Apple: Honeycrisp

[redbird]

I bought two locally grown honeycrisp apples at the farmers market on Monday, and just ate one.

I liked it: large, sweet, juicy, and yes crisp, with a good though not intense apple flavor. It's a good eating apple, though I suspect it wouldn't be great for baking. I'm a little skeptical about it as a cider apple; I've seen "100% Honeycrisp" labels on half gallons of apple cider, here as well as in Washington.

I'd had a Washington-grown Honeycrisp apple when we were living in Bellevue and been disappointed. That was when I was trying varieties I hadn't tasted here in the Northeast, some (like Pacific Rose) that I hadn't heard of until I moved to Washington, before I realized that Washington apples are all bland, because of either the soil, the climate, or both.

(This post is mostly for my own reference. It may also help you calibrate my apple reviews, since a lot of people have tried Honeycrisps.)

Comments

[kate_schaefer]

I love Honeycrisps grown in Washington. Then again, we buy our Honeycrisps from just one farm, Tonnemaker, and we know that their farm is at a slightly higher elevation from other farms in the area, which makes a difference to the dates their produce is available and probably makes a difference to the flavor of their produce as well. I assume their trees get a bit colder in the winter and not quite as appallingly hot in the summer. Knowing that much about the source of any food is quite a privilege.

In my Ohio and east coast youth, the only apples I ever had were Red Delicious, the world's most boring and omnipresent apple. I don't know when the apple variety revival movement started; I didn't notice it until some time in the eighties or early nineties.

[mindstalk]

In the 80s I was raised on mostly Granny Smith, with occasional Macintosh or Northern Spy. Red Delicious is inedible. I tried one last year from a farmers market, touted as "grown here in New England! Actually good!" It was not.

[redbird]

The best things I have heard in favor of Red Delicious are that it's a little better when freshest—which it may be, but it's still not good—and that the modern variety called "Red Delicious" is inferior to what was originally sold under that name, decades ago. That latter may be true, but I can think of better things to do with a time machine, even if I was somehow limited to agricultural/horticultural uses and couldn't collect now-extinct species of bird or lost works of classical literature, or record Beethoven playing the piano. (That's the no-paradoxes-please science fiction version that doesn't allow for distributing smallpox and measles vaccines in North American before the European invasions, or changing the results of the 2016 election, only collecting seeds that didn't germinate, photographing a book, or the like.)