As we enter fall, fresh apples flood the market. Gone are the days of a handful of options at the grocery store; American orchards grow more than 2,500 varieties. More than 100 of those are commercially available. Forgotten varieties of the past are enjoying a renaissance, while new creations continue to arrive from the test orchards.
Meet the Experts
Dan Bussey has managed orchards with as many as 1,500 varieties of apples. He researched and wrote the seven-volume Illustrated History of Apples in the United States and Canada, which chronicled 16,350 varieties of apples documented in North America. He figures he’s encountered another couple thousand since.First, the Basics
Throwing Dice
“Every apple is a hybrid,” Griffith said. If planted, an apple’s seeds don’t produce a tree of the same variety. Instead, they make a completely random—and typically undesirable—new apple. To repeat a favorable apple, you need to graft its branch of origin to the rootstock of another tree, where it will continue to produce that particular apple. In fact, you can grow multiple varieties of apples on a single tree in this manner.While most apples we know by name are grown from the grafting process, breeding intentionally—pollinating from one particular apple tree to the blossoms of another—can be done but requires a lot of work. The University of Minnesota has one of the top apple breeding and genetics programs in the United States, with more than 20,000 experimental trees growing in orchards at any given time, but it typically takes more than 20 years to perfect an apple and get it to market. The university’s new varieties, from Honeycrisp to SugarBee, may appear both at orchards and your local stores.
Heirloom Versus Newcomers
Heirloom apples simply refer to “varieties that have been around a long time, but are not grown a lot commercially, or were even lost,” Griffith said. If you’re looking for these, orchards are your best bet.Supermarket varieties are aimed at keeping for a long time and surviving being shipped around the country; you can often find them year-round. Bussey bemoans some of these commercial varieties. Think of Red Delicious, which became a seller’s favorite for its appealing appearance and durability in shipping—but is often spurned for not living up to the second part of its name. On the other hand, some great heirloom apples would never get to the store in time. Even at the orchards, their time is limited. Bussey offers the Chenango Strawberry apple as an example.
“[It’s] a really good apple for about 10 days, and then it gets mealy and crappy,” he said.
But as any one of our experts will tell you, there’s a whole world of apples that shouldn’t be lost or forgotten. As a consumer, you can help save them.
“A consumer can help prove that there’s a market for some of these varieties that have fallen by the wayside or may be harder to grow,” Berens said. “[Buying heirlooms] incentivizes the farmers to grow them. I think that’s really valuable.”
If you can’t find their specific picks in your neck of the orchards, rest assured your local grower can recommend regional alternatives!
Apples to Seek Out
Best for Baking
Northern Spy“A tart apple, with some sweetness, that doesn’t mush down,” Griffith said. For baking, “I want something that is going to retain its tartness.” Discovered in 1800 in upstate New York, this apple has a thin green skin with red striping. The white flesh is crisp and juicy. The fruit ripens late in fall and keeps well into winter.
When asked to recommend a grocery variety, Griffith chose a Granny Smith for baking. A supermarket mainstay, this light-green apple is hard, crisp, and juicy. It originated in Australia in 1868 and is named for the woman who found it. This sour apple keeps its shape in pies and other baked goods.
“I love Pink Pearl apples,” Berens said, “which have this strawberry blush on the inside and the outside. They’re just gorgeous.” A Northern California breeder developed these as a seedling of Surprise, to which many pink-fleshed apples can trace their genetic heritage. A yellow-skinned apple with firm, tart or sweet-tart flesh, they are good for baking, providing that lovely color.
These are Berens’s “favorite apple-fritter apple, because they seem to hold their shape well, and they have a really perfumey, appley flavor,” she said, describing them as less tart. The King originated in New Jersey but took its name from a county in New York around 1804. The skin is yellow-green with a lot of red striping. They keep well.
Best for Snacking
HoneycrispGriffith calls this “the first rock star” apple. While it’s good for fresh eating, “it is extremely princessy to grow!” she said. The crunchy, juicy white-fleshed apple was developed by the University of Minnesota in the 1960s and first sold in stores in 1997. The trademark has run out, and it’s become widely available and wildly popular.
While Red Delicious is often considered a bland apple bred to be pretty and shippable, it’s actually one of the parents, along with Ralls Janet, of the very popular Japanese Fuji apple. First produced in the 1930s, it took almost 30 years to get it to market. The creamy white flesh is crisp and juicy and pleasantly sweet like typical apple juice, while the skin is less perfectly red than its oft-maligned parent.
Discovered in Minnesota in the early 1990s, this rising star is a cross between Honeycrisp and an unknown apple tree, presumably a chance bee bringing the two together. This is a “club” apple, meaning it’s owned by a breeder or corporation and growers must pay to grow and market it. Growing rights to it were given to growers in North Central Washington. Known as BF-51 to the grower who discovered it, SugarBee “is a better quality Honeycrisp,” said Bussey, who currently considers it his favorite modern variety. It’s big, red, sweet, and crunchy, even more so than the Honeycrisp.
Grown from seed around 1700 by Thomas Ashmead in Gloucester, UK, this is a medium-sized, golden apple with crisp flesh and a good balance of sweet and acidity. The skin shows some russeting. Griffith’s favorite fresh-eating apple, it’s also good for cider.
Allegedly the favorite of Thomas Jefferson who grew them at Monticello, this aromatic and complex apple originated in Esopus, Hudson, New York. Griffith likes it for fresh eating for their sweet-tart and “complex flavor and buttery flesh.” It looks like a Cosmic Crisp—another modern release—“because it has little white stars for lenticels”—small, lens-shaped openings on the surface of apples that allow for the exchange of gasses and water.
Griffith planted these just six years ago and calls them “exceptional,” characterizing the flavor of the fine flesh as a “sweet-tart combo with nuttiness.” They originated in France and grow medium-sized with a yellowish-green skin and some russeting.
Like the Orleans, this variety came from France, but it’s more gold-green with a bit of russeting. “It’s been around for a very long time and its DNA is in Honeycrisp, it’s in Northern Spy, it’s in a number of those kinds of apples that have some significance, horticulturally speaking,” Bussey said.
First grown around 1830 in the UK by horticulturist Richard Cox, this now rare variety’s DNA can be found in myriad descendant varieties. The fruit is medium-sized, orangish-red with yellow-white, aromatic flesh, good crunch, a lot of juice, and a touch of tartness. Berens likes the “slightly rougher skin” and “beautiful flavor,” she said. “[Pippin apples] kind of sound like a rattle; the seeds shake inside.”
Some say this small, russeted apple has a hint of the unrelated namesake fruit to its flavor, but it may be that the name relates to its skin, a light-yellowish pineapple color. This honey-sweet, nutty dessert apple first appeared in England in the 1780s. Years later, it was marketed under its current name by John Williams of Pitmaston House in Worcestershire.
Golden Russets, with their muted rough golden skin, have a nice tartness and crunch early in the season, making them great for eating. But they also take on a delightful sweetness over time, though the flesh grows softer. “I have to broadly cast the nets saying [I recommend] any of the russet apples if you can find them,” Bussey said. “Roxbury Russet, Golden Russet, whatever ones people can come across.”
Bussey’s favorite apple, this is an English dessert russet. “It’s such a good apple, and you barely see it anywhere.” Featuring a nice flushing red skin, the apple has the aromatic character of the great Victorian dessert apples. It will keep and develop more flavor well into the new year, some even claim as late as spring.
A Note on the Ugly Apple
Typically, you don’t eat rotten apples, but “generally any kind of rot can be cut off if small,” Griffith said. Blemishes on the skin are “surface fungi that can just be wiped off,” such as sooty blotch and fly speck, to name a couple.Russeting is a discoloration, and rough patches (think of russet potato skin) on an apple’s skin that don’t harm the taste or edibility. In fact, some varieties, such as the delicious Golden Russet, are uniformly russeted by design. According to Bussey, the Knobbed Russet has been compared to “a shrunken head.” Despite its arguably unattractive appearance, it’s quite flavorful and even once won a blind-tasting competition he hosted.
