In Which We Yell About Apples

sure, grandma, let's get you to bed 🍂🍁

Morning, hunnybun!

It’s Peak Leaf Season in the Midwest right now. Around here, Peak 🍂🍁 Season means one thing: At any given time, on any sunny day, I’ll be cruising along, going 60 on the rural road that leads to the highway towards Minneapolis, and then I’ll suddenly need to SLAM on my brakes, narrowly avoiding a six-car pileup.

Every day. I can’t ever remember it’s going to happen. Just: “JESUSCHRIST!!!!” and then stopping three inches behind a Prius’s bumper.

And where did all these cars come from? Why are they all turning left in the middle of a sleepy country road?

Ahh, right. They’re going to the apple orchard.

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9 AM, 6 PM, it doesn’t matter what time of day you’re trying to leave town; you can’t do it quickly during Peak Leaf Season. That’s because the apple orchard just outside Northfield is unbearably quaint. It has a big red barn, and there’s a tractor parked out front, and you can pick your own apples and pose with your large-brim-hatted friends atop the hay bales. If you go inside the barn, there are giggling, red-visored teenagers dipping apples into caramel and making apple cider donuts and flirting with each other by untying each others' apron strings. There are shelves of jams and jellies and cases of pies and cheese curds and local maple syrup. There is a whole display devoted to pickled items. There’s even a refrigerated beef-stick case, which seems to be a kind of holding area for Dads, who are always standing in front of it, hands in their pockets, studying the various beef-stick flavor profiles with disturbing intensity.

The whole apple orchard operation is run by a fierce older lady who manages the cash register, opening and shutting the till with such ringing slams that the line forms about six feet away from the register, out of respect for an obvious apex apple predator. If you want to buy a (tiny!!) (the lid’s the size of a quarter!!!) jar of apple butter and you want to know how much it is, this lady is the one who looks you in the eye and says, “Four dollars,” in a flat voice, daring you to gasp or have something to say about the price.

It’s four dollars, sweetheart. You want to have a nice apple orchard day and buy a cute little jar with two tablespoons of apple butter in it that will then sit in your fridge, untouched, for the next eight months, or do you want to dicker about it and clog up the line? Will that be cash or credit?

You can buy lots of different kinds of apples at the apple orchard, all in white paper sacks with handles and all expensive, but they’re mostly local and heritage breeds (species? varieties?). If you’re looking for your favorite apple, it’s not happening, unless you’re me and your favorite apple is the McIntosh, which they do have, because it is a perfect apple.

Oh, you don’t agree with me? You think another apple is better?

Fight me.

Today and today only, we are doing a scientific Ranking of Apples, from worst to best. So seasonal!! So twee and gay!

Here is my formal ranking:

Red Delicious

Appalling.

How dare these exist. The Red Delicious apple is the worst apple in the world. Tasteless, mealy, and for some reason the apple that all children draw, this is the one apple you’ll find in a truck stop’s rarely-restocked “Healthy Choices” cooler when you’re on a road trip, miles from anywhere, and you haven’t seen a fresh item of produce in 13 days. Not crunchy, hard to bite, with flesh that browns instantly, the Red Delicious has no flavor and is barely even sweet.

This is dust in the mouth. This is regret. The Red Delicious is the six-month-old apple rattling around in the wire fruit basket at the Days Inn free breakfast buffet outside Bemidji, Minnesota. May its seeds wither and its progeny never know the feel of sun or the taste of rain. My hatred for this apple knows no limits, and could be mathematically written as infinity².

Granny Smith

Someone close to me [who wishes to remain unnamed, probably because they are embarrassed about their apple proclivities] had a sack of these on top of their fridge awhile back. When I said, “Whoa, that’s a lot of apples! What are you making?”, this person said Granny Smith apples were their favorite snacking apple, and that’s how I found out you can have a close, multiple-decades-long relationship with someone and never know who they really are.

Granny Smith apples are trash. Tart garbage. They are not for snacking. They are only for baking, which is the one thing they excel at. Rock-hard, painful to bite, and puckeringly sour, the Granny Smith smells far better than it tastes and is the first choice of apple for HGTV interior designers, who enjoy piling them in white ceramic bowls for a “pop of color” in the kitchen. And if you tell me that yes, you agree with all of this, but that a Granny Smith apple is quite delicious when sliced almost translucently thin and placed on a sandwich with a meltingly gooey brie, I challenge you to put an actually delicious apple on that same sandwich and see what you get. The brie is shouldering the entire load, I promise you.

Cortland

I used to have a coworker who grew up on a working farm. Anytime she encountered food she didn’t like – be it a “catered lunch” that turned out to be soggy turkey Subway sandwiches or a Tupperware of cookies someone had brought in that didn’t pass her personal muster – she would give it a withering look and mutter, “Pig feed.” Or “hog food.” Either one.

I loved her.

Cortlands are pig feed. They are low-quality food items, not for human enjoyment, never quite able to offer anything in the way of a sensorial blow in any direction. They are not sweet, and they’re not really tart, and while they are crisp to bite into, what they want is to be McIntosh apples, and a bitch could never. And the number of times I have purchased this apple, this IMPOSTER of a fruit, believing that it was my beloved McIntosh!!! Infuriating. Unforgiveable.

Golden Delicious

What do you picture when you hear the words “Golden Delicious?” Do you picture a glorious sunrise? Maybe some dewdrops winking off a fruit so tempting, so ripe, so irresistible that Eve herself was willing to risk it all?

I do. And then I taste a Golden Delicious apple, and I remember that many religions believe that Earth is Hell.

Maybe they’re onto something. Bland and mealy, this apple might as well not be here at all, and yet it is here, and has been here, haunting us like a boring apple ghost, for our entire lives. The Golden Delicious is the fruit equivalent of the moment your dentist suggests removing your (perfectly good) wisdom teeth: it feels pointless, and suspiciously like a scam.

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Fuji

Sometimes these are pretty good and sometime they’re terrible, like Red-Deliciously terrible, and you never know!! which one you’re about to crunch into. Fujis are cute, and they can be sweet and even juicy, but they’re also dull, and their skin feels strangely dry against my lips, and when you add in the fact that we also can’t trust them – that we can’t tell which of them are good on sight? Get out of here, we don’t need a fuckboy apple!!!

Jazz

These are whatever. I fell for the branding, going “Oooh, what’s this new apple?” at the grocery store when they first came out. They’re the JAZZ apple! And yes, they’re hard and juicy and they’re satisfying to bite into, crispily speaking, but otherwise? These apples are like what happens if you take me to an experimental jazz concert: I am going to spend the whole time wondering what everyone else is getting out of this.

Gala

Now we’re getting somewhere. Gala apples are fine. They are almost never bad. You can taste that they are appley, and they are not too dense and they are easy to bite and they are juicy and always available. Who has a problem with Gala apples? Nobody. That being said, they are the staunchly moderate, clean-living candidate with zero skeletons in their closet that we can’t make a single viral video for, and I’m gonna need more from them if they want my vote. Pick a side, Galas.

Pink Lady

FUCK yes. She’s pink. She’s pretty. She’s a sweet little tart and she’s going in my cart!!! Who cares if the Pink Lady apple is a bit too hard to crunch with comfort? Who cares if her flesh yellow-browns out a bit early for fruit salads? NOT ME. The Pink Lady is delicious, full of juice, great for baking, and she’s hard enough to withstand an entire day clonking around in my raggedy canvas shoulder tote without bruising. Tough and lovely, sweet but with brains, this is the high femme of apples in the gay apple hierarchy, and I’ll go for her again and again.

Cosmic Crisp

Have you fucking had this apple? It’s newish, I think; I just tried a Cosmic Crisp this year. My friend Rachel sliced one up while we were watching the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City at her house and then dipped a slice into fresh goat cheese. She handed it to me, and I put it in my mouth without looking (that’s what she said), and HELLO THIS APPLE IS INCREDIBLE. It’s gigantic, first of all, and it looks like a beautiful starry night, if the night sky was the preferred paint shade (blood red) of lesbian bars across the country, and it feels so nice to bite into. So crisp, and so sweet, and the flesh is so startlingly white that this is absolutely the apple that the wicked queen gave Snow White to snack on. This apple is worth falling into an enchanted coma for! That was me, laying back on the couch, moaning through a mouthful of Cosmic Crisp apple while Real Housewife Jen Shah was arrested on TV for fraud!!!

McIntosh

You know what? I know. I know that the McIntosh is a controversial choice for Greatest Apple of All Time. Some people don’t like its consistency. Some people think its skin is too tough.

Those people, my darling, are wrong. The McIntosh is a singular apple achievement. It is perfectly red and perfectly green, and it is naturally very shiny, and it gets even shinier if you rub it on your shirt like a farmhand in 1932. This apple gleams like a goddamn polished mirror, and it is the ideal size for a snack – not too big, not too small – and it’s not too dense, which means you can buy lots of them without getting upset while you’re watching them get rung up.

Sweet, zingingly tart, and excellent for apple crisp, these apples are pleasingly hollow-sounding when tapped, and they make delicious cider.

But nothing – NOTHING – compares to biting into one. The sound they make when bitten is crispy x 10000000, but also? McIntosh apples are effervescent. They fizz when you bite them, and that makes them the champagne of apples!! Long live the best apple on this rich, abundant paradise we call Earth!!

HOW ‘BOUT THEM APPLES, BB?