Apple Review #1: The Honeycrisp

We begin again.

The seed in the dirt. Tendrils push forth. Roots grab the earth with clutching fingers and a tree pushes forth, desperate for sun, eager for water, and one day, a fruit grows, is picked, and ends up in my hands where I shove it unmercifully into my mouth and I choose to give this miracle of nature a crass numerical rating between one and ten, denigrating this awesome-in-the-strictest-sense-of-the-world phenomenon where the world we’re ruining grants to us the food that will sustain us.

And eventually I chuck the core of the apple into the weeds, the seeds find the dirt, and tendrils push forth once more. The cycle begins anew, as it must.

This, then, is the plan: I’m starting over, ranking apples as I eat them. This time, I’ll also identify the orchard or store I got the apple from, for comparison’s sake. Why? Well, because — take for example, today’s apple. The Honeycrisp. The Honeycrisp is easily the most popular apple and also one that has been subject to degradation of quality, if you are to believe food journalists. The Rise and Fall of Honeycrisp Apples! Why don’t they taste how we remember? They don’t taste how they used to! They’ve gone from Marvel to Mediocre! Feel free to read any and all of those, but the tl;dr on this is: the Honeycrisp is a fiddly apple to grow, and grows better in some places than others, and sadly massive apple hunger (in German: eine Apfelbesessenheit) has required the apple be grown in places where it doesn’t do as well, often by growers who maybe can’t handle the plant’s delicate needs. Plus? Grocery store apples do not abide by seasonality. They are grown when they grow, and then placed in CAS, controlled atmosphere storage. Or maybe they’re just chucked into cryosleep like any of the poor galaxy-treading fools in Alien.

As such, where you get an apple, and when, matters. Where it was grown matters. How long it has been since harvest… drum roll please, matters.

And so, I begin again with the aforementioned Honeycrisp.

The reason is —

Well, I’ve not been kind to the ol’ Honeycrisp, have I?

I’ve long said, hey, this is a good apple, but it’s also kind of a basic-ass apple, right? It’s THE apple right now — you say to someone, “I like apples,” and eight out of ten people will light up and say, OH I LOVE ME A HONEYCRISP. The Honeycrisp is not only THE apple, and has been for a good decade, at least, but it’s also the origin point for many, shall we say, spin-offs. The Evercrisp! The Cosmic Crisp! The Sugarbee! The SweeTango! The Ludacrisp! The Rosalee, which I’ve never had! Curiously not the Crimson Crisp!

And on and on and on.

The Honeycrisp’s own parents are reportedly a mystery — one parent is the Keepsake, the other the romantically-named MN1627. (Relax, it’s from a Univ. of Minnesota breeding program. They only get the pretty names when they get put in the game, coach.) MN1627 mayyyy come from Duchess of Oldenburg and Golden Delicious? Whatever.

(For those who don’t know, here’s a bit of hasty apple science: you can’t just take the seed of an apple, plant that seed, and get the same apple. Instead, you take a branch from the tree that produces the apple you like, cut it off in an act of botanical body horror, and furthering the grotesquerie, graft it into another tree, forcing that tree to grow your fruit.)

(Nature is a miracle, but is also a nightmare.)

(Also yes, that makes all commercially grown apples clones.)

Anyway, as noted, I’ve given my fair share of shit to the Honeycrisp. I said it’s a basic apple. I also said it’s too sweet — I prefer an apple that has a bite to it, a precious tartness. A sensation somewhere between a lick of lemon and a straight-up electric snap to the tongue. Sweet and tart in balance is to me a fully armed and operational apple, and something too sweet feels… you know, kind of American. It’s like, “Oh we will only eat fruit if it tastes like candy.”

Therefore, it only feels fitting that I begin my re-journey to re-reviewing apples with the Honeycrisp — maligned (by me, for sure, and recently by food media) and yet very popular, it’s where I start.

And, to be fair, I already fucked it up a little, because I didn’t take a proper photo of the Honeycrisp I ate, but look, there’s a whole damn basket of them up at the top of the post, as the kids say, don’t at me, bro. *receives note* I am reliably informed that the kids don’t say that anymore. “They say Skibidi Six Seven. It’s sigma fire.”

ANYWAY, this is a very long preamble to the first review (re-review?) of apples, beginning with the maligned-by-me Honeycrisp.

Let’s get to the actual review.

My review of the Honeycrisp, bought late Sept, Manoff Orchard in PA:

To start with the positive, the first thing I noticed about the apple — and the first thing I really quite liked — was how thin the skin was.* Listen, I don’t love eating apple skin. Particularly with a lot of heritage apples, you can end up with skin that’s tough, waxy, or rough. A russeted apple has skin that feels like you’re chewing on a wet brown paper bag. It’s texturally upsetting! But the Honeycrisp (at one point I mis-typed this as Hineycrisp, which I suspect is a different apple entirely, and also a very nice epithet for a loved one) has a skin so thin it’s barely there. Your teeth perforate it with ease. It does not linger long in the mouth. Some apples you end up chewing the skin like it’s appleskin bubble gum. Always there, never able to properly swallow it.

The flavor also has some complexity — there is, truly, a honeyed component to the fruit, a sweetness that isn’t merely sweet, but that brings richness, variety, a little bit of that honey funk. (Honeyfunk is a less good loved one epithet, I fear. I love you, Honeyfunk. I love YOU, Hineycrisp.) And it has a great crunch — less so a great crispness, despite its name.

(The difference here for me, at least, is notable: a crunch is heavier, crisp is lighter — a walnut has crunch, a cracker is crisp. Crispness has a snap, a slate-like breaking to it, an almost chippish quality. Crunch is deeper, denser, more resonant. I also think an apple can have both crispness and crunch? Maybe? Probably? I’m no crunchologist.)

Point is, the Honeycrisp brought crunch, and a lot of juice.

The complex taste was welcome.

Less welcome was the fact it was very sweet — and only that. Barely any tartness to talk about. And for me, an apple should have a clear and present tartness. As I noted above, it should have bite. This is a sub-acid apple, for sure. And the final problem was — and this is a trait shared with Red Delicious, though here to a much lesser degree — an odd bitterness that arrived with the aftertaste. Not right away! But over time, a foul tang lingered. Which is also the first line of my new epic fantasy novel. “A foul tang lingered, thought Gormox the Evercrisp. He had expected this to be a day of honey, but it had turned with haste to a day of bitter rot upon his rough and russeted tongue.”

Anyway.

The Honeycrisp is fine! I get it. It’s a nice apple. A friendly apple. A total fucking crowd-pleaser of an apple. It’s Optimus Prime. It’s a Marvel movie. It’s one of those books that lives for a really long time on the bestseller list even though you read it and thought it was perfectly cromulent. It’s the Yankees. It’s a beach vacation. It’s good. As an agricultural product, maybe even great. But also, for me? More than a little boring.

Final score: 7.0

You can watch me eat the apple here.

*insert joke here about our current president