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Location: where you sip the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica
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I grew up around McIntosh apple orchards in western MA, and that's all we ate back then. I can't find them around here in northern CA ...... I'd like to have one again just for the sake of nostalgia. A nostalgic apple. Yeah.......
During the summer I complained about the apples, not sweet, and stale as if they had been in a warehouse for a year. They were southern hemisphere apples which should have been at their peak. OK, so now comes fall and winter and good old northern hemisphere apples from the US of A. Same thing, no sweetness. Maybe it's me but everything else tastes as it should.
Why is that surprising? Peak season for apples is September in Northern Hemisphere and March in Southern Hemisphere. Apples are stored in high carbon-dioxide chambers that maintain relative freshness for several months. They are obviously not fresh and you can't get fresh apples now.
I buy apples all the time. Gala, Fuji, Pink Lady, Honeycrisp, others. Taste fine from the market where I buy them--most are shipped in from Washington State.
I became an apple head when I quit smoking. Well, there was an interim love affair with Jolly Ranchers, but that didn't go well.
A supermarket here has Opal apples in as a special. These are great! Actually pretty hard to find....not the usual variety one sees.
...in general the thing I like least about apples is when they are mealy vs crisp and firm. I usually don't eat those stratight.... but chop them up and cook them with oatmeal, cheerios or cook them with sauerkraut (and I recall an apple/onion recipe that was interesting...from Holland).
Of the apples I think those tart green Granny Smiths are the ones that are usually the least mealy.
There used to be about a thousand different types of apples but now we only see a few different types in the markets. I'd guess they are selected for how well they ship and store more than how well they taste.
Where I live, I can easily choose from at least 50 different varieties. I live in apple growing country. I get my choice of at least 20 different grapes as well.
There still are hundreds of types of apples. Many are not grown in the US and are not native to us. Try a farmers market not a grocery store for variety.
And yes the apples being purchased now are old and were picked months ago. Apples are only picked once a year and are kept in controlled storage for a year. The controlled storage includes cool air, the proper humidity, and darkness. How do you think you get apples in May? Plenty of produce is like this.
If you're not finding apples sweet, I'd say you're either eating the wrong type of apple - all aren't designed for eating raw - or your tastebuds/brain are out of whack. No problem at all with sweet apples around here. Try some red delicious those are specially engineered to be sweet eating apples.
I have a fruit orchard that contains several varieties of apple. Believe me, OP is correct with the complaint that store apples aren't good.
Even common store varieties, you would not recognize as being the same variety if you compared one from the grocery store to one fresh picked at precisely the peak of quality, right off the tree.
My delicious Granny Smiths are not the same thing at all as the green picked, overly tart ones from the store. My Golden Delicious are full of flavor and crisp.
The apples from the store are bred to be bruise resistant. That means they have tough skin. They are picked early so they are hard and won't bruise. That means they never developed full flavor. They are bred to be red, which is the color that consumers want in an apple, but while being bred for the red color, the taste is neglected.
Plant breeders have discovered a sweeter apple gene, so there are varieties that are coming on the market that are sweeter. A sweet apple is not necessarily a flavorful apple. It's sugar, not taste.
During the summer I complained about the apples, not sweet, and stale as if they had been in a warehouse for a year. They were southern hemisphere apples which should have been at their peak. OK, so now comes fall and winter and good old northern hemisphere apples from the US of A. Same thing, no sweetness. Maybe it's me but everything else tastes as it should.
Buy a Honeycrisp. You won't buy any other kind after eating one of them.
I am so with you! They are never mushy, and they have that rich apple flavor that a misnamed Delicious can't match. I am not that fond of Honeycrisp -- the texture is to die for, but some of them taste like sawdust.
OP should take a whiff of the apples before buying them. If they don't smell like anything, they won't taste like anything either. But a really beautiful apple that has no smell will continue to ripen off the tree, if you keep it in the open or in a paper bag -- plastic keeps it from "breathing," and refrigeration keeps it from sweetening.
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