I’m fully aligned I eat apples for the texture above all else, with flavor being important but nothing close to how much crunch eat bite has.
Sweetango is also consistently flavorful and crispy and normally better than Cosmic, but the availability is what's inconsistent.
(And a Fuji apple I had in Japan was as good as the best Honeycrisps)
They've got high fibre content whilst being lower in sugar than other varieties and are good for gut bacteria.
However, the best apple to eat is one that you like as it's better to eat any type of apple than none.
https://wellintruth.com/the-healthiest-apple-variety-the-com...
You may enjoy the Fuyu Persimmon also. Eaten with firm skin is definitely crunchy. The flavor is moderately sweet.
Also some fuyu can still be astringent when very firm / underripe.
Persimmons are three (four?) totally different fruits in one.
Only real downside is that the appearance isn't very flashy; they're the russet potato of modern apples.
A childhood friend's dad is one of the people who developed the Honeycrisp and SweeTango (and Rave/First Kiss, Zestar, etc). We always had access to the latest and zaniest variants, but the Honeycrisp was just consistently very good. Yeah, sometimes you'd find an incredible fruit punch thing, but the next day you'd try another and it was gross and mealy. Honeycrisp was always reliable.
SweeTango is also excellent and reliable but it's harder to find and more expensive.
https://applerankings.com/sweetango-apple-review/
SweeTango's #1 fault, which the site calls out, is that they do not store well. The recent bags I've taken home are notably less crisp and hardy than earlier in the fall.
That said, they'll still be absolutely delicious for another few weeks, highly recommend buying a bag. Trader Joe's usually carries.
Even if I just got duds, they fail the consistency test that honeycrisps pass.
At the same time, it is worth noting that not everybody likes crisp apples, so the ranking in that website is... daringly interpretive.
> Brian Frange is a comedian and writer who has been yelling about apples for years. He started yelling about apples professionally in 2016 while working on Comedy Central’s Not Safe with Nikki Glaser while serving as co-host on the Not Safe Podcast. [...] What started as a bit revolving around his love of apples has now become a full-time job where Brian makes $700,000,000,000 per week providing apple advice for wealthy fruit enthusiasts. Brian is not in the pocket of big apple and all reviews are inarguably accurate and not corrupted by corporate influence.
https://applerankings.com/about/
It's all in good fun. Obviously if you prefer Red Delicious you're free to [strikethrough]have terrible taste[/strikethrough] disagree.
I made the mistake of purchasing that variety once, and learned from that experience. Fuji apples, on the other hand, do not deserve a score of 56 FFS.
I'm told that the original Red Delicious are in fact very good. So good that we made them our Platonic ideal of "apple". And then... we targeted the wrong metric.
The slight sweet-bitterness to a real fresh red delicious apple is completely unmatched by any other apple variety I've ever had. It tastes like apple. It is satisfying and juicy and doesn't overwhelm your stomach with sourness or sweetness.
I think people just don't realize how fast Red Delicious apples go mediocre and have rarely tasted the real thing.
For what it's worth, the only apples I buy, when they're local and in season, are McIntosh, which this site helpfully puts in the "pure shit" bin. That's just, well, wrong? Apples can be good without being bred for flavorless crispness like so many are today. And there's a difference between "soft" and "mealy", and good McIntosh apples are firmly (ha) on the soft side.
I like pink lady apples too, which this site rates "excellent", and honeycrisp are consistently acceptable - the Starbucks of apples - so it's not that they're making things up, but I think they are only rating apples along one axis and seem to have a thing for recent cultivars over classics and heirloom varieties.
"SugarBee® apples emit a sweet aroma and have high sugar content, generally reaching 14.6 Brix, compared to their parent variety honeycrisp, that reaches 13.8 Brix. "
https://specialtyproduce.com/produce/SugarBee_Apples_18673.p...
I wouldn't put much trust in it, at least if you are in Europe.
I really like granny smith apples for the sour flavor profile, but most review websites rate it poorly.
And a lot of cider apples
When I grew up, we had several crabapple trees in the yard. They very frequently bore fruit. My mom always told me these were toxic to eat, so I stayed away from them. Honeysuckle and blackberries, on the other hand...
I just googled it. It's a common myth, I suppose?
https://www.alamy.com/home-made-crab-apple-jelly-malus-evere...
https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/40275/mary-wynnes-crabappl...
https://thequietfoodie.com/my-first-ever-crab-apple-jelly-re...
As raw fruit they are perfectly edible when mature. The flavor is a mild apple flavor, a little bland an can be sour also. As in all apples, the seeds have cyanide, but as long as you don't eat them or filter the seeds after cooking it, it will not be a problem. Just don't eat it whole.
The immature fruits are hard as a steel ball, so there is a risk of suffocation with children, but apart if this, if you discard the seeds they are perfectly edible. I ate them many times, even if I prefer to let most in the tree for the birds.
"Wild" apples are Malus sylvestris or just feral domestic apples Malus domestica.
Crabapples comprise the rest (>30 different species) of apples and its hybrids. Malus florida from Japan is famous for its glorious blossom for example. Malus sieboldi from China or Malus bacatta from Siberia are also crabapples. Some are true to seed, but other aren't and there are many cultivars selected by blossom or fruit display.
There are some crabapples cultured specifically for culinary purposes, like Golden Hornet that bear heavy amounts of small yellow fruits. Very good for compote and jelly.
If you're in the Midwest (especially MN, WI, Iowa, etc) you can get Haralson, which are kinda like Granny Smith but more just straight sour.
Haralson is probably my favorite. But disclaimer, I also like eating straight lemons, so ... yea. Many people will use Haralson only for baking.
I hear that in Europe they have a few types that are more sour, idk.
You could also go down the cider apple route or even crabapples if you really want, though they often tend to be more bitter than tart.
Pink lady's texture is not great and I find it too sweet.
Anyway, I'm mostly just salty that he panned the cosmic crisp. They're good this year!
That’s when I realized that they were very rarely mealy, something I’d been in search of for years.
But agree that the site is mostly intended to be a more humorous take on apples. (And, to be fair, it is quite funny.)
And I’ve never heard of the Cosmic Crisp, which is showing up in a lot of comments. Again, maybe regional?
I like First Kiss (Rave) apples in August and early September, SweeTango in September and October, and Honeycrisp at any other time. SweeTango is my favorite, you can still get them as flavorful tennis/baseball size apples in MN vs the monstrous grapefruit sized flavorless Honeycrisp apples that seem to be everywhere these days.
There are still fantastic Honeycrisp apples available with lots of flavor, just ignore the gigantic ones.
While I agree they aren’t always the most tasty, they are almost always (like 98%) crisp and never mealy to the point I want to stop eating it, unlike nearly every other breed I’ve tried (which admittedly is only about 7-8 or the most common ones).
I will take a less flavorful crisp apple 100% of the time over a mealy apple.
So even a mediocre Honeycrisp is, to me, still way better than nearly all the other ones.
[1] https://applerankings.com/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33639206