Apple: Wickson

[redbird]

Wickson is a tiny heirloom apple, just small enough for me to put my hand around.

It's tart, juicy, a bit sweet, with a pleasant though not very strong flavor. There's no entry for this variety on orangepippin.com, so I asked them to create one (hoping they can find out something about its background), and sent a photo as requested.

This post is, again, based on eating one apple, as an after-dinner nibble. If I get hungry again before bedtime, I'm going to eat an Esopus Spitzenberg. It was a good week for apples at the market; there were at least three other heirloom varieties I hadn't heard of, so we got a bunch of the Esopus and a handful of the little Wickson apples, plus grapes and raspberries and tomatoes.

Comments

[bibliofile]

Yum.

Last week I had a Liberty and a Priscilla, both locally grown, bought at the Willy St Co-op. They tasted pretty much as described, good for eating.

Jae bought a bag of Wolf River apples, which were huge (maybe 5 apples in a 3-lb. bag). Their flavor wasn't very strong, but then Jae dehydrated them. Not crackalicious like dried Honeycrisp, but still edible.

[redbird]

Would you recommend Liberty apples? The farmer we got the Wicksons from on Wednesday also had those.

It turns out not to be a good year for the Esopus Spitzenbergs, so I may be going apple-shopping again today or tomorrow; almost certainly more Macouns, but one or two of something else new would be a good thing. (Zestar season is apparently over.)

[bibliofile]

I'm not sure if our apple preferences align, but I'd recommend at least trying the Liberty apples. We had a mini-tasting here, and all three of us liked them.

[bibliofile]

Oh, and I meant to ask -- do fall raspberries taste noticeably different from the summer ones? They certainly look the same.

[redbird]

They taste the same to me. The golden raspberries do taste different, although I'm told it's the same species, and I prefer the red.

On the other hand, there's almost that much difference between a Granny Smith apple and a Macintosh, and more difference between broccoli and cauliflower. Species isn't always a useful category at the consumer end, however much it can matter if you're growing the vegetables.