North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Betty Mayfield <bmayfield@opusnet.com>]

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>