Red Delicious Aren't Delicious
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- Опубликовано: 15 окт 2021
- Red Delicious. They used to be delicious but not so much anymore. I explore some of America's oldest orchards to uncover the history of this remarkable fruit.
Huge thanks to the team at the Belkin Family Lookout Farm
www.lookoutfarm.com/
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The best bit about juggling red delicious is that there's no way to tell how many times I've dropped them!
Lmao
Ah man, you only needed 30 more seconds on the video.
Still looks very impressive to see someone juggling while talking. Its not easy at all.
Now try juggling them and saying "Snow White" (instead of "Sleeping Beauty"). 😜
Great video. If I could make one recommendation it would be to turn down the contrast a little in post. It really darkens your face, creating deep shadows, especially around your eyes. It creates a very stark and harsh overall look.
I'm only about ten minutes younger than dirt, so when I was a child, the red delicious apples I ate were sweet, crisp, juicy and often had yellow patches. We loved them. Over the decades, the flavour declined, the juiciness declined, they became mealy and they were uniformly red. Now I know why--thanks!
"10 minutes younger than dirt" is an expression I've never heard before. So clever and funny
@@jessikaaustin2638 thank you!
@@GrainneDhu Yeah gotta use it too.
Question: Can you think of any modern varieties that remind you of the old taste and texture?
@@paintedshoebox3619 Braeburns do, a little, and so do Galas in texture but both taste differently. There are a variety of modern apples that taste really good but none of them taste like those old fashioned Red Delicious before everything that made them good was bred out of them.
And just how roses are available in more and more vibrant colors but no longer smell like roses.
Wow! That's really interesting, didn't know that!
in my garden still have relapses that smell like good roses, just the pretty dark pink big petals . just beautiful
I think this is true of a lot of stuff. Just ask anyone over 30-40 and they'll tell you that pretty much nothing smells or tastes like it used to, everything is bland now, and not just because they're older now and lost their senses. 😒
I wonder if it has anything to do with them both being in the family Rosaceae.
@@user-vn7ce5ig1z Right! Bell peppers, tomatoes, round/seedless watermelons...let's cultivate everything so it's brighter, prettier, trendier! It's only the taste and aroma we lose!
Dude, you just answered a question from my childhood that I never thought I'd understand.
In the late 90s, my family took a trip all over New England to visit my parents' friends. At one of the stops, all the adults got super pumped about apple picking at this small, local orchard. I didn't understand the hype at the time, but my mom tried to explain that these were apples you couldn't find anywhere else. My tiny child brain didn't understand what she was talking about. I'd heard of those apples before - Red Delicious. I was unimpressed. It wasn't until she finally got me to try one, that I believed her.
And It. Blew. My. Mind.
It was the best tasting apple I've ever had, and I ate 4 of them just walking around. I stuck to the name Red Delicious for years, convinced that I would stumble across the same ones at a grocery store. (Spoiler: I never did find an apple that tasted nearly as good, esp not no damn Red Delicious). After years of failure, I let it go, thinking that I probably remembered the name wrong, or I just got swept up in the hype and remembered the taste wrong.
But now I understand the significance of it all. That orchard had the OG Red Delicious apples. My parents and their friends were right about the specialness of that orchard. And this video just clarified years of confusion & frustration for me.
A lot of modern red delicious cultivars aren't bad from the tree. After about fifteen minutes the sugars convert to starch and lignin. This also causes all the perfumes and complex sugar alcohols responsible for flavor to disappear, either gassing out or getting converted to starch.
Do you remember where or the name of this orchard?
"Red Delicious - at least they got the red part right."
- John Oliver
Red Delicious: Great if you want a bland, sandy apple with a leathery husk.
Spot on with the description here, they almost feel soft instead of crunchy
They are great if you eat them fresh and picked at the right time. But Goodluck getting that from a grocery store
@@Unpopularity asymmetrical is fine, but i dont like the oblong shape, its cursed asf lol. The apples lose goddamn weight
I was going to suggest we should start using Red Delicious apples to make jack-o-lanterns. Then I remembered that when I was really young, my mom once did exactly that. So, there's proof of concept there.
@@LamanKnight in high school the lads and I used some to make pipes for smoking weed once
It worked and I still stand by the fact that every other possible use for red delicious apples is superior to eating them
I'm old enough to remember when Red Delicious apples were awesome tasting...crisp, sweet, and had a wonderful snap sound to them when you bit off a chunk. It's sad to see they've pretty much gone the way of most tomatoes now.
Tomatoes are so Bland anymore...they've bred the acidic aspects out of them in order to promote a 'pretty well shaped tomato with a consistent color' - and that acidic property was what also contributed to the flavor.
Because of this lower acidic property in tomatoes, you can no longer can tomatoes without adding an acidic additive (such as lemon juice or citric acid) to the process. If you don't then your canned tomatoes can go bad.
I've started to buy vintage, or heirloom tomatoes...they are often colored streaked, sometimes even purplish in color and lumpy looking things but they sure taste so much better than the 'perfectly smooth mono colored' tomatoes they sell in the stores.
I disagree about your assessment of tomatoes.
There are low acid varieties of tomatoes that taste amazing, but none of them are red. There are well shaped tomatoes with consistent red color that taste good, but they are high in acid. It's somehow the intersection of the two where tomatoes become tasteless.
I only eat locally grown red delicious apples, 8-10 apples a day, 😂. Still sweet, juicy and that beautiful sharp snap when you bite them.
I've started growing my own tomatoes too. I've grown tomatoes from seeds from supermarket cherry tomatoes then I started buying my own seeds. The supermarket ones tasted exactly like those in the shops so it's clear that the taste is all in the genes. I've not managed to get my hands on any heirloom seeds yet, they ran out within days. But even widely available F1 sauce tomato seeds make a lovely tasty crop that is way tastier than canned chopped tomatoes. I'm going to keep working on producing my own food so I can eat like a king. 🙂
@@elk3407 I was comparing heirlooms to the common tasteless tomatoes that are sold in grocery stores....and not with maybe various other varieties one might find at a farmers market or some gourmet area of a gigantic store.
I live in a small town and our main grocery store - which isn't small by any means...but no where near the size of of some of those city stores that take up a few acres of land...lol. Our store won't even stock cherry tomatoes anymore...everything is a grape tomato.
Some years ago they use to at least offer a choice. But even a few years back the tomatoes were already bland...and it didn't matter if you were buying a beef steak, or a cherry tomato type - they all tasted just about the same. And I use to love the tart taste of a cherry tomato.
The only way to get that taste that I remember from the 1960's and 1970's, is to buy heirloom seeds and grow tomatoes that haven't been genetically looked at to get rid of the acidity.
I watched a video a long time ago about why commercially grown tomatoes are now so bland. There were a list of reasons...hydroponics eliminating trace minerals/elements that soil can offer...being like one of the reasons, but also - as those growing the tomatoes tried to come up with a tomato that was 'beautiful' and about the same size and shape, as well as more sturdy to survive shipping...that aim to make a tomato be all those things, they had to reduce that acid in them.
And if I recall correctly, there is a connection with the loss of acidic properties to the taste. I cannot remember the name of the chemical that gets reduced along with the acidity...but it's that chemical that is a good part of what makes up the flavor in a tomato.
But I know that in the last 20 years, tomatoes that use to have a variety of taste...now all of them taste almost exactly the same regardless of what kind it's suppose to be.
The reason tomatoes from the grocery store don't taste good is because they are harvested under-ripe while still green. The tomatoes are then gassed with ethylene when ready to be distributed/sold. The process turns the tomatoes red, but the fruit itself isn't exactly ripe.
I’ve grown apples from seed before, most of them end up small and rather sour but some end up as really cool new varieties, I’ve even ended up with one that’s red inside instead of pale yellow.
That's because they probably were all hybrids which when you plant a seed from one it reverts to one of the parents, and you don't get the hybrid that you planted. Just like tomatoes that are hybridised.
Wow that's awesome, I hope you sell the new varieties, I would love to see that! And add to genetic diversity of plants.
Maybe you could graft parts of the trees you like onto other trees to expand how many of those apples you get!
I once knew a farmer who successfully crossed golden delicious with granny smith, and the results were so good! Unfortunately he died the next year, so I was never able to get a second harvest from him. ☹
@@pebblepod30 Apple as a species is already one of the most genetically diverse plant, therefore it never breeds true by seed^^
I used to eat Red Delicious exclusively for years, just because that's what my family bought when I was growing up, and it has "Delicious" in the name right? My mind was blown when I finally tried other apples that actually have flavor and no mealy texture.
I was lucky enough, growing up in the 80s, where I got to go to apple orchards in Minnesota where there were a lot of university of Minnesota cultivars being grown, and I’d love those apples, but when I’d go to any youth activity, if we got apples as a snack, they were always red delicious, and they always tasted like crap and had that mealy texture. I remember one youth group I was in, they would also sprinkle some kind of citrus juice on them, and for a long time I blamed the juice for making the apples worse, but I’m sure it was just the shitty red delicious being shitty all on their own.
My family always bought red delicious, and so when I was a kid, I just assumed I hated apples.
@@Loupgarou21 - An enzyme in apples called polyphenol oxidase utilizes oxygen to generate products that turn apple slices brown after a while. Rubbing lemon juice on an apple once it is cut is a common way to slow the browning because the juice creates a physical barrier to oxygen in the air and the enzyme is less efficient at low pH. Any other liquid with a low pH would work too - but lemon juice tastes better than sulfuric acid.
Some red delicious literally live up to their name. Some are just bland and not great.
Just like leaving the matrix or taking the red pill lol
I grew up with an old Red Delicious orchard behind my house. The farmer would always hand us kids an apple, and they were so good! They must have been old-stock apples from before they were bred to be nasty, because they were huge, sweet, and crisp. But when the old farmer died, his kids turned that wonderful orchard into a subdivision.
Incredibly sad to hear fantastic orchard was chopped up for houses. Sigh.
Your story makes us cry.
Better the land sprout a horde of McMansions than start growing those abominations that pass as Red Delicious.
The original varieties had so much juice, you couldn't contain it in your mouth. My uncle had an orchard in cashmere wa in the 60s. They were definitely better but they changed the apples to keep longer in controlled atmosphere storage.
Farmer's kids like that will be speading all the money on increased food costs. Selling family land is so incredibly foolish, and ravaging farmland to put up a bunch of crappy townhouses should be stopped before there's nowhere left to grow food.
My mother would pack Red Delicious apples in my elementary school lunches in the late 50s to early 60s. I finally asked her to stop. I just hated them. "But they're _Delicious_ apples." No, Mom, that's just marketing. They would keep well all through the winter and taste just as bad from the beginning of the season to the time the last ones rotted.
my mother would try to get me to eat them in the 80s and I refused. They were mushy and flavorless. When she let me pick out my own apple for eating I grabbed a green one, it was very crisp and tart but in a really nice way. She thought I was weird but I noticed she never ate the red delicious apples, she just made us eat them.
@@Avrysatos even today the green apples still taste better than red declicous. they have a sweet yet acidic taste.
@@blackkennedy3966 in my opinion the green ones are too acidic and hurt my gums
@@blackkennedy3966 I like apples that are a combo of red and green, like Fuji or Pink Cripps. The best of both worlds.
I can't imagine the bravery it would take to finally ask your mother to stop packing red delicious apples after 60 years
Has someone who grew up on a orchard, I can say that apple breeding is wild. We had a technical adviser that would create new cultivars by simply mixing pollen of a variety of apple with some of another variety. Boom, in fall you had a new apple. They got weird mix like apples that tasted like passion fruit or banana popsicle. Another one was small with rough brown skin and tasted like pear extract.
I’d like to learn more, can you point me toward that guy or maybe some resources on novelty apple flavors?
You got a new apple variety in just one growing season? How does that work?
Every Apple seed has wild variations, so planting a different seed will produce different apples.
It's amazing that the people in the food industry never considered that people would stop buying their red delicious apples after finding they were always horrible tasting. That looks would only get you a little bit of distance in sales. Proof that industry became managed completely by short sighted fools at some point.
They know you have to buy some food. It's similar to how political parties know you don't really have a choice.
Well, just remember what they did to tomatoes and strawberries. Both are picked green and shipped green. Their natural flavors never mature, they just change color.
They're not entirely wrong. If people grow up with a particular food, they'll be suspicious of anything else. When I was a kid, red delicious apples were sweet and crunchy. I'm in my mid-50s, and now red delicious apples are tasteless, mushy, and leathery, but most younger people won't have known anything different. It's the same story with other produce like lettuce and mushrooms; what you find in supermarkets are among the blandest and most nutrition-free out of an astounding number of species, but because, for example, iceberg and romaine may be the only types of lettuce most people have ever tried, they don't know the buttery sweetness of boston or the peppery spice of arugula.
@@NoJusticeNoPeace arugula technically isn't a lettuce, it is a cruciferous vegetable.
Ya but the people who made those changes made their money and for a lot of people that’s all that matters.
When I was little, I used to get excited when my mom got red delicious apples instead of the normal MacIntosh's- they tasted so good. Everytime I've tried a red delicious in the last 10 years I wound up spitting out the first bite. Thanks for explaining why! I thought I was just a particularly stupid child.
Nah, almost all produce on USA shelves is bred for those two factors cost and presentation. It has been occurring so long that now people get literally irate if they see a shelf empty.
Over 20% of food is sent to landfills because they went past the company's tested opinion of a proper sell by date (Exp dates...not regulated). If Americans didn't feel the _need_ to see full shelves we could all save a lot of money, assuming, of course, that the company shares its savings with the consumer and employees but increasing wages and decreasing costs (fiduciary obligations...).
So, nah, it wasn't you. It is the consumer market and the susceptibility of the average consumer to propagandized commercials that has made our produce taste bad.
Which in turn makes processed foods need more additives to counteract the creations process leading to an increase in salts, fats, sugars, throughout the process.
Can't have strawberry flavored ice cream if no strawberry tastes like strawberry. Therefore add in flavoring and extra fats and sugars to mimic the original flavour. The reason, imo, processed foods are poor for your diet is because we bred out the nutrition and flavour for cost and presentation and need to fill it back in.
Take orange juice, by law, to claim "not from concentrate" you must not have reduced the solution by heating. So what does the orange juice industry do? They filter out all pulp.. They deoxygenate the juice so it can be stored much longer. This causes the juice to lose all natural orange flavour...so then when it isnall recombined for bottling orange flavour is added in with additional sugar to recreate the fresh squeezed taste...which is why fresh squeezed taste so different.
Oh another another aside. Because of the banana plague that is why banana flavored candy does not taste like a banana you would get in the store. That man made flavoring was based of the now nearly extinct species/variation that was mass farmed from before the plague.
Last aside I promise. Bananas are a citrus because they have segments and their seeds would be at the meeting point of those segments.
They have three segments and we have bred out all but the tiniest of specs of seed. Cut a banana in half, width ways, and stick your thumb in the very center. You will get three segments.
The sad thing is the Macintosh is disappearing. People have become so accustomed to super-sweet apple varieties that Macintoshes have fallen out of style, and fewer and fewer orchards are planting them. No one bakes any more and people get their cider in a can, so the Macintosh may disappear from store shelves eventually.
@@NoJusticeNoPeace And yet, that is the only apple I like.
@@NoJusticeNoPeace I thought that was my imagination! I couldn't find ANY Macintoshes for pies this fall. I had to bake with Granny Smith's like a weirdo. That is sad sad news....
I tasted my first red delicious at least 60 yrs. ago and it was disgusting even then. As a teen, we had 2 apple trees in the back yard. I think they were Albemarle Pippins. A variety said to have been favored by Washington himself. They bore heavily on alternate years and my mother used then for all of her pie and dumpling baking. The kitchen smells were wonderful and the flavors lifetime memories.
I was over a friends house once when I was younger, and picked an apple from the fruit bowl that I’d never seen before. It was big, and a beautiful deep red, I thought for certain it would be delicious, yet soon found out after biting into it, it tasted like pure cardboard. 😂 That was my first and last time ever eating a red apple. They’re pretty tho.
You don't know how many times I've had a conversation with somebody about how bad Red Delicious apples taste. Finally! An answer!
Great video, very informative, and your storytelling skills rocked. I was engaged the whole time.
The tomato shares a similar sad story, that also was selected to be easily transportable and good looking but ended up loosing all the taste
Even homegrown I find our neighbor's big beefsteak tomatoes watery and bland. I only ever bother to grow the small sun gold cherry variety. They always pack a nice sugary punch, great for salads and curry, and one plant inside a pot produces more then a single household needs! Had success growing ground cherries this year too and they are a major hit.
Oh my god! I’ve always wondered why every time I get tomato, it tastes like wet celery! Now I know.
@@pillowkitty6 yellow pears are the best. Sweet as any other fruit and grows like a weed. Even when they die prematurely of disease, you still get enough to last a month or two.
This is one tame it works in my favor, because I hate the taste of tomatoes but love their texture on hamburgers :P
if you can get them, mortgage lifter tomatoes are really good. lots of flavor and beefy. they aren't just mush like most you buy in the store.
When I was young we had a Gravenstein apple tree in our back yard. The apples weren't pretty and didn't store long, but the flavor was intense, on the tart side, crisp and literally dripping with juice on every bite. When they went ripe my mother would make a years worth of applesauce in a few days to use them before they went bad. The only place you can find them now is a farmer's market, and only if you're really lucky.
They’re easy to find here in Washington.
I've seen the juice once or twice in Oklahoma.
@@Jaundice__
I'll have to keep an eye out for those because that sounds delicious.
@@BonaparteBardithion Here there are some small orchards doing apples most people have never heard of King David, Arkansas Black, etc. If you love apples, Washington has got them. Farmer’s market’s are a good place to seek them out.
Grafensteiner are my favorite too. :-)
The last good tasting Red Delicious was the Starking, circa late 60's - early 70's. They really tasted great, but sometimes did not have enough consistent red appearance to impress the buyers. Shortly after that, "sport" varieties took over that were more consistently red, and increasingly, much more bland. I know. I lived in Yakima Washington, and worked in the packing houses back then.
A Wenatchee Wa native 👍 agrees
Cool. It’s no wonder all the “Fuji” apples that stole my heart has never been the same since. 😔
I didn't know yellow spots on apples were correlated with taste at all, but now I know why I've always thought apples with them tasted better
Perhaps that's why there's *Golden* Delicious.
I always thought the opposite, the more yellow the more I disliked them
Well, it's because of the archnemesis of the Red Delicious, The Golden Delicious
@@snakecake-mw7vw I don't know if it's that because I specifically like the multicolored ones
it might be only related in this specific cultivar others might have bound their taste genes to completely different thraits like for example unregular fruit size or a specific fruitflesh color or consistency, thin peel etc.
When he said that Red Delicious originally were claimed to be the best tasting ever my initial reaction was "well, they can't have shit on Honeycrisp..." Lo and behold the degradation of Red Delicious was the impetus for Honeycrisp! Now time to find some SweeTangos...
SweeTango apples are legendary in my book, I can't always find them, but when I can it's a good week!
I’ve noticed storebought honey crisp have gotten worse and worse tasting over the years as well. They still have better texture than red delicious but are usually very flavorless. Luckily we have our own honey crisp apple tree.
@@keithcamac8963 Just picked some up on my last run to the grocery store... they are amazing! And actually less expensive than Honeycrisp!
@@CampingforCool41 I find that it depends on the grocery store. The higher quality stores that I like to frequent either way usually have decent Honeycrisps. Though just tried SweeTangos and they are just as good if not better than good Honeycrips and should be more consistent and less expensive, so that is my apple life from now on. Having a tree sounds awesome, but sadly I rent in the city.
@@CampingforCool41
I've noticed that about honeycrisp too, but even the blander ones are still good for cooking.
My family used to receive a styrofoam case of carefully packed red delicious as a business gift each fall. They were lightyears better than what was in the store. Huge, crisp, sweet, tart, and had yellow spots near the core that were amazingly sweet. The other corporate gift we received was a case of tins of Vermont maple syrup. 🍁 🍎
Sounds cool. Nowadays the cosmic crisp and honey crisp are amazing almost 100% of the time. Amazing. At least here in WA state.
When I was a kid we only had the Red Delicious apples in grocery stores and I always thought all apples were just bland and mushy. I couldn’t understand why anybody would like apples. Then we started to get other varieties and I was shocked to discover that apples could be sweet and flavorful and were actually a wonderful fruit. Totally blew my mind.
Here in the UK we had smaller apples with tonnes of flavor. When I first tasted American apples, I was shocked how awful they were. But even French apples were pretty bad.
You found a really interesting story here, and told it brilliantly. Your best work yet, and I think my favourite video I've seen in the last week's.
Thanks! It's a bit outside our regular content but it was super interesting. Plus good excuse to go eat some apples
@@AtomicFrontier bro you play Gwent? 1:53 that took me by surprise xD Gwent is the best CCG I have ever played.
@@SahilP2648 Havent played it yet but am obsessed with all things witcher. It worked too well not to use it
The last week's what?
I always wondered why those were called red delicious when they're literally the worst apples I've ever tasted lol :P I love your videos, just discovered your channel last week and I'm so excited to be here so early after a new upload :) keep up the great work!
Lmao true
You will not be disappointed at his content at all, arguably some of the best out there on the informational side if RUclips in my opinion
agreed, its too sweet, no complexity, and has a chalky texture
I'm only 43; & I remember RD Apples still tasting pretty damn good in my pre-teen, & teenage years. They had yet to engineer all the flavor out of them yet at that point. Nowadays they are just "Mealy" tasting, flavorless, hulls.
Same. I ate some before and thought that they would be the best ones but the mushy tasteless flesh and thick skin is terrible. It's the total opposite of what the apples should have been so yeah, it went directly to trash.
I went out and got a bag of SweeTango apples after watching this video, and they're the best apples I've had in a *long* time! Thanks for making this video!
I always wondered why my parents bought undelicious Red Delicious apples -- it turns out they were buying the memory of a good apple I never knew. Now I think I can sympathize with that habit -- years ago, I loved Gala apples from my grocery store. In more recent years, I still bought them but wondered why they had become so consistently mushy and bland. This might be the explanation. Time to switch!
I always wondered why Honey crisp apples used to be freaking awesome, and are now kinda meh. I thought I had just gotten used to the flavor.
I was wondering that too. Glad I know why but it's still disappointing.
They're still miles better than Red Delicious, but I agree. I noticed this year that they weren't as juicy or sweet. Thankfully, they're still edible (for now) unlike Red Delicious.
@DJ3ST3R They're still good, but they really suck compared to a few years back.
There's a newer variety--Cosmic Crisp or Cosmic Crunch, I can't remember which. Those are amazing.
Many of the newer varieties are hybrids that seem to regress in quality over the years I saw this in granny Smith and Fujii. Spent my whole life in the apple capital, Wenatchee Wa in the fruit industry. Have definitely watched the red delicious go back and forth in quality as they experiment with root stocks and spur varieties.
The overall presentations is hilarious, the sudden props and tangential metaphors were great. Very informative too.
I remember being a kid in the 90s and 2000s and despising apples specifically because of red delicious. It changed my world when I discovered Fujis, the crisp texture blew me away. Finally an apple that was crisp like a Bosc pear! And now Honeycrisps are nice too, but I'll be sticking with Sweet Tango now that I know they're just honeycrisp with quality control.
Favorites that I’ve tried recently are Cosmic Crisp and Sugarbee, with Sugarbee being absolute #1. It tastes like what I want the honeycrisp to taste like.
Love this video. This guy makes me think in a young David Attenborough, with his calm manner of speak and soft voice delivering great information.
Literally my only impression of red delicious apples before this point was that they were the gross ones my elementary school always served because they were the only ones cheap enough to buy in bulk
Yes and the apples sold in bulk were the next thing to culls. Spent my time from 73 to 2016 in orchards and fruit warehouses. 30 years of maintaining fruit processing machines 😋 👌
I never liked red delicious. 🤢 I didn't mind "the insides," but the skin was always revolting to me. I once described it like disintegrating leather in your mouth.
As someone who hates apples in general, I'm not super invested into this situation, but it's still interesting.
The search for lost varieties still goes on today!
My mother was born in Wenatchee Washington, the center of apple growing in our state. She planted apple trees in every yard where she and my father lived for most of their 54 years of marriage. As a child, I remember my mother’s tree with 5 different varieties of apples growing in our front yard, in the prime spot for sunshine.
@@kasumi8874 STFU
Anyway that's a cool story Brian. Their story sounds worthy of a book.
No way! I’m from Wenatchee and apples have always been such a big part of life growing up. I even worked on Tree Fruit Research.
HELP if apples are such a big part of washington culture why has every apple ive eaten from local stores so fucking bad lmao. Idk, maybes a spokane thing. Nothing is ever good here.
@@jjju3 My guess is that your local stores aren’t buying the good apples. Those are worth far more money than you tight ass locals are willing to pay for. They get much better prices selling the good ones to export markets.
Or that you are getting older and haven’t figured out yet that your own taste buds are declining in sensitivity. So you constantly whine about how everything sucks nowadays.
I’m sure it’s the first explanation. Damn corporate apple oligarchs!
One of the most interesting aspects of apple cultivation is the grafting of whatever cultivar to disease resistant rootstock. Whole fields of crab apple trees, gnarled and stunted former swamp creatures with practically unpalatable fruit, have been bred all around the world in a secret war against pests and disease, which they enjoy natural resistances to. Every commercial apple tree is a Frankenstein's monster of parts grafted together to produce a certain fruit on a tree of a specific size that will be suited to survive against whatever local blights mother nature might throw their way.
I've always considered Red Delicious a cooking apple, i.e. put it in something with a lot of sugar. I’m confused as to why my favorite eating apple the McIntosh apple seems to becoming hard to find in stores. About the same time something called a Fuji apple seems to be taking over. You have convinced me to try both the Honey Crisp and Sweet Tango apples if I can find them.
Edit June 2022
I tried both Honey Crisp and Fuji. The Fuji was a little sweeter, but I didn't like the hard fresh of either. McIntosh had flesh that was sweet and easy to bite into.
The Fuji apple also isn't that bad either
I've had Honeycrisps, and they're pretty darn good. My current favorite are Ambrosias, though. I used to like Galas, but either the newer types spoiled me, or they're going the way of the Red Delicious because they seem pretty mealy these days.
you need to try pink lady apples they are the best apples to me
I actually really like Fuji, and grab them when they're on sale
personally, honey crisps arent that horrible, better than the Red Delicious, but i think any apple is better than Red Delicious
If you haven't yet, try a Cosmic Crisp. Back in circulation in November and it's by FAR the best tasting apple I've ever had, and it stays fresh forever. My wife and I have been looking into becoming a licensed grower because they're just that damn good. Huge apples too.
Fantastic
I'll try to find a cosmic crisp, sugar bee is my reigning favourite cultivar but I'm always on the lookout for new quality apples. Anybody know a good online apple supplier?
Its good but the pink lady is the pinnacle
Cosmic Crisp is my new absolute favorite apple.
Weird, I tried it for the name several months ago, and thought it was awful.
This is the answer to a question I thought beyond asking most of my life.
I got a Red Delicious apple about 20 years ago that was magnificent! Sweet, clean and crisp flavor… it definitely was an outlier but it made me understand how red delicious must have originally got it’s name.
When I was a child, Red Delicious were hard, crisp, and had wonderful flavor. The only other eating apple available was the Golden Delicious. It was softer and bland. I didn’t care for it. Red Delicious became mealy and Golden Delicious disappeared. I like to combine three different varieties in pie, for different textures and flavors: one cooking apple plus Granny Smith and Pippin. Last fall the stores had no cooking apples, like Braeburn, Cortland, or Macintosh, and didn’t have Pippin either.
As a kid red delicious was the fruity nectar of the gods. Now it’s the nectar of malicious armpit sweat mixed with evil tuna fish
In other words, the nectar of the devil.
SweeTango stock going through the roof after this.
Have you eaten them? I have bought 2 boxes every year for the last 2 years. They taste amazing and make great pies. Seriously it's the best fukin apple you will ever have
Yeah I bought a bunch of SweeTango recently by mistake and by God I’m never buying another apple again.
I got them for the first time just the other week. They’re so good
Opal apples are my favorite
@@FukaiKokoro Are Opal varieties from New Zealand?
I just ate a wonderful Heirloom-type Red Delicious apple from a local farm that sells locally online. They really ARE delicious. Everyone should try them if you ever have a chance to!
West Australian here. One of my loveliest memories was being in a Jonathon/Red Delicious orchard (the way they were grown here) on a very hot day just before Easter when there was a sudden thunderstorm and a whole lot of the hot, ripe apples burst. The perfume of Red Delicious flesh in the air was overwhelming and swoon-inducing. Red Delicious were so good because they were (for a brief few weeks around Easter) so crisp and sweet and tangy.
What a trip ... that farm is down the street from my house, my dad lived on it in his 20s, I worked summers there in my teens, and still swing by every now and then. So weird to see this lmao, hope you enjoyed Natick!
Oh shit this is in Natick?! Guess it’s time for a visit to that orchard
Same here!
Really fascinating. I always wondered whether the Red Delicious used to taste better or if we just got used to tastier things. Thanks for the vid
I want to say I've had Red Delicious that were okay when I was really young, but I doubt that was the case, I only ever remember them tasting like saw-dust. 🤔
I remember enjoying some very red, crisp and tasty apples as a kid, now that variety seems entirely missing in stores, or those that look closest to them (albeit not as deep a red) don't taste like much. And I'm probably far from old enough for it to be a case of terminal old age nostalgia.
Red Delicious were undeniably WAY better when I was young. But they definitely had lots of yellow striation. Unlike the color they sell today.
I've had red delicious at a farmers market that were allowed to ripen on the tree before being picked and they truly are a delicious apple. Crisp and sweet with lots of sugar spots in the flesh, the ones grown in Australia still have the yellow stripes in them. The Supermarket ones are a bit meh though, you need to get them from a grower who cares about the flavour.
Better yet is when the temps hover around a frost. Somehow the flesh of the red delicious then becomes insanely flavorful and sweet. I've tried honey crisp and wasn't impressed. Store red delicious are pretty dull and I understand why most don't like them. It's similar to store tomatoes and homegrown tomatoes, when you eat a properly ripened Red Delicious.
@@were_all_fact6026 Yes I'm sure that was a part of it, the area these were grown in was Stanthorpe which I'm sure gets lots of frosts. It's the only place in Queensland (a subtropical state) that ever gets snow!
Thank you! I had an apple tree in my backyard when I grew up. I thought the skin was thick and the apples were kind of soft and mealy but they had good flavor. Still, in the eighties, the Red Delicious apples we got from the store were way better - thin skinned and crisp, a lot like Gala was when it came out (although it's going in the same direction), but with better flavor. By the nineties, Red Delicious were twice the size, twice as dark red, plastic one-note mush and I was eating the apples from the tree. I was told I was wrong and my taste buds had just changed. I feel vindicated.
My dad grew up thinking wild apples were the best - because there was an ancient apple orchard on the farm he grew up on (that was probably around a century old when he was eating off it in the 60s and 70s), and it was probably one of those great old varietals. Apparently they were so sweet they'd make you sick if you tried to eat more than one
That was just luck on his part- the old orchards (at least in the US) were more often focussed on apples for alcohol than eating, so they didn't worry much about flavor.
@@absalomdraconis they definitely made alcohol with those apples too, lol
That could have been a Pound Sweet - big, juicy, intensely sweet apples. I can’t eat a while one - it’s like trying to eat a lot of maple sugar or fudge.
Bananas have a similar fate. The variety we call Cavendish (actually Gran nain) was selected for grocers due to size, color and the fact they're tougher to bruise. Not that the many other, better tasting bananas don't also ship perfectly fine. Gran nain however is also coincidentally more susceptible to disease than many of these "ugly" tastier bananas (TR4, the fungus you hear in the news is just one of many diseases plaguing Gran nain plantations) making monocultures a bad idea in the long run. It pays to be an ugly banana in the long run... I'm growing some of these heriloom banana varieties in zone 6 right now (ofc they're indoors rn), can't wait to see how they taste. It's a pain to grow them so far north but it'll pay off.
Well, that was truly fascinating! I learned quite a bit about apple growing here. When I was a kid, my grandfather grew Cox Orange in the backyard. They were smallish and, being truly organic, sometimes wormy, but always juicy and delicious.
In Downtown Detroit, behind the Parking Authority building, there is an old Macintosh apple tree that’s been there for years. I used to climb on the roof of my car and pick those apples. Of course, since they hadn’t been sprayed, there were insect remains in the core of each one, but I would cut that part out and eat the rest, and it was the best Macintosh apple you ever tasted.
Of course, modern Americans want perfect-appearing produce, so if they saw such an apple, they would scream _EEEEK! It has a bug in it!_ and throw it away.
20-25 years ago, most of the apples I saw were what I called "Red Yukkies", with their not-so-round bottoms. Recently, I went into a Sheetz convenience store in Virginia USA and saw a display of of Red Yukkies, er, Delicious and realized I hadn't had one in a while. Although it is still not a favorite of mine, it was a nice change of pace.
My favorite apple is Granny Smith, which is green. My favorite red ones are Stayman and Winesap, which may be the same under different names.
Sleeping Beauty pricked her finger on a spinning wheel needle, Snow White ate the poisoned apple.
I was totally thrown off by that part, because I thought the exact same thing: “No! That’s Snow White not Sleeping Beauty!”
Where is the needle on a spinning wheel?
If you aren't totally addicted to eating apples, you've never had a really good one. Seriously, I got absolutely hooked after years of mediocre tasting local ones. Better than candy bar none
What's your favourite kind?
FelineBlue I've eaten many apples from all around the world (cuz I love apples) and without a doubt my very favourite is the Sugar Bee.
As explained in the video there are tradeoff and in this apple every tradeoff is for taste and texture. So often times they will have little bruises and also have a rainbow of oranges and reds and yellows with no real pattern. But despite their unassuming look when you cut the bruises off and don't mind the colour you get a light crispy bite with a sweet taste that is reminiscent of honey and apple pie more than an apple as you're likely used to it. I only see them in the shoppes during the season but I always buy them up because they're my very favourite lunch, a wonderful mid day pick me up.
personally no matter how good they taste i wont eat them because the skin makes my gums hurt terribly and its not worth the effort to take the skin off by hand.
@@greygoose8803 Peeling an apple with a SHARP vegetable peeler takes maybe 3 seconds.
Use a potato peeler
Very interesting! I like to use a verity of different apples when I make my apple butter because I find that it gives a better, more enjoyable depth of flavor than just using one verity. It’s neat to learn how the modern apple came to be🍎🍏
I was expecting a mention of the Pink Lady apple since it was developed here in Western Australia.
Yeah that apple's top shit.
Pink ladies are my favorite!
Do you guys find them sweet or bitter? I find them sweet but everyone else that tries them seems to find them bitter and sour.
@@ninjadogs3389 sweet and tart
@@ninjadogs3389 they used to be my favorite because they were sweet. Now I find them bitter and tart :(
The production value is really high, the story is interesting enough to keep me to the end while I didn't plan to watch this video at all. Wish you luck with views!
This was my favorite video. I loved watching him try to take two bites of apple at once. Thanks for the well thought out video presentation :)
I'm old enough to remember when the Red Delicious apples and Golden Delicious were about the only two apples you could get at the store. The Red's got gross and then, miracle of miracles, the Granny Smith came along. After that it was full on with HoneyCrisps, Gala, Fuji and lots of good options.
Was looking for some Red Dels in the local supermarket here in AUS a couple of weeks ago and couldn't find any. Now I know why. Cheers.
When James mentioned it, it suddenly occurred to me that I hadn't seen any in my grocery stores for a while either. I guess they're going extinct. 🤦
@@user-vn7ce5ig1z and thank god for that.
Pink Lady applies are the go if you're in Australia anyway (and they come from WA)
@@SuperTastyfish I had, until recently, a grafted Pink Lady tree. Sadly it is no more. :-(
Which state are you in? I'm in Vic and I still have red delicious at my local supermarkets and fruit shops. Not worth buying at the moment though unless you can miraculously find some fresh ones. My local fruit shop was getting in new season ones briefly a few months ago and they were unbelievably good, but it didn't last long before they went back to being flourey and gross.
Was anyone else too mesmerized by him juggling and talking to actually pay attention to what he said the first time? What a legend
This is really cool cinematography and editing. Subbed
Well this is something we've discussed in my family for decades. Mostly about strawberries though. But lately we've been talking about honeycrisp, which to our despair turned to crap in just a few years. Tomatoes is another crop that once they find some new awesome version, they soon start to sell bad knock-offs.
As someone who works in a grocery store i often wonder how come people buy the red delicious since it tastes like dirt to me. We get the specialty apples Cosmic, Rave, lucy rose etc. but Fuji/honeycrisp/gala are the most popular. Great video by the youtube algorithm
To me it's the Gala what tastes like dirt. But sometimes the red delicious tastes like dirt too. All the other sweet varieties are too sweet for me and I find them disgusting.
And thinking about apples... I would like that a more stale acidic option were available for using in desserts.
@@fenrirgg Do you not have cooking apples? In the UK we have Bramley apples in the supermarkets which are meant for cooking with rather than eating.
@@garethevans4073 no, I live in Mexico, we mostly have sweet apples, almost all imported from USA, there very few local varieties (because our climate is very warm most of the year) and the only apples I have used for cooking are, maybe, golden delicious when hey are not totally ripe.
@@fenrirgg
You're getting your gala from the US, which might explain the bland taste. Also, wouldn't it be better to combine the GD with Granny Smith? Since they are tart?
@@lunayen I've tried the granny Smith but it's too sweet for what I wanted.
The effects in the beginning of the video looked really great. I've done similar effects for film festival films and it's so fun to do, even though it's a lot of tedious work. Very very well done, especially for a short youtube video about Apples. I just spent the last 10 minutes discussing how I would compose these effects myself. (I'd probably do it all in blender, honestly)
Close! Aftereffects + PowerPoint
This is the first time I’ve seen this channel, but you have such a high quality production and presentation skill to your videos, and that’s really impressive.
This is the first video I’ve seen of yours and MY GOSH why is it so good? The filming, editing and presentation in just the first scene kinda blew my mind, and then you juggled while talking and I can’t any more it’s too good SUBBED
Well, I guess I'm old. I remember when they had the yellow patches. Yes, they were delicious. Once the yellow patches where gone, OMG, they were awful. ~~~ Funny, I came to develop a revulsion for that deep red color of the corrupted variety, and would actively seek out varieties with a matted, mottled look. ~~~ Yes marketers, we do learn, and that fancy bit of advertising psychology (neuromarketing) that speaks of how red things are so exiting is, in fact, quite subject to conditioning. Oh well, live and learn. (I wonder if anyone will catch that last bit of word play.)
Oh, and good riddance corrupted red delicious.
Me, too!
I knew it was the yellow bits were the parts that made it tasty!
All the apple orchards made the same mistakes with the honeycrisp as were done with the red delicious?
I guess you could say that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
Customers (the stores) care about today first and a decade from now almost never, and producers are stuck with the whim of those stores. The amount of production bought from the source is miniscule.
@@absalomdraconis That is why if possible I only buy apples from farmers markets or similar. It is the same situation for real tomatoes and strawberries lots of fruits really
This is such professional quality I expected over a million subscribers, keep up the great work I really enjoyed your video, you deserve more subscribers!
I was on a very potent medication for a full year several years back, and the only food that I could eat in enough quantity to survive was Honey Crisp apples.
Still my favorite to this day.
Amazing production once again! Juggling while presenting? absolute madlad, even i was confused with so much information at the same time. Really hope this channel and its team get all the recognition they deserve, its refreshing to see culture being transmitted in such a professional and clean way. Sir David would be proud!
This channel deserves more subs
I grew up on a farm in the 1960s that had a big apple orchard. The red delicious were the old style and were crispy and very tasty.
Sweet! I love your integrated video style! True eye candy indeed!
That's some impressive skill presenting whilst juggling 😂👍🍎
I read your comment when he was juggling and I realized he wasn't using cue cards or teleprompter app.
Very impressive.
I'm not very invested with which apple is on top, but I didn't know that red delicious was only toppled this year.
I bought a red delicious when I was a kid. It was so red, and so perfect, I knew it had to be perfect.
How wrong I was. That was one person, one apple.
Who on the good green earth, eats two red delicious apples?
The production quality is amazing!!!
Even 50 years ago I thought Red Delicious was rather flavorless. Also, the best apples are locally grown in New England. Unfortunately there are fewer growers every year.
There’s a great video on RUclips regarding those apples. The first McIntosh I ever had was in New England and it was the first time I’d had an apple other than a Red Delicious or Granny Smith. It was amazing.
@@em4151 I'll look out for the video. McIntosh are usually good, but when conditions are right they can be amazing - sweet, tangy, crisp, and very juicy.
Apple growing culture is massive where I live so it's really nice to hear some farmers are taking steps to actually produce good tasting apples instead of ones that only look nice
My man ~juggles~ so many topics on this channel incredibly well.
I was researching candy apple recipes and RUclips insisted I watch this. Very cool info! You got a new follower. The Pink Lady is my favorite apple.
My Opa grew the old type of Red Delicious apples, they lacked much of that very distinct bitterness that Red Delicious in the supermarket were known for. IIRC he would have gotten those trees in the very late 60s or in the 70s. They also didn't seem to be particularly dwarf, so they produced a ton of apples.
I grow a few varieties myself, but I like most apples.
I honestly thought you were making a joke with Stark delicious, didn't know that was actually true! Amazing juggling skills as well!
Also I will say nothing beats a good pink lady apple, easily the best apple you can eat. At one point we accidentally planted an apple tree at home as well but those don't taste any good in comparison.
Pink Lady (cripps pink) is one of the nicest apples you can get in the supermarket, unless your supermarket stocks seasonal apples in Autumn
Strange way of spelling granny smith
This was fantastic! I switch apple varieties I buy at the grocery store on a weekly basis from Red Delicious to Honeycrisp and Gala or Pink Lady, and I had no idea these fruits were bred from some pretty intense competition. Awesome presentation as always.
As a kid growing up in the 60's, we had lots of local orchards in CA with tiny, bitter little apples, but a few places had some pretty nice (also small) ones for a short time. I remember when the Honeycrisp hit the stands back in the 90's, I was elated. Problem back then was high demand, low supply and (apparent) short season. Great to hear the history!
Interesting… and I loved you use of graphics as you walked by them 👍
You should do one on the Great Brussels Sprouts Cultivar Change, subtitle Or Why Kids Today Don't Mind Brussels Sprouts While We Thought They Were Vile In The 80s.
Or one on the lost flavor of banana candy.
A lot of the issue with brussel sprouts is their sulfur content. If you cook them right ie roasting and not boiling them like our parents did the sulfur nastiness is mitigated somewhat. Plus as humans age their ability to detect bitter flavors weakens.
@@Falcodrin There are a plethora of vegetables that I disliked as a child that I have since discovered it had at least as much to do with how my parents cooked it. I *still* find asparagus nauseating when steamed.
@@Falcodrin There has actually been a huge shift in the cultivars of Brussels Spouts in the past decade or so. Newer cultivars have a lot less sulfur in them. This is what Chad is referring to.
The name always perplexed me; I never found them delicious. Growing up I preferred a crisp Spartan apple - which I also can’t find sold anywhere around me.
Really interesting. Thank you. I'm in my 60s and the red delicious apples of my childhood were fantastic. You were guaranteed just the right balance of sweetness, juiciness and crunch. Now they're just evil. Dry, flavourless and floury. Over the years l've continued to buy them every once and a while thinking l had just got a dud.
Nice to know l can stop bothering and just buy a different cultivar. Wonder what happened to golden delicious they were great in an entirely different way.
This was incredibly well done!
Interesting video, but I wonder if something more may be happening here. I used to live in Washington, where apples are claimed to be better because of the weather and soil conditions. I’ve eaten large (the size of both my fists side by side) red delicious apples fresh off the tree and they were still as red, crisp, and sweet as I ever recall. However, you’re right, for some reason those apples don’t seem to show up in grocery stores any more, only the small mealy tasteless ones, and I always wondered why.
The theory you assert that the good red delicious apples disappeared due to cross breading etc. may indeed be part of the problem, or perhaps a problem in some areas. Admittedly it has been a few years since I sought out one of these large red delicious apples near the orchards of Yakama or the Tri-cities, when do you think this change in apple quality took place exactly?
However, I also suspect something else as well. I noticed the apples I loved from a farm or roadside market were often huge and I suspect most people don’t really want an apple that size when they want a snack. Breeding them smaller doesn’t make a lot of sense when they are still valued at the large size. I wonder if these apples may not have sold as well in grocery stores due to that size, but perhaps they still exist but are considered better suited for juicing and apple cider. If so, we might not see these apples in grocery stores across the nation because they get better sale value in other capacities. I have no data or evidence to this but just something to consider.
I love the small heirloom varities of apple, one that's really good is mountain rose, super sweet and juicy with the right amount of crunch and the flesh is pink! I always think grocery store apple are too damn big, the little heirloom varities are perfect snack size
I have known about the splicing of apple trees for a couple of years now, but the story of how the Red Delicious became the worst apple in the store was one I did not know.
Thank you for the tale, and the information!
Good God, that juggling sequence must have taken a few attempts, particularly the catch at the end. Nicely done--subscribed!
Yeah, when I was a kid, I thought red apples kind of tasted like eating a raw mushy potato, and ai couldn’t figure out why people were buying and eating this tripe.
"Apples. As American... as Apple pie."
Seeing as neither is American, this definitely checks out.
But the two came together... and seeing how the apple saw its renaissance in Minnesota... it's pretty american now
thats very debatable, Apple pie outside the US isnt and wasnt like the apple pie that became a staple in the US
@@DaftPunkSkittle importing the idea kf apple pie and modifying it for our tastes doesn't make it American any more than Ryan Reynolds moving to the states makes him American and not Canadian
@@marshallc6215 lmao WHAT? have you even seen the apple pies recipes of back then? They dont resemble modern american pies at all. Its like saying Ferrari cars arent Italian because of Ford. Things evolve to a point you have to give credit if they make it their own. Calm down
@@DaftPunkSkittle from the tone of your comment, you're the one that needs to calm down. Apple pies aren't American. Pre-US pies have very different recipes from modern US pies. They also have very different recipes from modern non-US pies.
Your car analogy is also disingenuous. A more honest version would be claiming "cars are American" because Ford introduced some innovations. And again, that'd be wrong. Though arguable, it is commonly agreed that the first car was German.
What you seem to be saying is that Americans mean "as American as American apple pie". Which you can have, but it seems pointlessly tautological. Why not claim an actually novel American invention instead?
This is the first time I've seen your stuff, glorious production quality.
your videos are underappreciated man
I actually used to really love red delicious, and I'm not that old. My mom always told me they were gross but I ignored her. I just kind of assumed all apples were hit or miss. I would actually occasionally find a good one.