Cosmic Crisp Apple Launch
story.californiasunday.com
story.californiasunday.com
However... it's tough to beat the humble Fuji, IMO.
At peak freshness they are sweet, a little tart with hints of honey, and last pretty long. I feel I can find decent Fujis into late winter, at my local grocery.
I was briefly enamored by the Honeycrisp, but they are not as consistently good as Fujis and almost twice the price.
This winter I discovered Jazz apples. They taste good, but more importantly they are often hard like rocks. I detest even the slightest bit a mealiness, and Jazz are a great late season apple. When the Fujis looked shabby, I'd pick up some Jazz.
Incidentally, this is why I'll never use a grocery delivery service. I love food, I love cooking and am choosey about what I eat. I actually like going to the store and looking over the fruit, and chatting up the person behind the meat counter, etc. It'd be a shame if this ever went away. Don't disrupt grocery distribution. Disrupt whatever incentives that took carrots and made them taste like cardboard, instead of the sweet carrots I remember from my childhood.
Currently, when shopping I'd go with Envy > Braeburn > Honeycrisp (seasonally, the go off so quickly) > Cameo > Gala... Courtland are somewhere in there.
Also I live in Texas and all the apples here taste bad compared to Washington and New York and New England. Apples, bagels, and pizza... you just can't get good ones in Austin... and it sucks.
Isn't it precisely modern grocery distribution that gave us carrots that taste like cardboard and tomatoes that taste like water? These fruits and vegetables were bred for storage and transport, not for flavor.
I was specifically referring the "last mile" of distribution that gets it to my front door. I want to go to the store, and pore the produce.
I don't think Amazon, or grocery-start-up-of-the-month is going to fix that by removing people further from their food. They seem to optimizing for convenience, not the problem I referred to.
From what I understand, not only do consumers not want larger apple sizes, because the honeycrisp bruise so easily, larger honeycrisps are a PITA to manage.
The more variety the better!
(Fuji’s are hard to beat :)
My favorites are Envy, Opal, and Honeycrisp. Very excited about Cosmic Crisp!
Exactly so. And they will be, and they are. And then they end up tasting old and mealy. And people the last two seasons have been looking at the variety with disdain because of this.
There is nothing so wonderful that it can not be utterly destroyed through optimization.
Most of the apples I eat are for Almond butter or PB transport... I live for that meal.
My current favorite is the Pacific Rose, which has a similar skin and is delightfully sweet. Call me a Philistine, but there is something about the Red Delicious that appeals to me still.
The amount of scientific, horticultural, and marketing effort associated with this apple is really something. The Washington apple industry is wagering a _lot_ on the success of this variety. Hopefully they can capture some of the success associated with Honeycrisp [undeniably a great variety when grown well, and for years the most profitable variety for growers by far], without the quality problems that attended Honeycrisp's status as an unmanaged variety [especially after the patent expired], some of which are noted in this thread.
side note : Cosmic Crisp's "other" parent, Enterprise, is an awesome apple with bright 'candy apple red' skin [rather thick] and a very dense, crunchy flesh [hence its fair resistance to bruising]. It was developed by the Perdue-Rutgers-Indiana apple development program that also produced Williams' Pride, Pristine, and other fine varieties.
Envy vs Fuji comment - recently our Fuji's have been a lot larger (excess of 1 lb), whereas our NZ Envys and Smittens (my new jam) are about half the size. My sense is that larger apples often don't have as great if texture, and if you're buying by the pound but eating by the apple, the smaller fruits are better value even if they're slightly pricier.
But I wonder if they're as healthy (i.e., calories, glycemic index) as the apples that we were told were so good for us in our youth.
Edit: actually, as I just read from a link further down, it's a bit more complicated than the and there are breeding programs, but they are still much like discovery, but trying to wrest a little bit of control from a mostly random process.
I suspect that there are certain growing techniques (i.e. environmental controls) that are used to enhance size, sweetness, etc, but not really sure about that.
I've tried all of these varieties people have claimed are as good (Ambrosia, Jazz)... none even comes close.
imo, the coloration is much more appealing too.
The Cosmic Crisp was crossed with the Enterprise. They don't grow to problematic sizes. They are easier to handle. They store very well -- all the way into the next harvest season. A lot of the Red Delicious orchards in WA are converting over to these. So we're expecting to see a more consistent supply rather than something that is finicky and seasonal -- better price variability, and probably better prices for consumers.
I can’t help but read this as a B2B software pitch.
I imagine a landing page that says this is the fruit that consumers know and love but is somehow more robust. Instead of pricing by the pound or bushel they would have “click here to speak with a representative.”
Does Gartner have a magic quadrant for fruit?
Really good apples, in different ways than Honeycrisp!
Not necessarily. A single cosmic crisp is undoubtedly more enjoyable than a single honey crisp because it's both sweeter and tarter (they had them at NYC farmers markets last year), but what about after your 10th apple of the season?
You can imagine a situation like where almost 100% of people might agree that a Unicorn Frappe is better than a shot of straight espresso, but where almost 0% of people feel the need to have more than one of them in a lifetime. Not anywhere near that extreme of course, but just to illustrate the idea.
Cox is still the best, though!
We don’t get it here in the States.
Does this mean I have some weird genetic defect?
Understatement of the year. I struggle to think what could be improved in Sweetango. It's what apples want to be when they grow up.
The same will happen with all the subsequent varieties.
You can have the most delicious fruit anyone has ever tasted, then neglect and abuse its production until it is synonymous with mealy tasteless cardboard. And you will, if you're a commercial apple grower.
Making new apple breeds is mostly creating a bunch of variations/hybrids, and waiting 5 years for it to produce fruit.
This is a good read on it: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/apples-breeding-experi...
It’s old news now as it’s all been settled. But in the Apple/Fruit world, this was a closely watched lawsuit.
https://www.geekwire.com/2018/cosmic-crisp-conflict-washingt...
The honeycrisp is enjoyable to eat, the red delicious is bad to eat but good for apple warehousers and sellers.
So now we get the middle of both worlds.
From the article:
> The Cosmic Crisp (right) is the result of crossbreeding two varieties: the Honeycrisp (left), which growers find finicky but which gives the Cosmic Crisp its texture and juiciness, and Enterprise, a late-ripening, long-storing apple.
Is Enterprise a fancy word for red delicious?
[0] https://www.orangepippin.com/varieties/apples/red-delicious
[1] https://www.orangepippin.com/varieties/apples/enterprise
no one knows the exact parent of Orange Pippin that used to be known as Cox(after the breeder) but it could have been a Pippin but Cox’s Orange Pippin is a russet/orange.
Having said that, I have a very old Apple tree that came with the house(this is in California) and is probably over 25 years old at least(if not more)...it looks like a Granny Smith but it tastes like a Pippin to me.(not entirely..still reminds me of my favorite Cox Orange Pippin from the UK. Nothing in America compares to Cox Orange Pippin afaik)...I don’t even pick it before first frost. After first frost, something happens to the tart flesh and the sugars as it comes to the surface. It’s magical. I never pick apples before first frost. Not from this tree anyways. I have a newer Gala and it’s ok. The first frost trick doesn’t work on it. I wish I knew the name of my green apple variety.
https://www.orangepippin.com/varieties/apples/enterprise
It's also important to realize that apples are grown as genetic clones, rather than a normally breeding species. So a brand like "Honeycrisp" refers to just a single genetic identity rather than a range like most species or subspecies. That also means that crossbreeding a Honeycrisp + Enterprise can create many different varieties of apple, depending on which bits of which parent's DNA gets into the clone.