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nafex - Re: [NAFEX] Apple tastes, was Cameo Apple

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  • From: Betty Mayfield <bmayfield@opusnet.com>
  • To: North American Fruit Explorers <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [NAFEX] Apple tastes, was Cameo Apple
  • Date: Sat, 01 Nov 2008 14:41:30 -0700

To the list,

In answer to these two advocates (below) of rating crispness in apples above flavor, I respectfully disagree. Does that mean they are wrong? No, it just means that different people have different opinions.

To me, the aromatic quality is the most important thing about an apple. While I have a good friend who says crispness is the only thing, for me, the best apple is my own Gravenstein when allowed to become fully ripe. A sack of them on the kitchen table overnight will perfume the whole house. And, yes, I have found Cameo and Honeycrisp bland.

And as for the suggestion that apples be characterized as "crisp or yielding," a few years ago I had the opportunity to visit an apple packing warehouse in Yakima, Washington. A conveyor belt lifted the apples up and sorted them by color as ordered by the big retail outlets. For instance, if Safeway wanted 85 percent red, then a detector would shunt all the apples with that percentage to one bin and the ones with higher or lower red percentages to other bins. Flavor or crispness were not even considered - just color.

So it seems as if we just have to keep sampling all the apples that come along to find our own preferences.

Betty Mayfield
Northwest Oregon

At 05:52 AM 11/1/2008, Alan Haigh wrote:

Not long ago someone defined the Cameo apple as "bland" on a posting. I just sampled my first apples from this cultivar and would like to offer a different opinion. Cameo has been a stand-out in my nursery in terms of being a strong grower with very nice structure and I was pleased to discover that it's apples are very attractive and have a very good texture- crunchy and dense with a relatively thin skin. They are also quite juicy with a pleasing acid-sugar balance which along with it's ability to hold its texture when cooked make it a superior culinary apple as well. They were amongst the least insect scarred apples in my barely sprayed nursery.

I think that the definition of "bland" may have come from the Cameo's relative lack of aromatics- a complaint often made of Honeycrisp. I think it would be ungenerous to reject this otherwise stellar cultivar for a single shortcoming- no cultivar is perfect. <snip>


And Mark Angermayer continued:

<snip> One thing I've discovered is that the most important apple characteristic for me is snap. Why is this a revelation? Because snap doesn't seem to be given much weight in apple descriptions. Apples are typically characterized as sweet, balanced, or tart. For my part, I think apples should be characterized mainly as crisp or yielding. <snip>




  • Re: [NAFEX] Apple tastes, was Cameo Apple, Betty Mayfield, 11/01/2008

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