Years and years of knocking the Red Delicious Apple. And now I can not get enough of them. It is the texture mainly.
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Are you getting fresh ones now?
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Except crab apples, Iāve yet to find an apple i love so i feel it. Maybe one dayā¦
Iāve felt this way about persimmons until recently.
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Ive always compared eating red delicious to eating wet cardboard. Maybe ive never had a good one, but Iāve had enough bad ones to make me never want to try again.
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I felt that way about the ones in the store though the local ones are totally different.
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These came from a Dollar General store of all places. Not many handling dings on them.
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What crab do you like?
These seem to have the light sweet and just a moderate sub-acidic taste. With nice levels of juice. Not what I recall at all. i appreciate the big broad slab sides for peeling as well. Reminds me of a poor manās Striped Sweeting. Which is a sprightly sweet and tangy apple.
Lolā¦Now I will have to look for fresh picked ones somehow. I doubt we have the chill hours for them here. I wanted to try Mikeās ā39thā but Iām leary of the chill requirement. We get a steady 650-700 here. Every now and then we spike to 900-1000.
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You might be surprised. Applenut (Kevin of Kuffle Creek Nursery) grows apples in Uganda. Quick search here on Growing Fruit using āUgandaā will give you lots of choices.
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I read somewhere that to induce dormancy they strip tree of leaves.
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Yes. I have seen Applenutās site. And actually exchange emails with John Baptist in Uganda.
It is a strange thing. Georgia Apples that perform fine all over the hot steamy South do not always cut it in Kevinās Cali operation. Ironically Kali apples like Gordon, Pettingil, Sierra Beauty and Beverly Hills are mush machines here in the Southeast.
Even some Israeli/African apples did bad here. Want to expand and try some of the oneās Daveās Nursery found did well in Kaliās coast.
Hoping to work on a grant with the U of F where we will kill untried apple varieties with abandon to find new alternatives.
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Can anyone comment on taste of Hawkeye, the original Red Delicious? I grafted 3 branches this Spring.
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@Dbens recommended it to me and sent me wood several years ago. The graft took fine but has been slow to grow and hasnāt produced yet. I hope you have better luck than I!
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We had it in northern Illinois. It was very good when allowed to fully ripen, but before texture began to decline. We would eat some fresh, but most would go into a blend with Jonathon for applesauce. It was much better than the supermarket Red Delicious most people are familiar with. I think it is worth having in a small family orchard as a dwarf, maybe even as a top grafted cultivar on a tree with 2 or 3 other varieties.
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Yes, it is the texture. Even though it dominated the market for decades, it isnāt suited to the wholesale market. It makes sense in small family orchards or local retail orchards, where they can be consumed quickly. The Hawkeye strain is best suited for those situations.
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I never knew how good Red Delicious apples could be until I picked some from a home orchard, whose owner told me to eat them within 2 weeks. YES! If you eat them soon after picking, they live up to their name. Itās the supermarkets that ruin their reputation by storing them too long.
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Maybe youāve never had a fresh one? Eat within 2 weeks of picking. Supermarket-style storage ruins them.
Iāve never seen them for sale locally. Iām sure I could get them in Gettysburg if I wanted to make the drive. I just assumed since none of my local orchards grew them, that their quality was always mediocre at best!
I havenāt had the original Hawkeye strain of Red Delicious, but an orchard near me (in the Intermountain West, Zone 6) grows a relatively more modern sport called āRed Chiefā [ca. 1950?]. It was a mutation of āStarkrimsonā (a synonym for āBisbee Spurā?), which came from the āStarking Deliciousā, one of the early sports selected from the original.
Many people donāt believe me when I say that āRed Delicious is my favorite appleāā¦or also, that āI think itās way better than Honeycrisp.ā Iāve had plenty of bad-to-horrible Red Delicious from supermarkets, and even sub-par ones from other farmersā market stands in the fall. But the apples I get from the particular orchard that grows āRed Chiefāā¦wow. Among any low-acid apples Iāve ever had, none have been so sweet and crisp and delicious as these have (no pun intended). At their best, theyāre not simply sweet, but also somewhat complex in flavor, with hints of vanilla and true honey (and not the green-apple-candy flavor of "Honey"crisp) and other subtle flavors I can hardly describe. I think even the taste of the skin contributes something positive to the overall flavor, something that not all apples do, in my opinion.
My experience has been that, yes, they do indeed decline in flavor and increase in mushiness/āwet-cardboard-inessā roughly 2-3 weeks after harvest. A rumor Iād heard on the web is that any R.D. apples that lose their stem during harvest (and they do seem a bit prone to this) tend to decline more quickly. Iāve yet to confirm this from my own tasting, thoughā¦I eat through them too quickly.
The orchard with the āRed Chiefā did claim that the soil theyāre grown in (a āsandy loamā, unusual in our clay-ridden region) is what makes the flavor so goodā¦though, Iāve since discovered a second local farm that also grows excellent Red Delicious, so who knows?
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I checked the codes on my apple bag. Came from a Washington State grower cooperative. They did a good job as most of the 10 pounds are gone and only a few were bland.
Maybe I should explore buying from Washington growers for fresh apples. I wonder if anyone sells Waltana?