Apple Wedges: notes on the Sliced Apple Revolution

 Apple Wedges ver 13f

- Fall 2018 – Spring 2019 - Fall 2019 - Summer 2022
- notes by Hugh Tayler. Thanks to Joan Tayler for editing.

 Freshness Tips -
    Feel for cold and firmness
    Avoid sticky wax and wrinkled skin.
    Look for green on the stem.

Our Short List -
First of the season: Ginger Gold or Sunrise
Classic applesauce and eating apple: Spartan
Surprisingly tart and good: Golden Delicious
Long keeping tart apple: Pink Lady
A better Gala than Gala: Ambrosia
Safe bet: Fuji
Best new varieties worth trying: Salish for flavour, Nicola for crisp, Lady Alice for different.
Visiting Ontario: Empire

Fussy About Apples

I grew up in the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia and ate apples fresh off the tree, so I know what a good one should taste like. If you are also interested in apples, I recommend the local Davison Orchards website and also the obsessively detailed "Orange Pippin" site. New for 2022: I would also add Mary Jane Duford's "When to Pick Apples" at homefortheharvest.com.

Two Apple Secrets

Secret #1: You and your family will enjoy more apples if you don't have to consume a whole big apple all at once. When I feel like a snack, I like to cut an apple in half, clean out the core, and cut the apple into wedges. I sometimes precut the apple halves so that the wedges stay together, but are easily broken off. I store the remaining halves or wedges in a sealed container in the fridge for a day or two.  Much better nutritionally than juice and just as convenient. Like carrot sticks, they are one quick option to hand to a hungry kid while you prepare the rest of the snack or meal.

Cutting and coring apples is easier with a good small knife. I used to carry folding knives when I was travelling or at work, but I now prefer the 4 inch Asian or European fruit knives that come with a matching guard. They are easier to wash than folders. In the kitchen I use a cheap but good 3.5 inch stamped and ground paring knife from Portugal sold under Loblaw's house brand. It works just as well as the $10 Wenger or Victorinox knives. These simple knives with moulded plastic handles are the equal of forged knives that cost ten or twenty times as much. They are also much better than the super-cheapies. Don't get the serrated ones for apples: they are better suited to cutting tomatos or meat or limes, depending on the design. My wife prefers a shorter 3 inch paring knife with a drop point for coring apples. And she has a small plastic cutting board, just the right size to safely cut apples and serve them as a snack.  Small cutting boards are also easy to rinse quickly or put in a dishwasher.

Secret #2: I tested almost a dozen kinds of apples this fall and one fact stands out: A fresh apple from an acceptable variety always beats a tastier variety that has been sitting for days in a warm display. Four years later, I have found no exceptions to this rule. So how do you find the freshest?

Finding Fresh

Freshness Tip #1:  Look for apples that are kept cold. When you buy from a display, feel for the cold ones that have just been put out that morning.

Apples get soft and lose flavour when they sit around at room temperature, that's why fruit and vegetable vendors at a public market roll their display into the cooler at night.  Fruit bowls are meant to ripen pears and bananas and avocados and tomatoes, not apples. Keep apples in the fridge, in the crisper container so they don't dry out.  See Tuttle Orchard's website for more storage tips: https://indianapolisorchard.com/bowl-fridge-best-store-apples/

So look for cold and firm. Be polite about it, but see if you can take cold apples right out of the box when the produce person is restocking.

Freshness Tip #2: In late summer and through the fall, look for apples that are in season, apples that have just been harvested. Freshly picked local apples have a faintly dusty "bloom" on their natural wax coating. Farm fresh apples will not have been sorted by size, or washed, or coated with edible wax and won't have fruit stickers. You can get great deals on fresh apples if you can find a grocer that gets irregular fruit from a grower, the odd size apples that don't qualify for commercial packing.

The earliest apples start in July and the last ones get harvested in early December in North America. So from July through into November you can see last year's apples sitting beside this year's apples. To add to the confusion, we can also get apples shipped from New Zealand or even Chile.  Duford's list (see above) and my own notes are a starting point if you don't know your local apple cycle. You could also have a chat with your local produce person when they are not too busy.

Fresh apples are finished by the winter solstice. Unless they have been held in cold storage or controlled atmosphere storage, they will be getting a little soft and mealy, good for cooking but no longer perfect for eating fresh.

Freshness Tip #3: Cold storage can take some late varieties through to March, but year-round apples are kept in Controlled Atmosphere storage, a technology that became common back in the 1960's. CA reduces the oxygen level to slow the natural respiration of the product.  Nothing toxic is done to the fruit and there is no change in taste. I had an Ambrosia just of out of CA in June, over half a year after it was harvested, and it was simply excellent. The produce wholesaler who was giving away samples told me the secret: you have only about two weeks of good quality after apples are removed from CA and transferred to ordinary cold storage in trucks and warehouses.

So: look for apples that have not been out of CA too long.   After apples sit around a while, the natural surface gets dull.  You can feel a faint stickiness to the surface wax when an apple is getting old. Once the surface wax starts to change texture, you will probably detect a change in taste, usually a generic "fruit in storage" flavour that you may also notice in imported fruit like Asian pears.

By the time the wax feels really sticky, the fruit will start to show tiny wrinkles. The texture will change, too, becoming less crisp, more "mealy", sometimes spongy.  

But some apples rarely get sticky or wrinkly. One of my favourite commercial apples is the Pink Lady, a trademarked version of Cripp's Pink that get premium processing and waxing. They are harvested late, and they have a crisp texture and a sweet tart flavour.  But even Pink Ladies can't sit around forever. They might seem hard, but at some point even they will suffer an unpleasant loss of flavour and the flesh may show a subtle shift toward a transparent grey or brown.

With hard shiny apples like Pink Ladies, look at the stem. An apple fresh out of storage will have a mostly green and still flexible stem.  As they sit around, the stem dries out, shrinks and turns hard and brown, and eventually the tip of the stem turns from green to brown to grey. Really: grey.

You will see changes at the blossom end of the apple too, with the little calyx thingies turning crisp and brown and grey. That's where you have to look if the batch of apples has had their stems clipped. Yes, this is a thing.

So which is the more important guide to loss of quality: brown stem or sticky wax? Most of the time they go together, but in 2022 July, I found a batch of Ambrosias with nice green stems but with some stickiness to the wax. So I bought one. I knew with the first cut that it has started to go soft and mealy. I ate one unappealing slice and Joan used the rest to make muffins.
 
Freshness Tip #4: Consider the display as a whole. Are most of the apples bruised because they were not handled properly by staff or because they have been pawed through by careless shoppers while they sat out in a warm display for days? Do they feel waxy, or have brown stems? Have their skins had a color shift toward orange/brown? Do they smell musty? You still might find a few presentable apples, but unless those apples feel cold because they have just been put out, don't buy more than a small quantity to test. Statistically, they are unlikely to be much different from the rest of the bin.  


The Taste Lab:

There are at least a dozen varieties of apple commonly sold in Vancouver, so starting in 2018 we did a series of direct taste comparisons.

Discovery #1: People have consistently different opinions about what an apple should taste like. I can eat pears but never understood why other members of my family really like them. They are also real fans of local fresh "apple pears", which are crisper than a regular pear, and less fussy, since they ripen on the tree and keep better once ripe, more like an apple. Pear lovers tend to like aromatic apples, not tart ones.

Discovery #2: Apples are that are not ripe when picked will always be low on sugar and flavour and may even taste sour and starchy.  Fruits like cherries and peaches develop more flavour after picking, but not apples. My old elementary school would sell you an apple at recess time for 3 cents. They were small kid size McIntoshes, but many lacked any real flavour. They were picked too early, that's why they were small and sour. Just the other day we got a HoneyCrisp that had the same disappointing flavour profile. Unripe apples are high starch, high acid, low sugar and low flavour,  but the most dependable indicator of ripeness is the seeds. They are white when they first form, but turn dark brown when the apple is ripe.

The Penn State Extension website says "... background color, starch content, and firmness are the most important factors ..."  "They are correlated to some extent with sugar content, acidity, flavor, aroma, texture, IEC (internal ethylene content), and potential storage life." Read more at https://extension.psu.edu/fruit-harvest-determining-apple-fruit-maturity .  

The Contenders:

The first apples of the season are Transparent, appearing as fresh local apples as early as July 12. They are a pale green apple that tastes sour. They rarely taste completely ripe, even when they are turning soft. And they turn soft fast. A good apple for those who are desperate to fight scurvy, especially when sliced and fried in bacon grease. Their best use is combined in a pie with blackberries, which come into season at the same time. I've been told that they can also be used as a source of pectin for making jams and jellies from soft fruits.

If you can wait a week or two after the Transparents show up, you may find Ginger Gold, which I consider a soft but more flavorful early apple.

Davison Orchards recommends Sunrise as an early apple for a good reason: the taste is exceptional. You can stop buying last year's Pink Ladies!  But you need to get Sunrise apples fresh and eat them soon. They go soft and mealy within a couple of weeks, even when kept in the fridge.

I saw the first early season Galas appear just after the Sunrises showed up, so I tried a couple. They had been picked a little too early so they had not developed full sweetness and flavour.  They did have a nice fresh taste, but to me they were as unexciting as late season Galas.

The first Golden (Yellow) Delicious were right next to the Galas, so I tried them. Again, they were picked early and did not have full sweetness and flavour. Still, they were fresh and enjoyable if you like tart apples. The Golden Delicious is nothing like the boring Red Delicious. When ripe, it has full, tart flavour that is widely liked. If stored properly, they can be pretty good right through until next spring. They are on the soft side, a defect remedied by crossing them with the Lady Williams from Australia to get the crunchy, tart, Cripp's Pink, better know as the Pink Lady.

When the season gets rolling, the McIntosh apples appear. Nothing beats the full, complex, flavour of a good ripe McIntosh. Macs are unmatched for juice and cider, but they have tender flesh that gets soft and bruised when they sit for days in a big display. Imperfect Macs are still a good deal when they go on sale. We use them to make Macinsauce, a fast and tasty desert.
MacInsauce: Get big Macs. Cut them in half, and take out the core. Don't bother to peel them. Put them in the microwave in a covered bowl, skin side up. If you forget the cover, you will be cleaning bits of apple out of the microwave when the Macs explode. Run the microwave for a couple of minutes at least, depending on how many you are cooking. You will hear them start to cook and you know they are done when the apples have turned to applesauce and you can just lift the skins out of the bowl. If you want more texture, don't cook them quite as long and use a spoon to scoop them out of the skin. You can add raisins when you cook them, or add frozen fruit to cool the sauce down so you can serve it right away. Macinsauce is usually sweet enough to serve with plain yogurt. You might not need additional sweetener.

Can't find Macs? The Spartan is another classic apple that tastes almost as good as a Mac, but keeps a little better as a fresh eating apple. It too, has tender flesh and a tough skin, so if they start to get a bit old they are also good candidates for quick microwave applesauce.

The real classic from my childhood is the hilariously misnamed Red Delicious. If you compare them to other fresh in-season apples, they are relatively flavourless. But sometimes in late winter, when all the other apples on display have been sitting around getting waxy and wrinkled, you might find Red Delicious still cold and just out of CA storage. If they are the freshest apple on the shelf, they are your best bet.

Some people consider my favourite apples just too sour, preferring the bland and sugary flavours of fruit like the Asian pear or the lychee. The locally popular Gala is a good apple for those people. It has a pleasant forgettable taste when fresh. A victim of its own popularity, it often sits in huge warm supermarket displays.

I can hardly tell a Gala from an Ambrosia, but my son Max can distinguish the two and prefers the more complex, almost creamy, flavours of the Ambrosia. The produce wholesaler agrees: they sell twice as many Ambrosias as Galas.

The third candidate in this series of Vancouver favourites is the HoneyCrisp, which really is extra juicy and extra sweet.

Jonagold was once a popular apple around here, I just can't seem to remember the taste.

My cousin Jack, who worked in the tree fruit industry for years, said that he considers the Fuji the best apple, possibly because they store and ship so well. Indeed, when Joan used to serve breakfast to schoolkids, the Fuji was her default apple. Impressively big (and therefore easy to section into pieces for kids), crisp, and with a good flavour balance, they were a commercial favourite for export.  According to Jack, they would be placed on display in Japanese households, the way the Dutch used to show off pineapples.

The Aurora Golden Gala is a new apple that is yellow, not yellow-green. It is described as juicy and crisp and aromatic. My test apple was a little over-the-hill and quite unremarkable, but a fresh one might be worth testing against Honeycrisp and Ambrosia.

The Winter Banana is another yellow apple that looks like the Golden Gala, but has probably now vanished. It was supposed to be a good keeper back before CA storage was developed, but the apples were inevitably sad after sitting around for months. In hindsight, they would have been best cooked, a good use for any over-mature apples found lurking under the extra carrots in the basement fridge.

The Hidden Rose is a visual novelty apple with a green skin and bright pink flesh. The two we tried were low on sugar and truly acidic, just too sour for my taste, and not flavourful enough for my wife Joan.

The Nicola is new apple, pleasant, with a distinctive crispy, almost fibrous, flesh that hints at the texture of an apple pear.

Salish is another newcomer, definitely worth trying. Nice texture, nicely balanced flavour.  Not too sweet and bland, just a bit tart.  Like a Spartan, but crisper. Unsurprisingly, I prefer Salish over Nicola, while Max prefers Nicola over Salish. According to Max and Joan, a Salish has an odd hint of some flavour like cinnamon or maybe marzipan that reminds them of apple pie.

In 2018 someone left two mystery apples on the Free Table. They reminded me of Pink Ladies, but smaller and with a more complex flavour. They were deep red like a Salish, crisp like a Salish, but with a pink blush to the flesh and more flavour.  The taste was outstanding, the best apples we ate that year, but we never identified them.

We continued our apple testing late in the 2018 season when we visited California. Again, the Fuji's were predictable, holding up well in a cool supermarket environment. The Braeburnes we got had a taste shift from being stored too long, so we cooked them and went on to try two unfamiliar varieties.

 "Jazz" is the marketing name for Scifresh, a cross between Royal Gala and Braeburn. Our late season examples were nothing special, but promising enough that we will try again if I can find them in season or fresh out of CA storage. 2020 February: found some Jazz in decent shape. They seem to have tiny bit of tartness and a unique aromatic flavour. Interesting, worth trying fresh picked.

"Rave" is the marketing name for MN55, a cross between Honeycrisp and MonArk, an early ripener from Arkansas. Stemilt has the rights to this apple for North America so it is widely distributed commercially. It was still decently crisp, tart, and sweet late in the season, so it might be exceptional as an early apple. I plan to track some down for further testing in August when they first appear.

Normally, I wouldn’t bother with a Granny Smith. Maybe it is just me, but they seem tart without a lot of flavour.  They might just be the best storing and shipping apple: hard and crisp, with a tough skin. They hold their shape well in a pie, and by January, they compare pretty well to the other apples. You might still find some that are decent even after the last good Pink Ladies have disappeared. 2020 September:  I tested a couple of just-picked Granny Smiths, but they had been harvested too early and tasted sour and low on sugar.

Year-Round Apples -

In January 2019, some of the locally-grown Pink Ladies are starting to look pretty sad. This demonstrates that Pink Lady’s year-round tastiness depends on storage technology. But we got lucky and found a deal on Loblaw's house brand organic Pink Ladies. They were excellent: picked ripe enough to be sweet, and stored and shipped properly to keep them crisp. And proper storage is actually part of the commercial standard if the apple is to bear the Pink Lady trademark. That's why if you choose carefully, you can still find good Pink Ladies in early May. But in May you can also find something unusual: Pink Ladies that seem firm but have started to change color and flavour. They have a sort of pale grey translucent flesh and the taste is quite flat. I have no idea what storage problem causes this.

But good storage cannot create flavor where there is none. I found some Pacific Rose, fresh out of storage, and still crisp and very juicy. But as far as I can tell, the Pacific Rose is an apple for people who don’t like apples very much. It has a kind pleasant generic fruit/vegetable flavour that makes you want to chop it up and put it in a fruit or vegetable salad with something more interesting. If you like Honey Crisp, I would try a direct comparison of the two.

There is the technical question of how far Controlled Atmosphere storage can hold apples. In late June I accidentally bought a bag of Fujis (instead of Pink ladies) because they seemed to be still cool from storage and solid to the touch. I was disappointed that the taste was not as good as a fresh Fuji, but the apples had not gone soft and mealy. They did show a quicker tendency to discolor when cut, but overall they were quite acceptable.

I followed up the Fujis in early July with a few promising Pink Ladies. After seven months in CA storage they were still surprisingly tasty, surprisingly crisp, and much sweeter than the early Transparents sitting beside them at the display.

Updates:

2019 Fall -  By the middle of August we saw some early apples, Sunrise for example, that are much tastier than Transparents. And in early September you may see Pink Ladies that look okay, but don't be fooled. I bought a few and one of them had a translucent grey cast when cut and the others had flavour loss, clearly last season's apples. I should have looked more closely at the stems.

This year in October I got a few fresh Braeburns. They were tart and tasty enough, but without a lot of complex flavour. Next year I will try a comparison with the similar Granny Smith.

I tried a couple of fresh Macs that were okay but not the best ever. This year the Spartans I tried seemed to have more flavour than the Macs.

 2019 California again: Small greengrocers love to put apples out in big customer-attracting displays where they get warm. Even if it is October, when there should be a good selection of this season's apples, you need to be lucky to catch fresh ones coming in.  Your odds are a little better in heavily air conditioned big supermarkets that store apples in a cooler until they put them on display.

2019 December:
I found a few Lady Alice from Rainier Fruit sitting out in a warm display at a superstore. The surface wax was the teeniest bit sticky, indicating that they had been on display too long. But I bought one anyway, even though I knew it would be going slightly soft. Really interesting: sweet and with some kind of almond or marzipan or other distinctive flavor. Maybe not for everyone, but definitely worth trying if you can find them fresh.

2022 May: We visited Ontario and my daughter Sophie introduced me to Empire, a cross between McIntosh and Red Delicious. We got a bag that seemed fresh from CA storage and they were still good a week later. Good taste and texture, definitely worth trying again.


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Appendix A: The Future of Sliced Apples

Alfred Russel Wallace gave his name to the fictional Wallace's Law, which states that if your good idea is actually good, someone else will think of it too. In his case, the other guy was the far better known Charles Darwin. Wallace's Law therefore says that I am not the only person to promote the idea that people will eat more apples if they are washed, sliced and ready to eat. I just didn't realize that Neal Carter wants to be the Charles Darwin of sliced apples.

My wife Joan used to run a breakfast program for school kids where she served fresh sliced fruit. She's the one who taught me the fastest way to make apple slices. Place the washed apple its on blossom end. Use a big kitchen knife and make four slices straight down, just clearing the core. The cutting pattern looks like a  tic tac toe game. Put the pieces on a serving plate, but only slice enough apples for that meal. They are so fast to cut that you can always do more if you run out. With this cutting system, there is a little more waste around the core than if you slice and hand core like I usually do, but there is far less overall food waste than serving whole apples to a roomful of kids.

The food industry understands this and that's why you see shelves full of ready-to-serve packaged salads, carrots, and precut fruit. But there's a problem with apples. When they are cut or bruised a browning action starts. You can dip the slices in antioxidant, but that just creates expense and changes the flavour.

Agricultural engineer Neal Carter set out to solve the browning problem in apples and create his own patented and trademarked varieties. This simple goal turned out to far tougher technically and politically than just breeding a new variety of apple the traditional way. Much tougher. Nina Shapiro of Seattle Weekly did an excellent detailed article on Carter,  Okanagan Specialty Fruits, and the Arctic Apple technology back in 2013. Really interesting.

OSF (Okanagan Specialty Fruits) is counting on marketing and public acceptance to someday take their Arctic apple brands into the big leagues. OSF is now owned by Third Security LLC of Radford, Virginia, along with their sister biotech companies Oxitech and Eleszto Genetika. If you have agrifood needs that require genetic technology, OSF has lab services ready to help you.

I also listened to Carter on CBC a few years ago. I assumed that he was just a public-spirited scientist who simply wanted less food waste and better nutrition for a hungry planet, a bit like Norman Borlaug. But Carter launched into a full-on defence of genetic modification technology. He made the kind of blanket statements that just infuriate GMO opponents and did little to inform skeptics who want to consider each GM product on its own merits.

 Health Canada gave its okay to GS784 (Arctic Granny) and GD743 (Arctic Golden) years ago and Google does not deliver any reports of problems. I would now like to try them, but I don't see any Arctic branded apples where I shop.  Amazon Fresh lists their Golden Fresh Apple Slices as "Currently unavailable."  In fact, the orchards growing them were kept quiet at first and even last fall the orchard photo of bins of the new Arctic Fuji had no identifying geographic features.  

We have a friend who has met Neal Carter, so maybe tracking down a few samples will not be that hard. I'm sure thousands of people are already eating Arctic apple slices and maybe they just don't know it. But more likely, they do know it.  

Although there are over two hundred available apple varieties, some of the most popular are trademarked or patented: Ambrosia, Gala, Envy, Jazz, Pink Lady, Honeycrisp and so on. These mega-selling apples are not just grown: they are marketed and promoted. So OSF is gambling that they can promote their Arctic-modified sliced apples into a business segment that could be worth billions. Billions with a B. People consume about 80 million tons of apples globally and apple slices could be a big fraction of that number.

But you don't have to wait to participate in the Sliced Apple Revolution. A three dollar paring knife, a two dollar cutting board, and any washable container with a lid will put sliced apples in your fridge. Apples that don't generate more single-use plastic packaging.

 And you don't need DNA sequencing to find fresh apples. Just remember:
    Feel for cold and firmness
    Avoid sticky wax and wrinkled skin.
    Look for some green on the stem.

And listen to your produce person. They know what is fresh and if you ask politely, most will tell you.

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