Great comparison of types of sugars in dates.
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I’ll add one comment that hasn’t been mentioned. That is most people like a higher brix fruit vs. lower brix fruits and vegetables.
Most customers go nuts over our Saturn peaches, which is the highest brix peach we grow. I eat about one or two a season and that’s enough for me. I’m not a big fan of white peaches anyway (except for Spring Snow) and Saturn just doesn’t have enough acid for me. But compared to customers views, mine is the minority.
Likewise customers like our tomatoes more in the hot summer when they are the sweetest.
Same with sweet corn. We are very picky about when we pick it. We pick it at the earliest maturity when it is the sweetest. And only pick a couple hours worth at a time. Keep wet towels over it till it’s sold.
Then I constantly remind our customers to take it home and immediately put in the fridge with a wet towel over it. Then tell them not to overcook it. They rave about it because they’ve never really had “sweet” sweet corn.
I bought an ear of sweet corn from a roadside stand this summer, just to see what other people are selling. I shucked and tried it. It left me wondering why people buy sweet corn from roadside stands. It wasn’t very sweet.
I’m sure there are other flavinoids which also generally increase as brix increases, but generally speaking, brix is a good indicator of flavor for most people.
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Here we go again.
Highest brix does not equal best flavor.
Highest brix does not even equal sweetest tasting fruit.
Nor does sweetest tasting fruit equal the best flavor.
Average apples have a brix of 10-15. Alfalfa can get a brix of over 20. Why haven’t people traded in their average apples for high brix alfalfa? If most people prefer higher brix, they would do that. The highest brix apples are about 20-24. The highest brix dates are 68-72. So why haven’t people replaced apples with dates? Because brix is not the most important factor, nor is it the same as perceived sweetness. If you ask anyone whether apples or grapefruit have the higher brix, most will name apples, but average grapefruit have a similar brix as an average/above average apple. Actual brix does not always, or even usually, correlate to perceived sweetness. Watermelons are often perceived to be extremely sweet, certainly sweeter than apples, but even an average apple is usually sweeter than the sweetest watermelon. Studies of many fruit, and watermelons and peaches in particular, have shown that the fruits that people think are sweetest, often do not have the highest brix. Conversely, fruits with the highest brix are often not considered to be the sweetest. Different types of sugars, as well as different combinations of sugars, can have very different flavor profiles, so that fruits with lower brix readings will often taste sweeter than fruits with higher brix. If brix was the most important factor then we could rate apples by brix alone, but actual taste test rankings of apples don’t follow a high brix to low brix pattern. The article below ranks apples by taste and also gives their brix so you can see that there is no direct one-to-one correlation between taste preference and brix:
People prefer the fruits that taste best to them. That may or may not be the fruits that taste sweetest, and the fruits that taste sweetest may or may have the highest brix. Some people (not all) prefer fruit that tastes sweetest, but those fruits are not always the highest brix fruits anyway.
The best use of brix readings is for growers to compare sweetness of one cultivar from year to year, and throughout the growing season, and as it ripens after being picked, just so that they will understand their fruit better. For most consumers, brix is meaningless.
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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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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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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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Brix in building the house? I detect a good pun in there… 
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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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I guess I am down to 9% with my choice
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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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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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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:
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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My home is made of Brix too
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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.