Update: Tried the sweetango and pink lady with a granny smith.
- The pink lady has way thicker skin than the granny smith, so I have no idea how granny smith got 0 points for skin based on it being too thick while pink lady got 5. Like yeah, the thick skin is good for you, so I like that, but the site clearly thought otherwise.
- I agree now with the 3.5/5 tartness rating. Either the one I had before was an outlier or I was misremembering. It's tart enough for sure.
- This particular granny smith was having an off-day and wasn't nearly as tart as usual granny smiths.
- Probably like a 70/100 for me. Flavor's tolerable, reasonable price, reasonably juicy, mediocre texture, thick skin improves one of the few health benefits apples have over other fruits. Still much prefer something like honeycrisp, cosmic crisp, or sugarbee. Not the third-best apple at all.
- Generally preferred the granny smith, especially because a bite of pink lady goes right from tart to this mild, almost sickening sweetness like some Roman was working at the orchard and put lead in it.
- They were smoking crack when they gave sweetango a 95/100 and ranked it the best apple. This right here is a fucking 6/10 apple. The texture was like a less egregious red delicious. I can't even remember the flavor like 15 minutes later. Tiny little nothing. Genuinely one of the most forgettable apples I've eaten in my life.
The other day, I wrote this comment. I remarked that pink lady apples have "practically zero tartness", that they don't compete with even the nowadays hit-or-miss honeycrisp, and that a 90/100 is an outrageous assessment when something like a granny smith is at a 57. Enough of you disagreed and it's been long enough that, as a man of science, I aim today to challenge my own biases.
I'm at the grocery store right now, and in my cart are two pink lady apples in pristine condition. Get ready, fuckers, because in the next couple hours, I'm giving you my real thoughts on these overrated starter apples.
I also have a few sweetangos, which the ranking website shills for hard.
Pinging @fonix232@fedia.io @feannag@sh.itjust.works @OddMinus1@sh.itjust.works @bunkyprewster@startrek.website
I worked for an company that specialized in growing apples for 5 years. They are seriously dull. I always enjoyed talking about the grass they grew between the rows than than apples. I still have a few of them as customers although I ban all that bullshit apple talk. Yawn...
Apples are stored in large coolers with all the O2 removed. The lack of O2 prevents molds from growing. They are also all coated with some complex polymers to help prevent yeast and bacterial activity. They can last for about a year in storage. They juice apples that don't make the grade or start to break down in storage. Once the juice market is full, they dump the apples to dairies or feedlots.
Apples varieties are all clones of one plant. They don't really change over time. Fruit quality like the infamous red delicious mealiness is due to growing temperature, water, fruit load and nutrition. Every apple variety has its own special needs and growers often screw it up especially in mixed variety orchards. Climate change also adds complexity as apple varieties are genetically uniform and therefore respond to environmental stresses uniformly. So you can get good and bad years for certain varieties. For example cosmic crisp can be variable in internal quality depending on the year (From a WSU presentation in 2022). So they have done all sorts of trials to ensure a more reliable performance.
Special Note for those that like to visit older orchards: When visiting a older orchard, you must carefully wash all of the fruit. Every older orchard on the planet is contaminated with lead and arsenic (lead arsenate was used for over 100 years as an insecticide). These are not transported by the trees to the fruit but the dirt is still contaminated.