I have this daydream once a month or so: upon entering the afterlife, I’m presented with hundreds of piles of food. Each pile is made of one kind of food. Some, like the piles of meat pies, rice and ice-cream, are colossal. Others, like the pile of fermented crocodile penis, are made up of one item. Some kind of spirit angel thing says to me, “this is all the food you’ve ever eaten”. The biggest pile is apples.
This taste test is a bit different to usual. Instead of comparing supermarket brands, we’re looking at a raw product with variable prices and seasonal differences. We couldn’t taste every variety – not all apples are picked at the same time, some fruit earlier or later, and some store better than others. But this time of year, most apples are available at their best (sadly, we were a little early for the cosmic crisp, eve and smitten varieties, and a little late for mi apples and sweetango).
All that is why this taste test is less about best and worst – although, and I would say this with some confidence, there is a worst – and more about you finding a new lifelong companion. Mine was the granny smith … was because this taste test changed everything for me.
How we tested
I did the taste test with a group of column regulars, including a microbial ecologist who collects roadside apples for cider making, plus an apple enthusiast, a fruit and vegetable merchant and another journalist. We tasted 16 varieties, all sourced from either Sydney’s Flemington markets or local green grocers. We scored the apples on texture, taste, sweetness and acidity. To check their sugar levels, we also dripped juice from each apple on to a handheld Brix refractometer – a device that measures how light bends when it hits a liquid to estimate the soluble content, such as sugar in water. I’ve included the actual sugar percentages and our sweetness scores in a table below.
I’d pay more attention to the latter because your perception of sweetness is influenced by more than just the presence of sugar. Imagine your taste buds are like tiny funnels. If you pour an equal amount of sugar syrup and lemon juice into them, you’ll taste an equal amount of sweet and sour – a balanced, generally delicious experience. But if you increase the lemon juice going into the funnel, it’ll taste more sour but less sweet, even though the sugar content is still the same. It’s not a coincidence that almost every high-scoring apple has a balance of sweet and sour.
Now that I’ve tasted almost every seasonally available apple, I’m shocked and sad to report I’ve demoted the granny smith from lifelong partner to nostalgic booty call. It still has a place in my heart and fruit bowl, but from now on I will no longer be a monogamous apple consumer; instead, I will be in a harem with bedfellows by the name of jazz, yello, pink lady and envy.
Sweet and sour apples
Jazz
Score: 8.5/10
Over centuries, countless apple varieties have been traded, grafted and optimised, and this process will continue long into the future. The apple varieties we eat now may one day be usurped by sweeter, better-lasting alternatives with catchy names and pretty colours. The supermarkets of the future will be filled with these new varieties but among them will be at least one old, familiar name, for it is simply too delicious to ever be forgotten – the jazz. It’s so crunchy, juicy, sweet and floral it makes some of the other apples seem pitiful in comparison. The microbial ecologist, who has eaten more apple varieties than anyone I know, including a fair few extremely rare varieties, wrote: “A modern classic. Everything is dialled up.”
Yello
Score: 8.5/10
I bought a tray of these apples at the markets where most varieties were only available by the box, tray or pallet. I had a lot, so I was happily giving them out to curious merchants. An exotic-sweet-potato dealer took one, had a bite and said “woah, it’s like eating perfume”. He struggled to finish it, but almost everyone on our panel went back for seconds. It may be too intense or distinct for some, but they will be the minority. On taste, I gave it the highest score I’ve ever given in any taste test. Another reviewer gave a full 10/10 for the first time. “Wow, I love you. Thank you,” they wrote.
Pink lady
Score: 8.5/10
I doubt anyone reading this will be surprised to see pink lady at the top of the table, but you might be surprised to read how sour we found it. You just don’t usually notice because it’s also super sweet. Like all the great apples, it’s balanced. It’s also super juicy, crunchy and floral. In the world of apples, this is like a Blackpink song: all the genres at loud volumes delivered in a sub three-minutes optimised for your attention and enjoyment.
Kanzi
Score: 6/10
I’ve eaten many kanzi apples in my life. I even went through a short phase where they were my apple of choice. I suspect the kanzi we tried weren’t selected with the same new season rigour as the others. But since then, I’ve eaten many more and, while no part of me would say this is a bad apple, I now believe it’s an un-extraordinary one. The crunch is good enough, but being neither high in acid or sweetness, it’s a little boring.
Sweet apples
Envy
Score: 8/10
The uneven, faded and slightly brown colouring is both cute and misleading. An apple this sweet – our taste buds correctly aligned with the refractometer in ranking this top – should be bright red, pink or striped like a tropical frog about to strut down a catwalk. It doesn’t have a perfect snap like some of the high scorers, but it’s extremely juicy.
Golden delicious
Score: 7.5/10
At some point in my life, I’d learned to associate yellow apples with pretty much every bad characteristic an apple can have. I know I’m not the only one. But this has decent crunch (albeit with a bit of sponginess) and a powerful honey flavour; according to the refractometer and our taste buds, it’s one of the sweetest on the market. I don’t know who is to blame for the reputational damage, likely school camps or sad office catering, but whoever it was, a consortium of yellow apple growers should sue for defamation.
Fuji
Score: 7.5
One reviewer called this “baby’s first apple”. I appreciate that, it’s a nicer way to say sweet and boring. Along with envy, it’s probably the juiciest apple we tried, but there are apples that are both juicy and interesting. I’ll be looking elsewhere, but if you don’t want any sourness, this could be the apple for you. Note: if you see a dazzle around, they’re very similar.
Missile
Score: 7/10
One of a few apples to have a pleasant grassy aroma, as if it had rolled through a flowery meadow before sneaking into our fruit bowl. Like others in this list, the low acidity makes it feel a bit basic. Its juiciness makes it a bit more interesting, as does the very slightly bitter, dry aftertaste, but the latter isn’t the kind of interest you want. I will still buy these, mostly because the mini size is so useful. Sometimes, I look at the granny smith section, see those giant green boulders and think I don’t want a meal that’s 100% apple, I just want a snack.
Ambrosia
Score: 6.5/10
If the fuji is boring, this is completely forgettable. Well, it would be, if it wasn’t so light. As one reviewer said: “If a granny smith is dense, this is the opposite of that.” If you want a sweet apple with almost no acidity, I’d eat a fuji.
Snapdragon
Score: 6/10
In any 16-item taste test, you’re going to get a lot of repeat flavours but there was no other apple that tasted like the snapdragon. “Sherbet raspberry … are you an apple?” one reviewer wrote. Two others described it as candy-like. It’s not overly sweet, but its sweetness has a generic candy quality. Then layer on a faint earthiness, some tannin, and a notably thick skin – it’s all quite unusual. Who is it for? I don’t even know if it’s for me or not.
Sour apples
Granny smith
Score: 7.5/10
I remember this round so vividly. I was excited. I felt like the world, or at least the six other people in the room, were about to join my cult. A few mouthfuls later and I was questioning everything I ever thought about my favourite apple. The things I love – the juiciness, the crunch, the density, the autumnal aroma – I found in other apples, sometimes to a much greater degree. I found myself thinking, is it even that sour? It seems absurd, but when I tried it next to a pink lady, I was even more confused. Granny smiths only seem so acidic because they have such low sugar. They still have a place, in my heart and all our diets, because there’s no other apple like it, but it will no longer be my sweetheart.
Kissabel
Score: 7.5/10
I think all the apples in the sour category will be divisive, but none more so than this. Some will see the pink-to-yellow colour gradient and think of sunsets, others will see beige splotches and wonder if the apple has a rash. Some will find the extreme acidity assaulting, others will find their palate refreshed. Some will describe the astringency as added complexity, others will say “ew, why does it make my mouth so dry”.
Red moon
Score: 6/10
There have been many attempts to cultivate a red-flesh apple. This is a pretty good iteration. “So pretty, like a tie-dye T-shirt,” one reviewer wrote. It’s just not that great to eat. It’s certainly interesting, starting off with a lolly-like sweetness (similar to the snapdragon) that quickly descends into powerful, mouth-puckering sourness, before ending with a twitch of astringency. The problem is the texture. I doubt there are many people out there who would accept, let alone desire, a floury apple and this is one of the few that simply didn’t pass the crunch test.
Bad apples
Bravo
Score: 5/10
These smell like a pool. I can accept that as a quirk or a consequence of processing but I cannot accept the slightly floury texture, nor am I interested in the faded taste. I remember one reviewer saying, “It’s like grandma’s apples that had been left in the cellar too long.” This wasn’t a metaphor.
Gala
Score: 4.5/10
What is the point of an apple with very low acidity and sweetness? For looking at? On that, this would score pretty well, as this reviewer wrote: “Looks like it belongs in a Renaissance painting but it’s bland, watery and not snappy enough.” “Beautiful, but not much of anything really”, and “floral but pathetic”, wrote others.
Red delicious
Score: 2/10
The memes are real.
