Fruits

Apples Malus domestica

Firm varieties like Braeburn and Honeycrisp hold their shape in heat. McIntosh collapses into sauce.

21 recipes on this site

In the kitchen

Under heat

Pectin holds the cell walls together up to about 85°C; past that they break down into sauce. A quick sear in butter caramelizes the surface sugars before the inside softens.

Against air

Cut flesh browns within minutes as an enzyme reacts with oxygen. A splash of lemon juice or a bowl of water slows it, not stops it.

In storage

Keep them in the crisper, away from other produce — apples give off enough ethylene to over-ripen everything nearby.

At the shop

Press near the stem, not the middle. A soft spot there means the core has already started to break down.

Which variety, for what

Honeycrisp / Braeburn: Firm-fleshed, hold their shape through baking or roasting without collapsing.
McIntosh: Breaks down fast under heat — the right choice when you actually want sauce, not slices.
Granny Smith: High acid balances a sweet filling and keeps its bite longer than most in a pie.

Beyond the kitchen

EVERY SEED IS A NEW VARIETY

Apples are extreme heterozygotes: a pip from a Braeburn will not grow a Braeburn, or anything like one. Every named variety is a single original tree propagated by grafting ever since, which means every Granny Smith on earth is a clone of one tree found in New South Wales in the 1860s.

JOHNNY APPLESEED PLANTED CIDER

John Chapman planted seeds, not grafted trees, so his orchards produced small sour fruit unfit for eating. They were grown for hard cider, which was the ordinary drink of the American frontier. The Prohibition-era axing of cider orchards is why the story was rewritten around eating apples.

THE WILD ANCESTOR SURVIVES

Malus sieversii still grows in the fruit forests of the Tian Shan mountains in Kazakhstan, and some of those wild trees bear fruit indistinguishable from a cultivated apple. The city of Almaty takes its name from the word for apple.

CONTROLLED ATMOSPHERE STORAGE

Apples sold in spring were picked the previous autumn and held in sealed rooms with oxygen reduced to around one or two per cent, which nearly halts ripening. The technology dates to the 1920s and is why apples are the one fruit available year-round without air freight.

A longer history

The domesticated apple descends principally from Malus sieversii, a wild apple from the Tian Shan mountains of Central Asia, carried west along the Silk Road where it hybridised with European crab apples. Grafting — without which named varieties cannot exist — was practised in the Near East by the first millennium BCE, and the Romans spread both the technique and the fruit across their empire.

Monastic and manorial orchards preserved apple growing through the European Middle Ages, and by the seventeenth century hundreds of named varieties existed, most of them local and most of them destined for cider rather than the table. European settlers took seeds rather than grafts to North America, producing enormous genetic diversity and, with it, thousands of new American varieties in a few generations.

The twentieth century reversed that diversity sharply. Commercial breeding, cold storage and supermarket buying narrowed the global trade to a handful of varieties chosen for shipping and shelf life, and many heritage apples survive now only in collections. The recent revival of older varieties and of real cider is a deliberate reaction to that narrowing.

Pairs with

Good with

Pork Cheddar Butter Walnuts Cream Celeriac Black pudding

Combines with

Cinnamon Clove Nutmeg Cardamom Sage Allspice Star anise

Used in these recipes

Dessert

Apples Malus domestica