It’s fall! And along
with the glorious return of college football (and the NFL, I suppose), the
inevitably miserable end of the Mariners’ season (made only more miserable by
the what-might-have-been surge that simultaneously misses the playoffs
while ruining the chance for a good draft pick), the tragic end of summer, decorative
gourds, and the occasionally delayed start of the school year, fall means
apple season! And truly, there is no
finer fruit than the apple (including gourds, decorative or otherwise). (Yes, I'm aware of the difference between culinary and botanical fruits. I just don't care, because taking things overly literally and/or using the wrong or contextually inappropriate definitions is a prime wellspring of my humor.)
There’s a reason it was the fruit of the
forbidden tree, right? Right! Because they’re irresistible. I’m pretty sure that the serpent didn’t
really have to do much convincing other than bringing the apple to Eve and
letting her take a good look at it.
Of course, apple season wasn’t always such a source of
celebration, unless you like cider (and who could blame you for that?), as
explained (hopefully accurately, since I've done no fact checking of this whatsoever) here. (What?
Something good came out of Prohibition? Well, there's the 21st Amendment, but that argument reeks a bit of either a grandfather paradox or the trope where a tyrant sows the seeds of his own destruction.)
But fortunately for human civilization, we eventually wound up with some very good
apples, which are quite obviously my favorite fruit in the whole world.
Well, apples and grapes.
My two favorite fruits are apples and grapes. And pineapple.
My three favorite fruits are apples, grapes, and
pineapple. And watermelon.
Amongst my favorites are such diverse fruits as
apples, grapes, pineapple, watermelon, strawberries, satsumas…
Okay, I just like fruit.
Well, except for avocados. And
mangoes. And kiwis. So I like most fruit, but not all of it.
ANYWAYS.
In honor of apple season, I thought I’d make a list of my
favorite apples, because why not? Apples
are good, and Washington makes a lot of them.
So here we go:
1) Red delicious
For those of you who didn’t just close your browser in
disgust, let me explain.
For 49 weeks out of the year, red delicious apples are
absolutely at the very very bottom of my list. In fact, they’ve fallen off the bottom of the list into a compost heap made of terrible foods, UO merchandise, and MRAs. They’re incredibly mushy, and mealy, and
taste funny, and no one should ever want to even touch them, let alone put them in their mouth.. If I were stranded on a desert island with
the only thing to eat being a barrel of out-of-season red delicious apples, I suppose I
would probably eat them rather than starve to death. (And in fairness, they’d probably be better
than the potatoes Mark Watney wound up with (if you don’t already get this
reference, searching for it will probably be a spoiler). I probably just would have given up and
died then.) But it would be a very tough
decision.
However, for the other three weeks of the year, when red
delicious apples are truly in season, they are by far the most glorious of
man’s creations. They are crisp. So wonderfully, fantastically crisp. And juicy.
And delicious.
They are magical.
But only for those three weeks. God help anyone who eats them outside that
narrow window.
2) Anything in apple pie
I don’t think this really requires much explanation (pie!),
and it may be cheating a bit, but it’s my list and I’m doing it anyway. Because pie.
3) Granny Smith
I’m actually not a huge fan of things that are just sweet; I
prefer a little bitterness or sourness to go with it. Coke over Pepsi, Sour Patch kids over plain
gummi bears, Shocktarts (do they still make those?) over… well, SweetTarts still have some
tartness to them (obviously), but not as much as Shocktarts, so the analogy
still holds (barely). Whew!
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not exactly going to turn down
sweeter things if they’re on offer (because I’m not an idiot and I have a giant
sweet tooth), but if I’ve got a choice, I’ll likely go with something a little
less straight-out sweet.
This is why I like Granny Smith apples. All that delicious tartness is just
marvelous. (Yes, I also really like
those caramel-sour apple suckers.) Plus,
Granny Smith apples tend to be reliably crisp.
Which is good, because while a crisp apple is the delicacy of the
angels, a mealy, mushy apple is the devil’s food. (But not Devil's Food, because that stuff's GOOD.)
4) Gala
Gala and Fuji apples often seemed linked to me. They look fairly similar, they’re both quite
common, and they’re often stocked near either other. They also don’t taste too dissimilar. To be honest, there’s nothing particularly
special about either of them; they’re both perfectly adequate. They’re the “Meets Expectations” of apples. The J.C. Penney’s of apples. The Applebee’s of apples. They’re what you eat when you want an
aggressively average apple adventure.
However, in my experience, Galas are, on average, much
more likely to be crisp than Fujis are, and that gives them the nod. Because, and I cannot stress this enough,
mushy mealy apples are an abomination, and should be killed with fire.
5) Any of the
less-common varieties
Pink Lady, Fiesta, any other random new types of apples, I’m
looking at you here. Some of these are
pretty good (in fact, Pink Ladies are probably good and common enough to
deserve their own entry, but five is a nice round number), but they’re just not
around enough to really merit a slot. I
do appreciate that the apple industry is continuing to come up with new
varieties. Innovation! It’s where it’s at.
Anyone want to chime in and risk apple blasphemy by
disagreeing with this list or challenging the superlative fruit-ness of apples
in general? Or will you all do the right, just, proper and beneficial
thing and agree with me? Remember, silence is absolutely not consent in 99.9%
of all circumstances, but I’ll take it as such here!
