Too Many Apples, Too Little Time
I started off the weekend thinking that I’d review two apples for this episode of American Apple. There were only two new varieties at the orchard on Friday when I stopped in. But I swung by again Saturday afternoon and there were four more that I hadn’t yet tried! Ack! I selected two of the four. Here are the varieties I ended up working with this weekend:
Winter Banana. Notice the “suture” line.
Tolman Sweet
Cox Orange Pippin baked in Sour Cream Apple Kuchen
Winter Banana
Who could resist an apple with a name like this one? As a desert apple, it does have a very slight banana flavor. The flesh is white, crisp, and slightly tart. Winter Banana is a lovely apple too! Its exterior is rosy and shiny, and almost delicate looking, with an odd suture line up one side of each apple. These apples originally came from Cass County, Indiana, and were introduced in 1876.
Tolman Sweet
Tolman Sweet is another American apple, a bit older than Winter Banana. First described in 1822, it hails from New England and was once renowned as a cider apple. It’s another one of those that turns brown immediately when cut (see poor, reviled McMahon for another example). The flavor raw is nice and sweet, though the skin is tough. I thought a good cider apple would be really juicy, but Tolman Sweet is not. You don’t notice that they’re dry when eating them, but when I steamed them for apple sauce, they never exploded like most apples do when they’re done. The simply changed color and sagged a little bit. I guess you could call them imploders.
Tompkins County King
Tompkins County King is the third of our American apples this week. This one comes from the mid-Atlantic region and the very earliest decades of the nineteenth century. The King has something of a shady past along with a number of aliases. Besides “Tompkins County King,” it’s also known as Flat Spitzenburg, King, King Apple, King Apple of America, Toma Red, Tommy Red, Tom’s Red and Winter King. Some sources say a man named Jacob Wycoff took the apple from its birthplace in Warren County, New Jersey, to New York. Others claim that it was Thomas Thacker who popularized the apple. In any case, Thompkins County King became one of the most popular apples in new York by the early 20th century. I found the flavor of this one good, but compared to the other apples I tested this week, the flesh was a little soft.
Cox Orange Pippin
Cox Orange Pippin is a prized apple, known for its flavor. The first Cox tree was raised from seed around 1825, at Colnbrook in Buckinghamshire, England, by a retired brewer and horticulturist named Richard Cox. The variety was introduced for sale by the 1850s by Charles Turner, and has been grown commercially since the 1860s. Popular in Europe, Cox Orange Pippins are not well known in the United States. Raw, I found them delicious — crisp and sweet, with a very pleasant apple taste.
The Results
Tolman Sweet v. Winter Banana
I must confess that I’ve eaten so many apples in the past few weeks, that I’m beginning to have trouble telling them apart. Friday night, we tasted Tolman Sweet and Winter Banana in apple sauce and pie. Compared to the apple sauces we made a few weeks ago, both of these sauces lacked pizazz. It’s not that they tasted bland or bad, but the color of both was an ugly browny-red or yellowish green. (See our second episode for some beautiful apple sauces.) Then we tried them in pie. One of our tasters preferred the Winter Banana pie, but the majority preferred Tolman Sweet. In fact, the performance of Tolman Sweet was so good in pie that I drove back to the orchard on Saturday for more. I particularly liked that each slice held its shape in the pie. The slices were soft and fully cooked, but did not become mushy as some apples tend to do when baked.
Cox Orange Pippin v. Tompkins County King
On Saturday, we tested the remaining two apples, this time solely in pie, not in sauce. Though both apples baked up into a respectable pie, Cox Orange Pippin outshone Thompkins County King in flavor. This evening, I used Cox Orange Pippins again in cake. The pippins held their wonderful flavor when baked this way too.
Combining results from both Friday’s and Saturday’s tests, here are the rankings:
- Cox Orange Pippin
- Tolman Sweet
- Winter Banana
- Thompkins County King
Cox Orange Pippin and Tolman Sweet will both make it into my apple bag next year. The other two, while perfectly fine apples, were not outstanding enough for me to buy next year. Too many others that I like better!
