The best apples for apple pie | Hacker News Reader

The best apples for apple pie

seriouseats.com

51 pointsdjoldman60 comments

I'm amazed that the author would even include Red Delicious in the comparison. It's known as the worst apple in the world. Thick skin, mealy interior, either bitter or no flavor. I don't know why anyone would buy these for any purpose, and I don't know why anyone grows these. It's like putting North Korea at the bottom of a list of 10 best places to live - any other item on the list would improve the list.

I came here to say more-or-less the same. Red Delicious are mass-produced garbage. Feed them to the pigs instead.

Maybe I'm crazy, but I remember when I was little red delicious were crisp and sweet and juicy and perfect in every way. Then over the years, they became more and more hit-or-miss, until they became the mealy, flavorless kind you're describing. I've always been curious what the truth is there.

Reminds me of the first time I had the opportunity to travel abroad. Until that point, I had always thought I hated bananas. All the stores I'd ever been to in the US only sold Cavendishes. They're stiff and stringy and have very little flavor. But the ones at the produce stand weren't like that at all; they were vibrant, sweet, custardlike, and melted in my mouth. My second thought after the initial shock of how delicious the first bite tasted was the realization that I'd been lied to the agricultural industry for decades and the hollow sting of betrayal from being sold-out by my countrymen.

Red Delicious used to be good, supposedly, and I bet they’d be good if you found a small old orchard.

I was a produce manager at Safeway in the 1980's. Both Red delicious AND Golden delicious were great eating apples. Not sure much anymore and I'm not sure why.

Take a look at Small Red Delicious v. Large Red Delicious. Nowadays you can only find large's, and larges used to be "mealy and icky", while the small red delicious were wonderful. Everybody dunks on Red Delicious apples, but I've tended to like them when they're firm and crisp. There's lots of other varieties around and I haven't found a new consistent favorite yet, but glad to see such an systematic overview of apples! :-)

My understanding is that Red Delicious are a casualty of their own success and were cloned and bred with themselves so many times you now had a very pretty apple that tastes horrible. At least that is what I think remember reading from an article about how Honey Crisp came about.

A family from Costa Rica just moved in down the street from us, and the wife was complaining that the bananas here are terrible compared to her home.

I know this is the minority opinion but I buy them sometimes for a change of pace. I like the slightly bitter flavor and the ones I buy are always firm and crisp.

The author gave the Red Delicious the lowest rating, while, surprisingly, the Golden Delicious got the highest rating.

Golden Delicious and Red Delicious are not related to one another except in name (and in the sense that all apples are related). They do not have a known common lineage.

Thanks, I would never have guessed that! They look similar, so I always assumed they were closely related.

Many horrible fruits and veg explode with flavor when cooked. Rhubarb and Quince for example are unbearably tart when raw, and yummy when cooked up with some sugar

JKLA is incredibly methodical and thorough. I imagine he included them for completeness.

It's known by many, but still sells incredibly well. Until 2018, it was the best-selling apple in the US! I believe it is still the most-produced apple, since it's used for items that are sold, and is still a top seller.

It needs to be included so that more people come to understand how horrible it is for anything!

I don't know how I've managed it, but across the half a dozen grocery stores I've regularly used, I only rarely gotten a bad red delicious. Sure I have gotten some bad ones, but on average they're perfectly fine. Then again, I'm not the biggest fan of honeycrisp, so maybe it's just me

They really missed out by omitting Honeycrisp apples. I got a pie from the bakery at my local grocery store made with them recently and it blew my friggin' mind. So good. All other apples can go extinct.

Ah, a fellow Honeycrisp devotee. Always good to meet another member of the Fellowship of Delicious Apples. Have you tried the newest engineered Honeycrisp successor, Cosmic Crisp? Imagine a Honecrisp, but twice the size, twice the price, and somehow even crispier. They're still new to the market since they were developed quite recently but I found some at Trader Joe's last fall and they are absolutely divine. Like candy that grows on a tree.

Yep, my wife puts them in her apple pies that she sells at the local farmer's market and they always get rave reviews. Northern Spy is better, but basically a unicorn when it comes to actually finding them.

To me the cosmic's flavor was a little too sweet, I've noticed that the availability is also much scarcer than honeycrisp (at least in my area). I will agree that the texture was MUCH crisper though!

To each their own, I see what you're saying though. They taste sweeter than a real apple should legally be able to taste. And yeah, availability is hit-or-miss, probably because they were invented so recently and there's just not enough propagated saplings yet to meet demand.

I'm not familiar with Cosmic Crisp, here in apple country on the eastern shores of Lake Michigan the new hotness over the last few years has been "SweeTango", a cross of a Honeycrisp with a Zestar.

I bought a few of these last year not knowing what to expect, and they blew my mind. Unfortunately, they don't seem to be stocked too frequently where I am.

Cosmic has nice floral notes like a Pink Lady

I've been baking with them for years now. My favorite accessible apple. (at least on the west coast)

Slightly tart and sweet, good crunch. Good for eating, applesauce, and pie :)

When I make apple crumble (it's a British variation on apple pie I guess), I use a mix of dessert/eating apples (say Pink Lady) and cooking apples (say Bramley). The cooking apples give you the structure, whereas the eating apples give you sweetness. I chop the eating apples up into tiny cubes, so they basically dissolve.

Are Bramleys readily available in the US? - I was surprised not to see them mentioned. (I live in the Uk with a Bramley tree in my garden.) EDIT: Apparently they are Uk only. Wow.

I got curious, I live in Oregon and could grow them but never seen them but it sounds like some people grow Bramleys. Of course there are about 10 million varieties here and probably some similar thing exists, people get very particular about their varietals.

In the Uk, at least in terms of what’s available in normal shops you have all the varieties of “eating apples”, (which you pick up and bite into in the normal way) and then the “cooking apple” which is roughly twice the size of an eating apple and is too dense and tart to be eaten in the normal way but is used in apple pies with lots of sugar and maintains much of its density through the cooking process. There is only one readily available variety- the Bramley.

As far as I know the UK is the only place that has special varieties of apple for cooking. Cooking apples are usually large, tart and cook to a pulp. There are many varieties but Bramley is by far the most common.

I have a Bramley tree in my orchard here in Massachusetts, so they are available. I have never seen them in a store or otherwise commercially available.

Look at this as an opportunity to grow your own food!

Having moved from Ireland to the US, I usually can't stand the apple desserts people make and eat here. They are all far too sweet and I realised it's because there are no cooking apples available anywhere. Not only do people not use cooking apples when baking, they also dump way too much sugar and often obscene amounts of cinnamon in with their sweet apples.

Kenji considers this in the article and rejects it, since his goal is to get a uniformly good texture without any mush.

Jonathans. At least, the Jonathans in the Midwest. The texture becomes something like one of those modern cuisine emulsion/gelees, where it’s a toothsome shell that then bursts open with juice. They’re a very juicy apple generally, with good tartness.

And, NOT Jonagold. Jonagolds are insipid and lead to a mushy pie.

It’s hard to find Jonathans these days. On the east coast Northern Spy can be a suitable replacement. Staymans are recommended as a good pie apple, but they’re not even close in my experience.

My sixth grade science fair project was testing apples for apple crisp. The winner? Pink lady!

Edit: on a more serious note as a seasoned baker: for the typical person who makes maybe one pie a year if that, blind baking your bottom crust and making sure your top crust has adequate ventilation will do more to impact the flavor of your pie than finding the perfect apples. (If you don’t vent the crust, they will steam and get mushy; if you don’t blind bake the bottom, it will be soggy.)

Fussing over apple varieties when your crust is underbaked is like spending weeks picking the perfect JS framework for a side project.

Big fan of Serious Eats but it seems weird he would dismiss the multi-variety approach, I always do this. What doesn't make sense to him (mix of soft and firm) is precisely why you want two varieties. Most serious apple pie recipes suggest at least two varieties and it is the best approach.

I’ve often seen this recommended and it just seems like a way to avoid a bad outcome. I grew up with really good apple pie and think the use of a good pie apple beats the central limit theoremness of the multi-variety recommendation.

If you find bad cooked apple texture off-putting, as Kenji does, then it doesn't help to mix flavorful bad-textured apples into your pie, because you're going to end up with some amount of off-putting texture; better, according to this approach, to satisfice on flavor and optimize on texture.

The best apple pies are made with crab apples. Most crab apple trees are almost inedible since they aren't bred for flavor, but there are some really good crab apples out there.

Eaten raw, most crab apples are too tart even for pies, so you want to find one that are edible raw. It'll probably still be considerably tarter than a Granny Smith, but there should be great flavor behind the tartness.

Add more sugar than a normal apple pie, since you're getting less from the apple.

The resulting pie is sweet & tart & flavorful with great texture.

I have to disagree. The best apple pies use a range of apples. By adding different types of apples you add different texture and flavors to your pie. I will typically use 2-5 different types of apples and I bake apple pie all the time. I'm certainly no authority, just feedback I've gathered personally as the apple pie maker in the family.

The reality is most people can cut up apples and add sugar. The hardest part is the dough, the apples might not even matter, if the crust isn't good the entire pie fails.

I'm sure you make good pie, but have you actually tried a crab apple pie?

There's no botanical difference between crabapples and "normal" apples per se it's the same plant just crabapples are allowed to let the wonky apple genetics deal do its thing. So what kind of crabapple you get is just random, some taste better than anything you can buy, most are hard sour and astringent. Apples are also like this if planted from seed and left alone.

And because of the size they have a higher skin-to-flesh ratio which does make them a little bitter but also more complexly flavored if you balance it out. And for the same reason they have more pectin and cook up thicker, which is good for pies once you account for it and ideal for jams.

So yeah overall I agree, people should taste the crabapples around them and see what they can score. It's one of the most easy/fun/accessible/practical intros to urban foraging for sure.

My choice would be a red Boskoop[1] and, if I can find it (rarely) a Glockenapfel would be fine.

[1] https://www.orangepippin.com/varieties/apples/belle-de-bosko... [2] https://www.orangepippin.com/varieties/apples/glockenapfel

Definitely one of the best apples for baking as it's very acidic. I'm always disappointed when I eat an apple pie that lacks in acidity, actually surprised by this list as it includes mostly very sweet apples which result in a non surprising low rating.

One can always add some lemon juice if one is forced to bake an apple pie with substandard apples at hand, works quite well.

My wife bakes an excellent apple pie and she has found the Honeycrisp apple to be a great baking apple. Granny smiths were not cutting it. We have also found the Northern Spy Apple to be a great baking apple but they are nigh impossible to find except through honeycrisp.com who sells out in a day or so every year.

I want this but for apple sauce, I was in Indiana once visiting a friend and we stopped at a Meijer (a regional grocery store chain) and while we were getting apples (they had a larger variety than I'm used to) a little old lady exclaimed that they didn't normally have this certain variety of apples and we should get them for apple sauce, she said just heat them up on the stove and add cinnamon to taste, but that they weren't eating apples.

We bought some and it really was that straightforward, they sauced themselves with a little heat and we added a little extra sugar to taste but not much, it was both easy and a little magical.

My garden came with an old white transparent apple tree, which produces very tart apples. They are one of the first apple varieties for the year and are harvested around St. Jacob's day at the end of July.

It is an obscure variety, because the apples have to be processed within a few days of harvest and are prone to bruising. But, if you have the chance to find them, they are excellent baking apples. I particularly enjoy them in pies and strudels, but they are excellent for apple sauce.

The empire apple one confuses me. Everything about it seemed good besides it being too sweet, but that's something that can be easily fixed by adding less sugar.

It sounds like they added fairly little sugar to begin with, and that the apples themselves are cloyingly sweet when cooked.

The best apple pies I've made were with Calville Blanc d'Hiver apples[1]. Hard to find. There's a vendor at our farmers market that sometimes has them. When I see them I immediately plan for making an apple pie.

[1] https://www.orangepippin.com/varieties/apples/calville-blanc...

No mention of Grenadier apples, unfortunately. Perhaps understandably so.

They're impossible to find in most shops due to them not storing well and being quite ugly. We have a tree in our garden and the apples are outstanding for pies, crumbles, cobblers, and Charlottes. They can hold their shape well, or turn to a delicious purée if cooked longer.

My grandmother was quite the baker, and was known in particular for her pies. For apple she swore by the Pippin. She was very upset when they became uncommon in supermarkets.

I’ve carried on her tradition, and as a substitute I do half Fuji and half Granny Smith. I think it provides a nice balance. But, I’m always on the lookout for Pippins.

Surprised Kenji didn't use Opals. They're a hybrid between Golden Delicious and Topaz, with better crispness, sweetness and flavor. They also don't brown, but that's due to lower enzymes, not acidity.

Honeycrisp/Cosmic Crisp would also be a good choice.

Gravenstein should be on the list.

Yes, surprisingly good. Our neighbor always brings over big paper bags full of Gravenstein and they are great for baking and also drying.

Calville Blanc d'Hiver is my answer to this question.

I get it is not widely available enough to warrant inclusion in this list but if you get the opportunity to bake with it don’t miss the opportunity.

It’s a bit impractical but I was hoping to see a last round of a combination. I certainly have some baking plans this fall with this information

If you're looking for a good combo for apple pie filling, I've found honey crisp and granny smith to be the perfect combination of sweet and tart.

Cheat and use pears.

No need to cheat, just make a french "Tarte Tatin" with pears. Or apples, or prunes. Delicious either way.

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