The Awful Reign of the Red Delicious (2014) | Hacker News Reader

The Awful Reign of the Red Delicious (2014)

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I prefer Granny Smith myself:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granny_Smith

Generally anything that's not-soft.

One of the newest varieties is Cosmic Crisp:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Crisp

* https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50619281

A whole bunch have come out recently it seems:

* https://newengland.com/today/food/the-best-new-apple-varieti...

* https://www.10best.com/interests/food-culture/types-of-apple...

My wife entered me into a contest to get cosmic Crisp merchandise. They sent me a shirt, dish towel, and a few apples. I was already a rabid fan of the apple. It is tart, sweet, juicy, doesn't brown even after 24 hours of being cut, and is firm enough for baking without being too hard. It is like the Honey Crisp, but stores better and has more flavor IMO. All hail the Cosmic Crisp.

Seriously though. The Red Delicious is disgusting. When I bought my apple trees I asked the nursery employee if anyone ever buys the red delicious trees. Apparently some do, so perhaps those of us that hate the red delicious do so with a passion, while most are just indifferent.

Does anyone know why some of these apples don’t brown? They have obviously been bred that way, but how can they not oxidize?

No idea. My completely uneducated guess that probably makes no sense is that they have thicker cell walls (or whatever they're called for plants)?

Food is very rooted in memories and childhood. A lot of people who ate Red Delicious as children will feel that same sense of safety and warmth that they did when they ate them as kids. Proust’s Madeleine and all that.

I know someone who likes Red Delicious and buys them specifically, over other choices, and not on price.

I would be wary of such an individual :)

My favorite apples (day to day) are Holsteiner Cox[1] and (Schöner aus) Boskoop[2]. And Berlepsch[3], but the latter is not easy to get here.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holsteiner_Cox

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belle_de_Boskoop

[3] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlepsch

Where in the U.S. can you get these varieties?

btw, if you ever thought engineers were terrible about naming things, check out Apple cultivars, where you have names like SweeTango™ [0] and Zestar!® [1]

[0] https://sweetango.com/ [1] https://mnhardy.umn.edu/varieties/fruit/apples/zestar

You make fun but the Sweetango is by far my favorite apple. It's better than cosmic crisp IMHO!

I'm sure programming and novel cultivars are not the only places where naming is hard.

Big fan of the Cosmic Crisp, it really does live up to the hype! Although, I have a sweet tooth and I might even find it too sweet.

Completely agree. I rarely eat an apple on it's own, and a granny smith is crisp and sour, and great for baking.

Add Rome!

I love to eat cold honeycrisps myself.

Red Delicious gets such a bad rap: I swear you can find good ones (in Ontario anyway) that are perfectly sweet and crisp. When they're good, they're probably my second favourite behind the short-season Red Prince. (Which is currently in season in Ontario) The Apple has a weird story behind it too. Discovered in the early 90s in the Netherlands. It's only been in Ontario for a decade or so (?) And has to be cellared for like half the year to get the tartness to a good level.

Also some weird early biz struggles by the company that controls the fruit...

https://financialpost.com/commodities/agriculture/the-red-pr... (2015)

I don't even know what they taste like because I can't get past the awful texture of red delicious.

I have no idea if it's regional or what. But when a Red Delicious is good, it's great. So many are that gross mealy mess and I don't think there's any way to tell from the outside.

Fujis are the best IMO. They are perfectly crispy and sweet. Everytime I try another variety I usually regret it.

Have you tried Braeburn? Fujis always seem like a pale imitation of a Braeburn to me. As do Pink Lady, Gala, and Jazz.

Braeburns are great when in peak season — juicy, crisp, not at all pappy — but in the UK at least they’re highly desirable (edit: I mean they’re a staple, not that people really crave them) and therefore grown or imported year round, despite the fact that for 10 months of the year they’re mealy, bland spheres of disappointment.

A Kent Braeburn in season is pure joy. Your description of the remaining months, primarily imported, is spot on.

So is it just me or are Jazz apples just the mealiest of apples? We get them at our office, and I've tried them multiple times figuring maybe the previous time we just got a bad batch, but every single time it's like taking a bite out of a bag of flour.

Ate a Jazz this morning and it wasn't at all mealy. Office fruit is often terrible, though - you get the oldest and dodgiest leftovers that no consumer would buy for themselves.

Fuji also have one of the most edible cores from a taste perspective. Great for an end of hike treat.

I call them red yuckies. Apples are seasonal. If you can get them fresh, the better they are. Apples are also put in cold storage which means that the first ones out are the "freshest". People also have different tastes. Some prefer sweeter, mellow apples (like an envy or gala). Others prefer tart (like granny smith or a cosmic crisp). There are so many types that are fun to try.

Kiku, Kanzi, Sweet Tango, Braeburn, Fuji, Ambrosia, Yellow Delicious, Lemonade, Mcintosh, Empire, Gala, Envy, Cosmic Crisp, Ginger Gold, Honeycrisp, Jazz, Macoun, Opal are all examples of good eating apples (in no particular order).

They pick them early, keep them in cold storage, and ripen with ethylene gas. The Macs in particular are hard little balls with zero flavor.

Go to an orchard that has Courtland apples and try them fresh off the tree.

Fresh cortland are amazing!

^ in no particular order- what are your top three? Of your list the only I've tried is Honeycrisp.

I haven't had all on his list but I have had many. Of those my top therr are honey crisp, opal, and sweet tango.

Ambrosia is pretty unique.

Fuji, Gala, Macoun, Macintosh — well, I tried most of the list, they all are worth a try.

I worked at an apple orchard one year and really liked the Northern Spy apples they grew. I was told they were pie apples, but I never tried baking them.

In high school we used to sell large bags of Washington apples as a band fundraiser. We sold so many we got a full truckload delivered direct. They were so fresh and flavorful. The fresh bag of Red Delicious I ordered were the best apples I've ever had. It's not the point of this story, but fruit you get in the grocery store, often flash frozen and thawed, has a fraction of the flavor it has pulled off the plant. I can't even eat store-bought blueberries after picking them fresh in North Carolina.

My favourite apple were Elstar. Why past tense? The were small, had an amazing rich aroma, a slight hint of acidity and were very refreshing. The apples nowadays sold under that name are roughly 50% bigger, colours are the same but the taste is like 20% of the old ones.

An apt comparison would be the small strawberries you have to pick yourself in the woods (or my parents garden) with that intense exploding flavour, compared to those tasteless zeppelins you can buy in shops.

Farmers' market apples taste a lot better than discount grocery store apples of the same variety. I don't know why, and it's not everything--potatoes are potatoes.

Potatoes freshly dug from our garden are very different from what the discount grocery store sells.

Basically all fruits and vegetables taste much worse (or, simply, much less) than they used to. Is this some kind of weird market failure, or is it just the only way to produce this stuff at the scale required nowadays?

Yes... and no.

I mean, fruits and veggies were very, very seasonal, save the things we could preserve in different ways. Eggs were seasonal as well. Now with shipping and greenhouses, more of us can have some of the stuff all year.

But only if it ships well enough.

For a lot of things, we've decided that having the thing is better than not. So we get red delicious even where apples don't grow, and maybe you can buy local ones in autumn - you know, the ones that don't ship well. Some fruits you only get frozen or in jams simply because they won't make it to you fresh. And so on.

To make things more complicated, things like apples are strange: An eating apple is a rarity from seed.

It might also be that your taste buds were more sensitive when younger: This is a known thing. It lets you eat a wider variety of foods now, as an adult, but can have the effect of not liking other things.

That's kind of what this article is about..... but to answer your question: it's a market "success", and it's taste.

People do not buy fruit & veg because it tastes very good, they buy it because it exists in a supermarket and looks pretty. Flavor is not a major component in choice. If you have 3 apples, and all 3 taste bland, people will still buy the "best" of the 3 bland apples rather than no apple at all.

Fruit/veg found at a supermarket are also bred for industrial purpose. They are selected to store well, grow quickly, produce in large numbers, resist disease/drought, and be visually pleasing. Flavor is a minor consideration, because 99.99999% of people will not go out of their way to find a better tasting version of the same veg.

If you want tastier fruit/veg, go out of your way to find a local varietal, or a local grower of more varieties. There are thousands of small farms all over the country that grow a wide variety of fruit & veg.

Also, tastes change. The fruit/veg that you prefer may have gone out of fashion, so the new stuff doesn't taste as good to you.

It's a failure of "eugenics": aggressive artificial selection amplifies trade-offs, and by the time the market picks up on the fact that trade-offs exit (in the case of Red Delicious, mostly having to do with taste of the fruit), consumer tastes shift, and the formerly selected-for traits become very unpopular.

Can't agree more. I spent most of my life hating appleas because of those damn beautiful Red Delicious. I honestly didn't understand how anyone could eat them.

Fast forward to my 30s and reading a random forum post about apples, I see people explain how different apples taste, and a ton of recommendations for Honeycrisps.

Boy were they right. An actual delicious apple, which was a gateway drug of sorts to my current favorite fruit, the Pink Lady. Who'd have thunk two similar looking fruits can vary in tastes so wildly.

I'm surprised more people don't like Golden delicious apples. They tend to get a bit mealy faster than the newer varieties, but when they're in season they're nice and crisp, mild, and not too sweet. They always put Red Delicious to shame.

Golden Delicious reigns supreme in my book. Love a softer apple.

Previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14349964

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8300619

Some comments about Cosmic Crisp in this thread.

Actually there was a legal fight between the Ag tech startup Phytelligence who raised nearly $23 million and Washington State University over it.

https://www.geekwire.com/2019/agriculture-tech-startup-phyte...

“We changed our food product so that it looked better but now it tastes bad. Why did everyone stop buying?!? Let’s sell it overseas.“

Since we're just naming apples now, in the last few months i have really enjoyed Jupiter, Holskin, Golden Melinda, Reveille, and of course the mighty Cox:

https://www.orangepippin.com/varieties/apples/coxs-orange-pi...

I’ve always wondered if there is a way to remove the wax coating before eating an apple. It always seemed to me the wax would just seal in whatever nastiness was in the Apple when it was coated and it would be nice to remove it before eating. Anyone know how to do that without baking it or peeling off the skin?

I've used this in the past: https://www.veggie-wash.com

but there seem to be many ways to do it, usually with a solution of white vinegar or baking soda:

https://www.healthyfoodhouse.com/how-to-make-homemade-apple-...

https://afarmgirlinthemaking.com/removing-wax-from-fruit-usi...

Great links! I used to use the veggie-wash stuff but switched to soaking in baking soda because it was much cheaper and seemed to achieve the same result. The difference is huge for me, eating grapes used to cause me headaches and upset my stomach if I ate more then a dozen or so, after I started soaking them in baking soda I can eat them by the pound without issue. I don’t know what is on grapes that causes me grief but just washing them doesn’t get rid of it. I do that with everything now except watermelon and bananas. My wife likes to candy orange and lemon peels so I do wash and soak those.

I actually just use dish soap. I do this with the most of my fruit/veg. Only takes a few moments and washes right off. Of note I do use no scent, fragrance free dish soap.

It doesn't seem right that taste can be the least important attribute of a fruit's market success. Even if appearance tricks consumers into buying a product once, wouldn't bad taste and texture discourage them from making repeat purchases? And for a staple like apples, aren't repeat purchases the vast majority of sales?

And yet, still, Red Delicious rules. I've long been baffled to see them in all the beautiful deli displays in NYC, the Big Apple, because their gushy, pasty bland internals render them unenjoyable.

How can this be so? Is there some kind of supply chain monopoly/scam operating for apples in NYC, like the United Fruit joke with bananas?

I’m not entirely sure the red delicious of today is the same fruit it was 40 years ago. I loved them as a kid, now they are pretty gross. Maybe my taste has evolved, but it doesn’t really even look like the same fruit i remember.

That's the point of the article: in the quest for ever greater redness, the companies dominating apple production bred out the taste completely, so now you have mush in a tough, red sack.

They generally don't use the same trade name for totally different apples.

It's likely the Red Delicious of the old days are genetically exactly the same as the Red Delicious of today.

The author seems to believe they changed: “But as genes for beauty were favored over those for taste, the skins grew tough and bitter around mushy, sugar-soaked flesh.”

No, the author is not talking about Red Delicious in that sentence. The sentence before talks about Red delicious, and the sentence you quoted talks about later cultivars.

You sure? I’d love it if it were like you say. I imagine a dedication to an authoritative strain. Like champagne or parmigiano reggiano. I heard bananas today are completely unlike bananas of the past.

Sadly, I’m pretty sure Red D ain’t what it used to be. The next sentence:

> But as genes for beauty were favored over those for taste, the skins grew tough and bitter around mushy, sugar-soaked flesh. Still, by the 1980s, the Red Delicious made up 75 percent of the crop produced in Washington.

> I heard bananas today are completely unlike bananas of the past.

That is because bananas of today is a completely different cultivar of banana. Up until the 1950s the primary type of banana was the Gros Michel. This is also why artificial banana flavor doesn’t taste like bananas we have today. The artificial flavor was originally created when the Gros Michel was what people thought of when they thought of a banana.

> I’m not entirely sure the red delicious of today is the same fruit it was 40 years ago.

You are probably right. 15 new lines (sports) have been patented during past 40 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Delicious#Sports_(mutation...

I remember eating red deliciouses about 30 years ago and they were terrible, for the exact reasons in the article. It turned me off of apples, to this day, I still mostly eat pears, and shy away from apples.

You too have changed in those 49 years.

Do yourself a favour... go to an orchard and pick up some golden russets.

Honeycrisp ftw... eating one rn while typing w/ one hand

Yep, or the brand new cosmic crisp, but the price is rediculou s on those right now.

Damn, really? How much are they going for?

At the moment Jazz and Pink Lady are damn good in the UK!

Pink Lady come from Australia; Jazz is grown in Europe but may well come from New Zealand. Not really local seasonal fruit...

Jazz are grown in the AU too! I know because they banned importing NZ apples in the 50s I believe, and I can still get them here!

You can get Pink Ladies (Cripps Pink) from Italy, France, Argentina depending on the season

As someone who lives in near Apple orchards (Central Virginia), there is little similarity between the apples sold in supermarkets (largely from the Pacific Northwest, and available year-round), and "real" apples, available for 2-3 months in the fall. Any variety, including Delicious, is far better truly fresh.

I haven't seen red delicious apples in some time. It's all galas, honeycrisps, and fujis where I shop.

Same here, and good riddance. Prior to their disappearance they weren't even the cheapest apples, gala/fuji had them beat pretty regularly, yet they held on for a couple years.

BC has a variety called Ambrosia that has an absolutely delicious bite. My second fav is Honey Crisp and they share some qualities albeit Ambrosia does not have a Honey flavour.

Edit: Apparently, Ambrosia are referred to online as having honey flavour so my taste beds are failing on that metric :)

Ambrosia apples are also grown in the USA (at least in Wisconsin). We bought box this year, along with a box of Snow Sweet and a box of Honey Crisp. 11 people (five kids) are eating them, and as the boxes start to run out, the Honey Crisps are almost gone, with Ambrosia close behind. The Snow Sweet is the least popular. I like them all, but my order of preference follows that of the our (greater) household.

Empire is pretty much the perfect every day apple. Super crisp, firm(no bruising), tart, sweet, and cheap! Every other apple, and I've tried a lot, goes too far down one of those attributes. Granny Smith being the exception for baking, and pairing with caramel.

If you can find them, Rome apples are, IMO, far superior for baking compared to Granny Smith.

[edit]

I should say this is true if you like a tooth to your baked goods. Rome apples are far more firm after being cooked than most breeds (some Jonathan crosses are similarly firm after cooking IIRC)

Bramley. Nothing more to be said.

I don't think i've tried it; according to these people, Empire vs Red Delicious is an east coast/west coast thing:

https://www.orangepippin.com/varieties/apples/empire

But i live in the UK, so i don't see either!

I'm old enough to remember the first time this was posted to HN...

Red Delicious: The greatest lie big apple ever told.

I'm probably the only person that likes them. I like the big mushy ones.

You're not the only one. I like a lot of apple varieties, and red delicious are firmly on that list, somewhere in the top 5. I always found the hated of red delicious to be a particularly amusing kind of pretentious groupthink. Just forget for a moment what your hipster "apple connoisseur" friend or your favourite foodie podcaster say about them. Forget the hate, actually try them and realize they're actually quite good.

Mcintosh please, also Braeburn

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