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I remember going to one of the local markets and asked the guy putting out the apples if the organic apples were really worth it.

He immediately pulled out an organic apple (fuji if I recall correctly) and the same type, but non-organic. He cut out a slice of each apple and let me taste it.

The organic apple had significantly better flavor.

He explained that the drawback was that the organic apples would go bad quickly so you should only buy what you need, and eat them promptly.

Anecdotally, I find this to be the case with many fruits, especially citrus. I always figured that a lemon is a lemon and a lime is a lime, but after getting into cocktails and mixology, I realized that there is a night-and-day difference between high-quality fruit and the cheap stuff at your discount grocery store. This doesn't mean organic fruit is always strictly better, but I have found it to be a pretty reliable proxy for quality.

And god forbid you have premade line juice. Roses is the absolute worst (and people keep bringing it to make daquaris), but the extra effort for fresh juiced is worth it.

You might want to reconsider that, at least for homemade pre-made juice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RA3AaCO7A8

I love Super Juice! If I'm going to have friends over for a get together or party, I'll make a batch (or multiple if I want more than 1 fruit) a few days ahead of time to increase the speed in which drinks can be made. The downside is that garnishes still generally tend to need peels, so I still need to have a couple real fruits hanging around.

For garnishes, unless expressing the oil of a citrus peel is essential to the aroma of your cocktail (like in a Negroni), my "hack" has been to dehydrate citrus wheels as garnish. You can get ~2-3 wheels out of the middle of every citrus fruit and use the rest for super juice. Plus, they look really cool.

Thank you for the link. I hadn't heard of this, and I'm going to give it a try now!

Rose's is barely juice, probably only really suitable for gimlets. You can get straight lemon/lime juice in glass bottles. I find that works as a mostly fine alternative if I don't feel like squeezing.

Fruit at the discount grocery store is usually old/nearing end of life. Citrus, and limes in particular, get noticeably more bitter as they age and oxidize.

This actually leads to a schism in European/American bartending. Europe juices their citrus a la minute, so the juice has no time to oxidize, making the acid component punchier. American bars pre-juice before service, and it has time to mellow out a little.

Someone (Dave Arnold maybe) ran a blind taste test with bartenders from Europe and America and found that the their preferences lined up with the customs in their country.

Personally I follow the Europeans. Not because I like it better, but because I don’t have the kind of foresight to juice hours before I’m making drinks :-)

We got organic bananas because the regular bananas were all green. They were SO GOOD. Bananas are so damn cheap overall we just always get the organic ones and they do seem overall better.

> The organic apple had significantly better flavor.

What are you concluding from that? You can get the same apple 1 week apart and have a significantly different experience.

Or you could get the same apple at the same time from different batches and have a significant difference.

Or you could get two apples from the same batch at the same time and they could vary a lot.

Well, I suspect at a minimum that the organic apples were turned over quicker, and possibly were picked recently.

That's because conventional store apples are coated with wax and organic ones are not. Wax often has bad, usually bitter, taste and unpleasant texture.

Organic apples are not coated with wax, so they taste better, but will dry up faster.

I’ve long held a notion that organic produce is better mostly because it’s fresher - it has to be since it doesn’t have an unnaturally long shelf life.

Point #4 is totally on point!

I slice lots of apples to share with my kid and there is such an unexpected difference depending on the variety we buy. Some apples really benefit from being cut into wedges!

I agree as well, rating apples without considering the use case is a critical oversight! Kenji set the apple rating bar pretty high:

https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab-what-are-the-best-a...

I love our local farmers market during peak apple season. There are maybe 20 varieties to try across the different farms, more if you consider each farm's variant it own thing. Sadly we still have covid restrictions preventing food-tasting.

> 2) The time of year makes a HUGE difference. It seems obvious when I say it, but different varietals from different farms are best in different weeks.

Exactly. Don't expect to get a good apple in March. Eat something else instead.

I grew up in the apple producing capital of the world.

There is no such thing as a fresh apple in retail. They are all picked just before they are ripe and stored in massive cold storage rooms with all the oxygen pumped out. Apples can spend up to two year in storage, and the best tasting sweetest apples are often the ones that have been stored the longest because they form more sugars.

Your entire concept of when an apple is good or not boils down to the time between when the ethylene is pumped into the room to start ripening to when you put it in your mouth.

As with everything it depends. The heirloom varieties that make it to grocery stores (at least in the Bay Area) have a short enough window each year that they're definitely not being kept in cold storage for too long. The window of availability for something like Gravensteins and Pink Pearls out here is about a month.

The sweetest apples you're talking about are probably the mealy ones folks are complaining about (although some varieties are more prone to becoming mealy than others).

> The window of availability for something like Gravensteins and Pink Pearls out here is about a month.

The window for pretty much all apples is a few weeks. That is exactly why they all go to cold storage. If the growers don't pack them directly into storage the brokers and wholesalers will. Apples are worth more in the off season.

Unless you are shopping at a farmers market or a roadside stand, they have spent some time in a CA room.

> The sweetest apples you're talking about are probably the mealy ones folks are complaining about

Mealy apples are caused by the cell walls breaking down. The most common cause is refrigeration after they have been chemically ripened. Either spending too much time in the refrigerated grocery logistics chain or in your refrigerator at home.

> The most common cause is refrigeration after they have been chemically ripened.

We often experiment between organic and nonorganic apples, and in my experience, it seems like the organic apples are way more prone to being mealy, suggesting that it’s not (in this case) what you’re describing.

Right. And out here the heirlooms I'm talking about are only in stores for a couple weeks (a month at longest)… because they're not likely being kept in cold storage.

While the technology for cold-storing apples is impressive, I don't believe most apples do well after two years in storage.

According to https://extension.umd.edu/resource/keeping-it-cool-cold-stor... the maximum is 6 months, while some apples can handle only 1-2 months.

According to https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/bk-2007-0956.ch020?cook... the antioxidant activity in apples gradually drops off after three months of storage in the cold. An apple stored for nearly a year will have almost no antioxidants remaining in it whatsoever.

This definitely fits with my experience that apples bought just before the seasons starts (so 11 months in storage) are not worth eating; and the best apples are the ones picked straight from the tree.

I get Honeycrisp at my local market that I don't like much (other bags are great).

I have some hope that the newer trademarked varieties will be able to/choose to control for growing conditions so that they are more consistent.

You spent a whole month? You must be a big fan of apples.