An Apple Buyer's Guide: Varieties, Uses, and How to Choose at the Market

By the second week of October the apple table stops being simple. One grower brings a handful of varieties, the next brings more than you can carry, half of them with names that never appear on a grocery sticker. The useful question is not which apple is best. It is what the apple has to do by Thursday.

Start with the job, not the name

University of Maine Cooperative Extension states the working rule plainly: "tart apples are best enjoyed for cooking and sweeter apples are best enjoyed for eating raw." That gets you most of the way; the exceptions are the interesting part.

Four jobs cover almost everything. Eating out of hand wants crispness and juice, and it is the one job where a mealy apple is fatal. Baking in slices, meaning pie and crisp, wants firm flesh with enough acid to survive sugar and heat. Sauce and butter want the opposite, apples that break down willingly. Cider wants a blend, because no single apple does it well.

A reference table for the market table

The taste and use columns below follow Ohio State University Extension's variety chart in Selecting, Storing, and Serving Ohio Apples, with additions from the National Center for Home Food Preservation, Penn State Extension, and the University of Minnesota.

Sauce, pie, and the apples that fail at both

The two cooked jobs pull in opposite directions, and the mistake most people make is buying one bag for both.

For sauce and apple butter, the National Center for Home Food Preservation names Golden Delicious, Rome Beauty, Stayman, Jonathan, Gravenstein, and McIntosh, and says flatly that Red Delicious "do not freeze or cook well." For a sauce with some spine, Penn State Extension suggests 1 to 2 pounds of a tart variety such as Granny Smith or Pink Lady for every 3 pounds of something sweeter like Fuji or Gala. Buy the blend at one table and you can ask the grower to weigh the two piles separately.

For pie, the quantity question matters more than the variety question. Ohio State puts a pound at about three medium apples, and two pounds, six to eight apples, in a 9-inch pie. If a grower sells by the peck (10 1/2 pounds) or the bushel (40 pounds), that peck is roughly five pies, and a bushel is 16 to 19 quarts of sauce. Apples that get ahead of you can become slow-cooker apple butter, which is the traditional answer to buying too many.

Cider is its own category

Most cider at a fall market is pressed from dessert apples, the same eating varieties sitting in the bins. University of Wisconsin–Madison Extension points out what that costs: dessert fruit lacks the tannins and other phenols that give cider its flavor and complexity. Real cider fruit sorts into four classes by chemistry: sharps (acid above 0.45 percent, tannin below 0.2), bittersharps (both high), bittersweets (low acid, high tannin), and sweets (both low). Sugar becomes alcohol, acid gives brightness, tannin gives body. One variety rarely carries all three, so cider gets blended, which is why a cidermaker may be buying the astringent apples nobody wants to eat.

Why market apples do not look like supermarket apples

Three things separate the two piles, and none of them is about the grower trying harder.

Grades reward color and a clean skin. USDA's grade standards for apples set a minimum percentage of good red color for twelve listed varieties: a Red Delicious needs 66 percent to be U.S. Extra Fancy, 40 percent for U.S. Fancy, and 25 percent for U.S. No. 1. Russeting, the tan netting common on older varieties, is scored against fruit on a sliding scale. Smooth net-like russeting counts as injury past 10 percent of the surface, which disqualifies U.S. Extra Fancy; as damage past 15 percent, which disqualifies U.S. Fancy; and U.S. No. 1 caps it at 25 percent. A grower selling to you directly is usually not packing to those lines, so the crate holds fruit that is greener, smaller, blotchier, and occasionally hail-marked.

Supermarket apples are often storage apples. Controlled-atmosphere rooms drop oxygen from 21 percent to between 1 and 3 percent and raise carbon dioxide to 0.5 to 2.5 percent depending on the cultivar, which slows respiration enough to hold fruit for months. University of Maryland Extension names the trade-off: low oxygen slows softening and maintains color and nutritional content, but CA storage leads to a "gradual decrease in the fruits' flavor profile, namely its aroma," once fruit is held six months or more. A crisp February apple that smells like almost nothing is the honest result of a good storage program.

The commercial variety list is short. A USDA-ARS-led review of apple genetic resources counted more than 7,500 named apple varieties worldwide while reporting that 15 varieties made up 90 percent of U.S. production in 2008, with Red Delicious alone at 24 percent. Those production figures are more than fifteen years old and the mix has moved since, but the underlying gap has not closed: the same review counted 5,004 unique field accessions in the USDA collection at Geneva, New York, very few of which ever reach a produce aisle.

A fourth difference is timing. Washington State University's guidance on apple harvest describes a picking window of roughly 7 to 11 days, during which starch converts to sugar and acidity falls. Fruit picked ahead of it comes in too firm and low in sugar, with poor flavor to match, and fruit headed for a long truck ride gets picked at the early end on purpose.

The names on the bins, old and new

Most of the varieties that define the modern supermarket arrived from somewhere else within living memory. The same USDA-ARS review dates Fuji to 1962 in Japan, Gala to 1965 in New Zealand, Cripps Pink (sold as Pink Lady) to 1985 in Australia, and Honeycrisp to 1991 at the University of Minnesota. Newer university releases follow the same path: Washington State's Cosmic Crisp, a cross of Enterprise and Honeycrisp, is slow to brown and holds its texture in storage for more than a year.

The market table is where the rest of the list survives. Minnesota's own variety catalog is a good map of what shows up at Upper Midwest stands: Zestar! (1996) ripening in late August with a sweet-tart crunch and only 6 to 8 weeks of storage; Sweet Sixteen (1977), described as sugar cane or spicy cherry candy; Keepsake (1978), very hard and crisp, holding six months; Haralson (1922), tart and firm, the regional pie apple; Frostbite (2008), intensely sweet and called excellent for cider.

Older varieties come with older descriptions. Washington State Magazine's guide to heirloom apples collects the historic notes on Baldwin (firm and sprightly, a keeper from November into March or April), Grimes Golden (rich and aromatic, deep yellow with russet dots), Esopus Spitzenburg (a choice dessert fruit and also one of the best apples known for cooking), and Northern Spy (very juicy and tender, and it holds its crispness in the bowl). If a grower has any of these, buy two and eat one on the walk back to the car.

Getting them home and keeping them

Apples are among the best keepers at a fall market, which is why our fall produce guide still lists them in January and February, and why they show up in the late-winter storage crop guide mostly as a hazard: their ethylene turns stored carrots bitter and sets potatoes sprouting.

Cold is the whole trick. University of Nebraska–Lincoln Extension stores apples at 30 to 40°F and about 90 percent humidity for 3 to 8 months, and notes that because of their sugar content apples can sit at 30 to 32°F without freezing. Its most useful line for a home kitchen: apples "ripen about four times as fast at 50°F as at 32°F." A bowl on the counter is a decision to eat them this week.

Practical version for a normal refrigerator:

• Keep them in the crisper in a perforated plastic bag, which is Ohio State's method, and expect 4 to 6 weeks rather than months.
• Sort before you store. Nebraska's bulletin explains the old proverb: a damaged apple gives off ethylene faster and hurries along everything in the container with it.
• Keep them away from the greens and the vegetables. Nebraska notes that apples pass their odor and flavor to more delicately flavored produce, and their ethylene ripens whatever sits next to them, so give them their own drawer. Our guide to storing market produce has the ethylene table.
• Wash just before eating, rinsing in cool water. Ohio State says no soap, detergent, or bleach, because the fruit absorbs them.

Questions worth asking the grower

Six questions, none of them awkward to ask across a table:

1. When were these picked? Fresh-picked and out-of-storage are both fine answers; they just point to different apples.
2. Which one do you use for pie? Most growers cook their own fruit and have a firm opinion about which variety holds up.
3. What will still be good in six weeks? Nebraska's bulletin notes that late-maturing varieties are the ones suited to storage. Early ones are not: Zestar! holds 6 to 8 weeks.
4. Is the cider pasteurized?
5. Do you sell seconds or drops? Bruised and undersized fruit is cheap, and sauce and butter do not care what the apple looked like.
6. Can I taste it? A single bite settles the sweet-versus-tart question faster than any chart.

Buy three varieties in small amounts, note which one disappeared first, and come back for a peck of that one. Our market shopping guide covers the rest of the table, starting with the pears sitting next to the apples, which need an entirely different plan.