Why is brix so important? Does higher brix mean more flavorful / tastier?

General Fruit Growing
#45

Comparing things totally not related is silly. Brix only matters when you are talking about the same thing, especially if it’s the same exact cultivator or strain.

Some things have little taste regardless of their brix, like sweet pomegranates that most people think are too sweet, if they are picked earlier when they have a lower brix then they are not too sweet, yet they would not really have much of a flavor either.

At least some fig cultivators have more complex flavor if they are perfectly ripe.

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#46

Exactly.

Brix is only interesting if you are talking about one cultivar of one fruit and how it compares within a growing season, or from one growing season to another. It might be interesting to some growers who are tracking how their fruit grows. Otherwise it is only one very tiny detail that has little or no significance to most fruit consumers.

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#47

I think we should do a poll on that one. Because most people like sweet fruit. It’s not trivial. Even people who like highly acidic fruit also like high sugar to balance it out.

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#48

Brix in building the house? I detect a good pun in there… :smile:

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#49

I don’t disagree with any of the above you wrote. But you seem to imply brix doesn’t matter.

If that’s the case, try some field corn ready for the combine (any variety) and let me know how it tastes. Or pick a peach two weeks too early (any variety) and tell me how it suits your palate.

Of course brix alone doesn’t encapsulate all the taste sensations, (otherwise we’d be happy to eat table sugar by itself). But nobody is arguing that. There are flavinoids, fragrances, even temperature, etc. which contribute to the taste experience.

I clarified my points with lots of qualifiers (i.e. generally, most, etc.) but I think you missed my point.

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#50

This is why I did the poll.

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Fruit sweetness poll
#51

I guess I am down to 9% with my choice

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#52

I can only speak for cider and apples. The three most important characteristics of a cider apple are high brix, medium tannins and medium acid. Tannins are more important to me personally in carrying through flavor and texture when the sugar is all gone but higher the sugar, the higher the alcohol, and the higher the alcohol, the more stable the cider will age. The higher the amount of total acid, the less sulfited you need to add, but acid and sugar can be adjusted but never as good a substitute when all is in the correct ratios to start with. In my state, any cider that creates an abv of 8.5 or more has to be designated and taxed as a wine, so there is a level in my opinion when it’s too much. Which is between 15-15.5 brix of the final blend.

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#53

Why would I even care what other people think about taste of fruit? When I’m eating fruit, those are my taste buds in my mouth, not theirs.

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#54

Probably thanks to this thread, I’m enjoying Barhi dates to add to my snacks.

I think part of the controversy of high sugar fruit stems from a few of historical realities:

  1. Fruit used to not be nearly so sweet, by a long shot. To nearly anyone’s palate sweeter is better when the baseline is barely sweet. Now we have some fruits that can be 2X or 3X the typical sugar for what they would have been for way back ancestors.

  2. I assume most of us are food secure with a good margin. But when struggling for subsistence, high calorie density is going to be very attractive. I assume we’re biologically biased to want high calorie density foods.

  3. Some foods that are mass produced for efficiency of delivery and logistics (like supermarket apples in the 90s), have lost much of what made them palatable. Brix along with it. In some cases, finding fruit with high brix can be a marker that correlates with other aspects of desirability - meaning, you’ve found a fruit that wasn’t bred and grown like a supermarket Red Delicious - for whatever reason.

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#55

The original Red Delicious apple, meaning the Hawkeye cultivar, had decent flavor. Selection for ultra-red coloring led to sports that almost eliminated any yellow tints from modern varieties. It turns out that color and flavor are inextricably linked with most carotenes directly in the biopath that produces flavonoids. In other words, get rid of the yellow color and you also get rid of a lot of the flavor at the same time. If not for the compromised flavor, Red Delicious would still be one of the best apples ever produced because it is arguably the sweetest apple that can be grown across a broad range of climates. It has very high breeding value as can be seen with the release of varieties with Red Delicious parentage.

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#56

Interesting observations. I’m definitely prejudiced in favor of orange colored fruits and vegetables.

I think Red Delicious sports have also been selected for tougher skin, type (shape), and coloring earlier relative to ripening.

Generally, my presumption is that aggressively selecting for any particular trait is likely to lead to compromises, at best, in other traits.

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#57

Why do you believe that? I was working in an orchard last week with very old and not very red Red Delicious and Fuji (much younger tree) and Yellow Delicious were sweeter to my palate and both more flavorful. Both are grown in a wide range of climates.

On good years old strains of Red Delicious, which must often mean Hawkeye given the age of many of the trees I manage and the retro-not-so-red color and I’ve yet to taste one that I’d rate better than good (I’m not that hard a grader).

I can’t speak for other regions, but there is no strain of RD I have tasted that would make me want to grow it.

Incidentally, many consider Jonaprince a great strain of Jonagold including myself, and it is much redder than the original strain- I don’t think darker red necessarily means less flavor at all. However if you don’t factor in flavor when selecting new sports and only judge apples by appearance, you are likely to end up with worse flavored strains- it depends on what the breeder is focused on

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#58

Generally this is true and not just with selecting sports of a widely grown variety. When breeding and doing genetic selection, selecting For a trait(s) automatically means selecting Against some other trait(s).

Alan, your taste buds will never find Red Delicious to be a good apple. Nothing wrong with that, just a fact to acknowledge. That said, Red Delicious has been grown across just about the entire U.S. successfully all the way from the gulf coast to Canada. My point is not that other varieties can’t be sweeter, it is that Red Delicious produces syrupy sweet apples in just about every climate it is grown in. No, I’m not saying it does very well in a desert, but for most other climates, it is productive and reliable. Show me any other variety that can be grown in as many different regions/soils/climates and still produce roughly the same results. Also, run a brix text on some of those apples that taste so sweet. High brix does not necessarily correlate with perceived sweetness. As you know, Fuji has Red Delicious as one parent.

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#59

My home is made of Brix too

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#60

I’ve been measuring apples long enough to separate the acid from the sugar in my own palate. My point is that Red Delicious is probably better when grown elsewhere besides my own region. I believe if it was judged based on taste as grown here it would never have become so popular- before Americans had Fuji and especially Gala to choose instead. Gala is grown all over the world and has long since replaced RD in NYS as most widely grown. I have a Brazilian friend who says the same thing of Brazil apple production.

The shape of RD is beautiful and once they added solid red to its appearance it became eye candy. It is also grower friendly for a variety of reasons (probably mostly annual productivity, but it is also resistant to various rots and corking). I suspect no version of RD made it because of superior taste- even sweetness.

Have you tasted Sansa? Now there is an easy to grow sugar apple.

I have to admit to being prejudiced against RD- it is one ugly growing tree and difficult to train on vigorous rootstocks.

#61

I have tried some ‘Red delicious apples’, imported from central or south America, I forget which country, and it was nothing like the ‘Red delicious’ apples that I am used to seeing eating, they looked like normal apples to me.

#62

Merry Christmas everyone! :christmas_tree:

If it tastes good --it is good. :slight_smile:

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#63

I have no idea what this means. It certainly is important in how they perceive the flavor of the fruit. Lets try a taste test of fruit of the same variety but varying levels of brix before making an absolute statement like this.

You posted that taste contest and your opinions about brix a long time ago, but I just read it and I’m floored by what a bad test that seems to be simply because of the low brix of many of the apples- and apples grown where summers tend to be endless days of sun and drought. Perhaps the apples came from close to the beach in the fog belt or something, but a CA Goldrush should have brix in the low 20’s I would think- same thing with Spitz. both being 2 of my favorite apples and the more brix they have on any given season the better the quality of the fruit, pure and simple and absolute. Both those apples can reach the low 20’s even here.

If Honeycrisp scored so low, I have to wonder, because the general public tends to love that apple when it gets up the brix it had at that taste test. The reason it is so widely grown is because the apple is worth more because people will pay more for it. That is a true taste test, although reputation can be maintained even as quality diminishes… at least for a time. The Honecrisp I grow here taste terrible to me if brix don’t reach the teens, with about 14 being needed to please me. I’m not a fan of September apples though- no room for storage with all the stone fruit in my refrigerators and I prefer dense flesh apples anyway- not foamy crunch although it can be appealing. Variety is the spice…

Taste tests don’t work very well, apples vary a great deal even on any given tree, let alone the particular orchard and season, and some store better than others, so quality can drop off in a couple of weeks for some. A taste test in Oct may include apples that haven’t achieved full ripeness as I suspect was the case in this one. It would favor apples that ripen in Oct and how they taste immediately after harvest.

A far more interesting test to me would occur in January because that is when it really matters, with maybe a follow up one in April. Apples aren’t like peaches- we use a lot more of them out of long storage than shortly after harvest

Most of all, taste tests should never include the name of the apple- you can dismiss any test that does include it. Especially among us apple snobs who will likely be drawn to more unusual types we can’t buy in stores.

Incidentally, the quality of apples can be as affected by the strain (different sports) of any given variety as much as the variety itself. For instance, I consider Jonaprince to be quite superior to the original Jonagold although both would be sold as Jonagold. Macintosh has many different strains and some are denser and higher brix than others- those are the ones I prefer and off the tree they can be world class according to my palate, But that’s off the tree and certainly not out of storage.

The best way to evaluate an apple’s taste is by growing it and knowing it over several years. The second best way is walking someone else’s orchard and sampling as you go.

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#64

Really interesting thread that got bumped from the last reply.

It’s a widespread understanding that our sense of smell is a huge percentage of what we perceive as taste. There is a reason our parents would pinch our noses when we took bad tasting medicine. It’s also the reason I don’t spend money on a nice meal out when I have a bad cold.

I wonder whether super tasters are actually super smellers and the taste acumen is a byproduct.

For me I have very limited experience to discern my own preference in fruit taste components (stone and pome). The only source for these fruits outside of satsumas, which are grown commercially less than a 2 hours drive from me, comes from supermarkets.

While I’d say I have a sweet tooth in general, I do think I’d go for a more balanced acid - sugar mix. I actually don’t mind underripe peaches as I like the texture…really that is the only kind of peach that you can buy in the store here.

For a few weeks of the year we get truly ripe peaches in the local market from farmers who drive from Georgia to selling their harvest. Truly chin dripping ripe. A guilty pleasure.

I’ll be happy having almost any homegrown fruit close to ripe that I can enjoy. Once I have a few of a type fruit to compare in my yard, then I can start a talk about keeping or getting rid of one and adding other.

The sugars (carbohydrates) in fleshy fruit evolved to increase the likelihood of animals being drawn to it and spreading the seed. Human animals with our bulbous thinking brains have accelerated it (high brix) with fruit husbandry.

I also quite like the contrast of the sour plum skin and sweet flesh…but I will be curious to compare a sweater type against it to see if it’s really my preference or just my limited experience.

After all I still think my mother’s gumbo is the best… Surely I’m being objective right??? :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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