Supermarket Apples: How to Choose?

apple cobbler for dessert tonight

We all know that Granny Smith apples are great for making pies. But have you ever wondered which other apples might be good in pie, or what type of apple makes a good sauce, or which apple has the most crunch for fresh eating?

Walk down the produce section of the grocery store, and you'll be greeted by reds, yellow mixed with red, green, and even crimson apples. So many from which to choose. The three factors that determine best use for any apple variety are acidity, sugar content, and cell wall strength. Let's look at how today's grocery store apples stack up in those areas and how best to use them.

Baking Pies, Crisps, and Cobblers

When you want an apple bursting with tartness and will hold its shape when baked, turn to Granny Smith, Pink Lady, and Braeburn apples. The acidity and pectin help build strong cell walls in these apples, which is why they can soften but not turn to mush when baked. 

The Granny Smith is the queen of tart apples. Their tartness stands up well to the sugary syrup they find themselves baking with. This tart aspect also makes them ideal candidates for caramel apples.

The Pink Lady apple has a dense flesh with a tart-sweet balance that intensifies as the flavors cook down. They're lower juice content doesn't create a soggy crust when baking a pie.

Braeburn apples, if you can find them, are a classic pie apple, favored for their firm texture upon baking and hint of spicy flavor. Braeburns have mostly vanished from supermarket shelves in the past decade with the introduction of newer, and oftentimes trademarked "club" apples. There's a business behind the scenes that the apple consumer rarely hears about. Corporations develop new apple varieties, own the rights to who can grow them, how many can be grown, and what price they can be sold at. With such tight controls, the corporate entities stand to gain a lot in profits. Braeburn apples are an old variety that is available to anyone to grow. The profit margin for Braeburn apples is not as great compared to "club" apples. 

Your best bet to find Braeburn apples are farm stands and u-pick orchards.

Sweet and Exceptionally Crisp for Fresh-Eating

You don't have to settle for Red Delicious apples if you want a good fresh-eating variety. The supermarket is your friend when it comes to out-of-hand apple crunching. Most consumers prefer a good crunch, some juice, and a sweet apple flavor when eating apples fresh. The best sellers in recent years have included Honeycrisp, Cosmic Crisp, Fuji, and Gala. And what makes some of these apples stand apart from the rest is a couple of them are good "crossover" apples -- they are great for snacking, but also have the components of good baking apples.

Honeycrisp apples are juicy, sweet, and have a good crunch. They also have strong cell walls which helps slices hold their shape when baked. If, however, you prefer a more tart flavor in a baking apple, you can splash Honeycrisp slices with extra lemon juice to get that sweet-tart balance.

Cosmic Crisp apples are a cross between Honeycrisp and the Empire apple. It was bred to be a good multi-purpose apple -- sweet-tart and crisp for fresh eating, but also has a firm texture that holds its shape when baked. They also tend to brown less upon slicing, making them a good apple for charcuterie boards.

Fuji apples were brought to the US for cultivation ,and then landing in stores, sometime in the 1980s. I remember when it was a "new" apple. It's one of the sweetest apples on the market. It pairs well with cheese as a snack, and it's low acidity makes it a good apple for adding to salads.

Another mainstay of the supermarket produce section is the Gala apple. Galas have been in US markets since the 1970s. They are thin-skinned and sweet with a faint vanilla fragrance. It does not hold its shape in baking, so this is definitely a better fresh-eating apple.

Soft and Mellow for Sauce and Butter

When it comes to making applesauce or apple butter, texture and flavor are everything. You want an apple that cooks down into a velvety consistency while holding a complex flavor profile of both sweet and mild tartness. The gold standards for homemade applesauce for years have been Golden Delicious and McIntosh apples. Both of these varieties have become near impossible to find in supermarkets these days. You may have luck at farm stands or u-pick orchards. The farm stand near us carries Golden Delicious, selling them by the flat specifically for making sauce and butter.

If you're limited to what your grocery store sells, you can make a good sauce using Fuji or Gala apples, or you can blend a couple of apple varieties in one pot.

If you're blending varieties, the rule of thumb is to use 3 parts sweet apples to 1 part tart apples. So you might use 3 parts Fuji apples with 1 part Granny Smith. Old timers will tell you the best apple sauce isn't made with just one apple variety, but is a combination of several varieties.

There are several other, newer varieties in my grocery stores. The Rockit small apples, often sold in clamshells, are bred to be small and fill a marketing gap -- the kid-sized apple. Rave is a new apple in my stores. It's a summer apple, bursting with juice in every bite and a sweet-tart flavor balance. Most of the new varieties in stores are geared for fresh-eating. Home-baking apple desserts is simply not as popular as it once was. So stores stock what they sell the most.

The photo at the top of the page is our dessert from tonight, a French apple cobbler. You may be wondering what type of apple I used for the cobbler. I used our own tree apples, varieties not sold in our stores. I combined 3 varieties -- a russet apple, which is a sweet-spicy crisp October apple with brown over golden skin, a tart green apple most like a Granny Smith, and a red-skinned, crunchy and sweet apple most like an old-time Jonathon apple. So I combined spicy, sweet, and tart into one dessert.

Do you have a favorite variety of apple? Do you bake apple desserts, or do you mostly eat apples fresh?