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.
Merry Christmas everyone! 
If it tastes good --it is good. 
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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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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??? 
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Nothing to be guilty about, unless you are a Puritan I guess.
https://archive.nytimes.com/well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/31/making-the-case-for-eating-fruit/
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Going back to the original question(s): brix is important as it is a fairly easy and somewhat reliable way of measuring the sweetness of things, higher brix can mean more flavorful and, while this is far more subjective, is generally perceived as tastier.
As pointed out earlier, brix is not a measure of sugar, it is a rough measure of dissolved solids and is typically calibrated around sucrose dissolved in water. So measuring brix will give you an approximate upper bound for the amount of sugar in solution, with lots of confounding factors at play. It is not a good way to measure total sugar. Those factors include temperature, the mixture of sugars present (again, sucrose is what the calibration is based on, but it’s not the only sugar), the presence of soluble carbohydrates other than sugar (which is why that table posted early is so weird. Yes, alfalfa has a high brix, no, it’s not sweet–those are carbs. Though I think that table has other issues as well.), dissolved acids, dissolved polyphenols and other soluble organic chemicals, dissolved salts and chelates, and even the solute itself–alcohol for instance will throw off a brix reading. Another thing to consider is that not everything is always fully in solution. Once a piece of fruit is in your mouth, it mixes with saliva and, conceivably, some stuff that was not dissolved will dissolve. But, and this is crucial, it is fast, tends to be fairly precise (if not accurate), easy, cheap, and simply enough that it can be done outside of a laboratory.
That being said, perhaps measuring just sugar isn’t what you would even want a brix meter to do. Sure, if you’re a beer or winemaker, you really do want to be able to measure just sugar. But for a backyard gardener or a fruit grower wondering why one fruit tastes better than another, measuring just sugar might actually provide less information than measuring brix. You can taste or smell a lot of things that are not just sugar, and most of those things will be measured, along with the sugar, when you check the brix. It’s not a huge difference, I expect, for most things, but it is a difference.
And in that sense, higher brix really should mean more flavorful. Increasing the amount of tannins and salts and acids and VOCs in a piece of fruit does increase the flavor. But that’s just something that is objectively true–doesn’t make it practically helpful. We might say it’s just technically true. Because so much of brix is just sugar, and sugar also tends to change a lot depending on conditions, cultivar, and ripeness, a higher brix reading might not actually imply more flavor. So, more flavor means a (marginally) higher brix, but a higher brix doesn’t necessarily mean more flavor.
In an ideal world, you’d measure each kind of sugar, the pH, how buffered the solution is, and the quantity of every major flavor and texture component, be they carbohydrates, salts, aromatic organic compounds, etc. (hmm, maybe that isn’t an ideal world–sounds pretty tedious actually). But that would require everyone be rich and idle enough to have a personal laboratory, and smart and curious enough to know what the major flavor compounds even are.
So that’s why brix is important. Is it so important? Likely not, just important. We happen to be born with built-in brix meters. Maybe not the most well calibrated ones, but pretty impressively sensitive ones.
And of course brix is a pretty good approximate of sugar, which is a decent approximation of how sweet something will taste, but not a perfect one. Acidity, tannins, salts, etc will all affect not only the flavor, but the perceived sweetness. And while brix technically does measure those things too, it doesn’t differentiate them. To say nothing of VOCs and whatever else you can smell, and to say nothing of texture, bite, mouthfeel, juiciness, juice viscosity, etc.
But that’s getting into tastes, so the “tastier” part of the question. And tastes are just way, way more complicated. It’d be nice if it were purely objective, but it’s not, heck it’d be nice if it were purely subjective, but it’s not. Tastes are this crazy mix of objective, subjective, contextual, and Zeus-knows what else. You can make a strong case that one nectarine is sweeter or more aromatic or flavorful than some peach, but it’s a far harder thing to argue that it tastes better, and an even harder argument to say that people should prefer it over said peach. It’s not impossible, it’s just not as simple as saying: laboratories confirmed more of x chemicals.
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I’m baffled by the popularity of Gala. Maybe, like Honeycrisp, the ones available here are just not as good as elsewhere. But it is relatively mealy and meh compared to apples I enjoy. I’ve definitely had many Red Delicious, although decades ago, better than any Gala I’ve tasted.
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Hey, one of Gala’s parents is Cox. They can be OK. It’s certainly a great kid’s apple.
There are so many sports of all the popular name apples, some are better than others. Also, you can’t judge a fruit variety till you grow it yourself under optimal conditions (or know that it has been grown under optimal conditions). In general, I don’t care for Gala, same as most people here feel about supermarket sold Red Delicious, but last week I picked a sport of Gala called Bukeye Prime from a local orchard that was very flavorful, sweet, somewhat crunchy and very enjoyable. In 2015, I had similar experience from another orchard in upstate New York, but unfortunately I don’t know the name of that sport.
Yes, I know, that increases the expectations.
Yes, I know fruit can vary hugely depending on how they are grown.
But Gala are popular as sold in the grocery store. Presumably people are buying them and choosing them over others. The same ones I’ve tried half a dozen times.
You have a point, but I will borrow your words and say that I’m baffled how 90% of supermarket fruits get sold in the first place… The average consumer is miserable, and has been tamed over the years to accept very low quality food…
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There are foodies who like them. And there are foodies who hate them. I just did a search to see what people who pay a lot attention to flavor think of Gala.
I think all popular apples are not very challenging but their certainly is a wide range. Popular ones I like are Pink Lady, which is a top apple in my book, Braeburn, which can be and Jonagold. I also think a ripe Granny Smith is very good, but where the hell can you find that except on someone’s tree in early Dec after a very warm November? It must be good when grown in parts of CA- maybe the Sierra foothills.
Orange Pippin has this to say, Gala is a cross between Kidd’s Orange Red and Golden Delicious - a highly promising start. Bearing in mind that Kidd’s Orange Red is the offspring of Cox’s Orange Pippin and (Red) Delicious, Gala is effectively a union of three of the world’s most important and distinctive apple varieties. Perhaps the flavor does not quite live up to that promise, but this is still a high quality apple with the potential to deliver really good flavor, particularly when home grown.
Thanks for rounding the info up for your post. I’ve read the Orange Pippin description. I still hold out hope that they can be very good and it isn’t just a difference in palate.
I’ll have to remember to try them if I find myself in other regions of the country. It’s not like they are bad, just super meh.
Some of my very favorite apples are Golden Delicious and Cox’s Orange Pippin offspring.
Brix is a measurement value, that tells you how much dissolved sugar is in a liquid solution and is indicated in degrees Brix (°Bx) The higher the Brix degree, the sweeter the liquid solution.
A hydrometer will also measure the amount of dissolved sugars in a liquid solution, known as specific gravity (SG). But a larger sample volume of liquid is needed to get a measurement.
devolved sugar = potential alcohol, when fermented. There’s formulas all over the internet to help you with this calculation. I used to make grape wine, fruit wine & beer. I no longer drink so haven’t used my refractometer or hydrometer in many years.
I have a new outlook… It’s simple… less complicated… eat when ripe and enjoy, but above all be thankful.
Maybe a good rule of thumb is that for a given type of fruit, higher brix cultivars will often be better than lower brix cultivars, and that for a given cultivar, higher brix fruits will usually taste better than lower brix fruits. But taste is very much about preference as well, and the juiciness, tartness, VOCs, etc. are going to give a different profile at different stages of ripeness/different brix as well.
When it comes to comparing across different types of fruits, I think that if I personally rated a good specimen of 50 somewhat common types of fruit (conditional on a brix of at least 8 or so, i.e. culinary vegetables excluded) on a 1-10 scale and measured the brix alongside it, my own tastes would result in little to no correlation between flavor and brix.
I personally don’t care for eating Gala much, although some years it is pretty good for a sweet apple, but I certainly like it for its grower friendly attributes. Home orchardists need grower friendly apples even more than commercial growers. If you have a few in your orchard you will likely have apples every year.
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You completely missed one of my main points.
Highest brix does not always, or even usually, equal sweetest fruit.
I have no problem at all with sweet fruit. Most people love sweet fruit, but high brix does not automatically equal the sweetest fruit.
And there are many other factors that influence flavor rather than fruit.
How about a poll on how many people prefer sweetness PLUS extra flavor versus how many people prefer sweetness without extra flavor?
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I never said that brix does not matter. Anything that impacts flavor matters. My point is that brix is only one factor.
I didn’t miss your point at all. My discussion of brix and my comments are directed to everyone in this group, and especially to those who think that brix is the single most important factor in fruit flavor.
There are indeed people in this group who think brix is the most important factor.
Not true at all in fruits.
Different sugars taste different. Different combinations taste different. The sweetness perceived by human taste buds may be quite different than the brix readings would suggest. In many fruits, perceived sweetness does not match up with highest brix. The watermelons thought to be the sweetest rarely have the highest brix readings. Dates can contain glucose, sucrose, fructose and even other sugars. A higher brix reading from fructose may taste much less sweet than a lower brix reading from a sucrose/glucose date.
If you want to learn about how the human mouth perceives sweetness, rather than how brix readings work, study the work of date growers in the Middle East. They know more about sugars in food than you can even imagine.