farmer's market down the street were ginormous. I had never seen them that size anywhere else in the country.
- MisterOctober 7y agoFor what it's worth, apple size is largely a function of how hard the grower 'thins' the developing crop. If they remove most of the fruitlets early on such that there is fewer than one apple left on the tree per blossom cluster, huge fruits can result. Thinning to one-per-cluster is kind of average, and those little "lunchbox" apples are grown 2+ per cluster.
- hosh 7y agoFair enough. Maybe that is why the smaller orchards and packers have larger fruits. From what I understand, not only do consumers not want larger apple sizes, because the honeycrisp bruise so easily, larger honeycrisps are a PITA to manage.
- hammock 7y agoYou sure you aren't looking at the organic ones? They are smaller.
- skybrian 7y agoBecause they're so popular and pricey, a lot of orchards started growing them, even in places where they don't do so well. So, quality has gone down.
- Dig1t 7y agoI like you
- gdubs 7y agoThe way nature works, there’s no guarantee our beloved varieties will be around forever; pests, blights, climate stress... The more variety the better! (Fuji’s are hard to beat :)
- BurningFrog 7y agoMaybe my tastebuds are unusual, but to me, Fujis are really flavorless. I kinda feel like I'm chewing water. I do like the consistency. My favorites are Envy, Opal, and Honeycrisp. Very excited about Cosmic Crisp!
- MisterOctober 7y agoFuji are among the best "keepers" in the industry -- they'll last a year in marketable condition if kept in proper controlled-atmosphere storage. Kind of like the modern Ben Davis, except they taste good!
- droithomme 7y ago> they'll last a year in marketable condition if kept in proper controlled-atmosphere storage Exactly so. And they will be, and they are. And then they end up tasting old and mealy. And people the last two seasons have been looking at the variety with disdain because of this. There is nothing so wonderful that it can not be utterly destroyed through optimization.
- rabboRubble 7y agoTry the Envy variety if you can find it. I'm a Fuji / Jazz fan as well, and the Envy hit the spot with me.