> 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...
At the same time, it is worth noting that not everybody likes crisp apples, so the ranking in that website is... daringly interpretive.