Fall is a very busy time of year when it comes to getting upset about flavors. There is no shortage of opinions on pumpkins, or whether turkey is any good, or how to properly sauce a cranberry. Meanwhile, apples have been getting a free pass from food writers for years. “Oh, an apple,” people exclaim vaguely when presented with one. “That’s good, somehow.”
Apples are monstrous. They are monstrous when they come pre-sliced and pre-doused with citric acid in a small plastic bag; they are monstrous when shaved into a sandwich or snuck into a salad; they are monstrous by themselves and they are monstrous with cheese; they are monstrous freshly plucked from the damned tree and they are monstrous hauled out of a cellar in mid-January. Put peanut butter on it, if you like; now you have a messy apple that smells like peanut butter.
They ruin cakes, they ruin crepes. The best part of “apple spice” anything is the spice.
I will not discuss candy apples here, as that is beneath both of our dignities.
There is nothing that can be done to an apple to improve it. Remove the skin, and you have a featureless white mass, without contrast in either flavor or texture; the jicama of fruit. Leave the skin on, and it fragments and splinters and curls into maddening little shavings that take up residence between the teeth.
Go ahead. Bite an apple, whether whole or sliced. It is a disgusting simulacra of the eating process. There is something in your mouth, to be sure. Your mouth could not accurately be described as “empty.” But what is there? Grainy globs of cold, tasteless flesh. Crispy chunks that slowly melt and soften into pale gobbets of saliva-coated fiber. A peel that must be chewed a thousand times before it can be wrestled into submission and digestion. The suggestion of a memory of a flavor. And nothing. Eating an apple is a nihilist act.
An apple is an offensively virtuous food. “If you are not hungry enough to eat an apple,” as the saying goes, “then you are not really hungry.” First of all, you don’t know my life. Second of all, when has an apple ever sated real hunger? An apple is a sphere of tasteless cellulose bound together by a thick, impenetrable peel. Perhaps the kindest thing that can be said about an apple is that it is not a pear.
Perhaps the worst thing that can be said about an apple is that if you take a few bites without immediately consuming and disposing of the rest, it almost immediately collapses in upon itself, like a black hole. The edges shrivel. Your bite marks brown and then soften. The whole thing takes on the appearance of a shrunken head, which seems deliberately provocative. Apples are trash food and you are a human being. Give an apple to a cow. A cow has four stomachs, which seems like the appropriate number of stomachs to have to dedicate to demolishing the indestructible peel of the apple. Also, cows do not care what they eat, as long as it is crunchy.
Some of you, I know, do not refrigerate your apples, a choice I find inexplicable but still respect your ability to make. A cold apple can aspire to be at least inoffensive; a room-temperature apple is an affront to the front of the human face. There is nothing else I can say to you about the matter.
“But things are different now,” I hear you say. “The Red Delicious and Granny Smiths of our youth are no longer our only options.” I know, my friend. I know. I can go to any farmer’s market and buy a sack of absurd, tiny Pink Fantastics or Sunshine Dollface varietals. There is no difference. They are smaller, not better.
Apples are bullshit.
[Image via Wikimedia Commons]
If you do not like eating apples you have not had a truly wonderful apple, and I have now learned that even the best supermarket organic yum yum apple is shit compared to an apple-orchard apple from, say, Dutchess County, NY, that you picked yourself. Mutsus, Northern Spies, Pink Pearls, HONEYCRISPS….the heart trembles. Back here in SF I must make do with so-so grannies and maybe a Fuji.
THIS HAS ALREADY BEEN ADDRESSED get your “no true scotsman” rhetorical fallacy and HIT THE ROAD, apple-lover!!!1!
But Mutsus are as big as my face and so circumvent the “smaller not better” part by being GIANT AND FANTASTIC!!1!!1 i’m tearin holes in yer argument, Ortberg!
DUTCHESS COUNTY APPLES FOREVA! ….. are you a Vassar girl??
No, a Bard girl, but yes, they are the best apples of all apples and I will not hear otherwise!
Yeah but what about grapes?
Grapes are fine. They’re not amazing, but they’re fine.
Grapes are like eating the egg sacs of a sea creature. Grapes are awful. They POP like gel-filled balloons. Ngggh
The TSA agrees with you, recently confiscating my grapes for being a “gel” and therefore a threat to airport security.
no WAY. ugh TSA. i almost threw down over some tupperware’d mashed potatoes and gravy coming home from Thanksgiving last year.
I don’t understand the question and I won’t respond to it.
Madam. /This will not stand./ Fetch my pistols, Olivier! Tomorrow we ride!
IF YOUR APPLE-BLOATED CARCASS CAN STAND IN THE MORNING
I am having Olivier polish my long dueling gloves just for you, Ortberg. JUST FOR YOU. I want you to see the shine of my pistols reflected onto every curve of leather and recognize me as your DOOM.
Did you have to do this WHILE I WAS EATING AN APPLE?
I just ate two. All I did was read the whole article with my mouth a-gape.
Just so you know, I’m envisioning you reading this with two apples sticking out of your mouth.
I’m literally wiping honeycrisp juice off my chin laughing about how sad I am for her. #concerntroll
WHERE DOES THE JUICE COME FROM?? APPLES ARE NOT JUICY BUT THERE IS INEXPLICABLE APPLE-SCENTED WATER HIDING INSIDE EVERY LAST ONE
IT COMES FROM THE OTHER PLACE 🙂
WHERE THE BIRDS SING A PRETTY SONG.
OR IT COULD BE FROM WHEN THE APPLE CYSTS POP.
I once had a friend over for dinner who hated apples. I accidentally put apple juice in every dish and didn’t tell him.
Until I was about 16, I thought there were two types of apples: red apples and green apples.
But once my tastebuds experienced the pure crisp sweet tart joy of a Honeycrisp, there was no going back to the misnomer/abomination known as “Red Delicious.”
I have long maintained that apples are, among other things, THE INFERIOR PIE FRUIT and I will believe no differently until the end of my days.
LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU OVER THE DELICIOUS CRUNCHING OF MY HONEYCRISP LA LA LA THE TOAST REMAINS PERFECT
“Perhaps the kindest thing that can be said about an apple is that it is not a pear.”
Hear hear!
A good pear is way better than a good apple. A bad apple is way worse than a bad pear.
All pears are disgusting. Also all peaches. This probably began as a reaction against the slimy canned versions of both I had in my youth, but the disgust remains.
Currently eating something produce-stickered as an “Apple Pear” (PLU 4407)
I can’t get behind you on this, Mallory. The apples I get from the grocery store sometimes, those apples range from bad to mediocre to kinda good. But the farmers’ market apples? Those are great: crispy, not too hard or too mealy, fragrant even before I cut* into them, and spilling with juice so delicious it should rightly be called “nectar.”
*I could say “before I bite into them,” but I’m not going to front: I haven’t bitten into an apple in years. If I’m eating them raw, I want them sliced into translucently thin crescents and served with sharp cheese.
So no, I can’t get behind you on your “apples are bullshit” agenda. But what I can get behind is a general sentiment about not wanting or appreciating any particular foodstuff. For example, apricots can get fucked.
Apricots are pointless. They’re just peaches that’re harder to eat. No one likes them.
I can barely be bothered with actual peaches, though I realize that probably says more about my peach-buying history than it does about peaches in general. But I can be a lot more polite about peaches than about apricots.
Yeah, grocery store apples often suck. But fresh, non-agri-business apples are awesome. (This article is making me miss my apple tree — it was a victim of Hurricane Sandy last year.)
Also: total yes on the apricots. Nectarines and peaches are awesome, but apricots have no business existing.
Mealy bland apples are bullshit, and canned peaches are coated in devil slime, but I have eaten many a fresh peach straight off the damn tree and they are the very best.
Apricots can kiss my ass.
While I’m at it, I would rather drive upholstery tacks through my gums than eat a pear.
Apples are legit but pumpkin spice lattes are the devil’s vomit.
Never before have you been so wrong about anything. The hatred of hummus I can understand, but apples?? They are Nature’s gift to Man.
Whatever, Mallory. All the more apples for me. I will pick them and make them into crumbles and pies, and eat them raw for breakfast, and sip delicately from goblets of apple cider, alcoholic and non-.
Christ, even my avatar is of me in a bushel of apples, taken while apple picking last autumn.
THERE ARE SOME GOOD APPLES. SOMETIMES.
Like … 8% of the time.
But at least the funky organic Galas and whatnot are small enough that I can eat a whole one before it turns into a knobby, rust-stained hunk of gross that leers at me while I think “oh my god you have to finish it it’s just ONE APPLE what’s wrong with you?”
You leave pears out of this you monstrous woman
Pears are like the deformed rotting offspring of tasteless apples and fine-grit sandpaper.
NEVER
You’re all bastard people!
Pears are ass-faces!
I’m with you, dude, and relayed a similar stance around these parts.
The only acceptable use of an apple is apple pie, and only when made without adding stupid water or cornstarch and only when topped with a crumb topping of brown sugar and butter.
I have never had a brown sugar and butter topping on a pie and now I MUST TRY THIS. This sounds amazing.
It is literally butter, brown sugar, and flour. Oats, too, I guess, if you want them, but they are unnecessary. Check out any recipe for Dutch apple pie. “Dutch” means it has the crumb topping.
I got ahold of a 60s-era Betty Crocker cookbook, and, to my surprise, the pie you describe was called a “French Apple Pie.” They had a recipe for Dutch apple, and it was a regular two-crust pie, but you make extra-large slits in the top crust before baking, then pour heavy cream into the slits about 10 minutes before the pie was finished baking. Very odd, and I think it wouldn’t be good because then how can you have ice cream with it if it’s already full of cream?
Wait, why could you NOT have ice cream if it’s already full of cream? I don’t see the problem, really.
Fair point.
But no other fruit is available for purchase PRE-CLOAKED IN DELICIOUS CARAMEL. Also ONNA STICK.
If state fairs have taught us anything, it is that the best foods in life come on sticks, ZERO EXCEPTIONS except tiramisu but I bet you could put that on a stick if you tried hard enough
Also FUCK WATERMELON #unpopularfruitopinions
Fuck watermelons indeed!
Hear, hear!
The caramel and the stick is the point, not the apple. Fling some caramel on a pretzel. It’s a pre-made stick, and crunchy to boot.
…That actually sounds delicious.
BUT ALSO YOU CAN PRY MY CARAMEL APPLES FROM MY COLD, DEAD, DISTURBINGLY-STICKY HANDS.
But pretzels are disgusting.
I feel like caramel apples are part of the reason candy apples have a bad rap. In my world, caramel apples are called “caramel apples,” not “candy apples.” (I AM NOT NAYSAYING YOUR CARAMEL APPLES. I’m just saying that if someone offered me a candy apple and produced a caramel apple, I’d have to conceal my disappointment.)
Candy apples are bedecked in impossibly red glaze, as bright and perfect and magical to a child as the ruby slippers, and you make them by impaling a small apple on a stick, then dipping it into a hot sugar syrup and twirling them.
The heat of the syrup ever so slightly cooks the skin and the barest layer of apple flesh under it. That means that when you bite into the candy apple, you bite through three layers: the shatteringly crisp red glaze, a tender layer of something like a baked apple might dream of being, and then the crunchy, satisfying CHOMP of fresh apple. Eating my first candy apple made me better grasp the concept of “sugar plums” and other old-fashioned sweets, and making my own candy apples is one of the shining memories of my childhood.
I myself am not a fan of candy apples, but on the behalf of the Caramel Apple Brigade, I am willing to enter a mutual-protection pact with the Candy Apple Privateers against Mallory’s unceasing and clearly deranged war on all of appledom.
Or you and I could just sit here and eat all the caramel and candy apples, respectively. TO PROTECT THEM.
EXCELLENT PLAN.
THREE BABY TEETH gone to ONE of those things, BLOOD EVERYWHERE
Mallory Ortberg will not rest until she sits upon a throne constructed of the rotting carcasses of every snack you have ever held dear. Hold your string cheese close, it may soon be taken from you.
Surely string cheese is among the more disturbing, freakishly non-food-like snacks we currently accept as edible?
Its name is not a strange reference to something else; it is literally fibrous, in the manner of yarn or, I don’t know, hemp, or other materials we use to produce clothing and upholstery. It is like eating cold, not-quite-dairy-flavored twine.
Apples, though.
String cheese is totally good!!!
String cheese : real cheese :: Red Delicious apples : Honeycrisp
*lobs apple over the barricade, ducks back into foxhole*
First she came for the apples, then she came for the string cheese, and finally and most horrifically, she came for the goldfish crackers.
The fact that no one so far has replied with some variant of “Well, how do you like DEM apples?” is shocking to me.
*I* will be that person. I will do it. Someone has to.
I am ashamed of myself.
I, too, think apples are garbage, and if Nick agrees with us, we should probably make this an official Toast Stance.
Who are you people??
If you’d told me before today that some people did not like apples, I would not have believed you.
I am still not convinced this isn’t an elaborate joke.
I’m standing in the awesome orchard down the street from my house, eating a delicious apple right off the tree and laughing. Heartily.
Nick, you alone stand between The Toast and The Abyss of Irretrievably Bad Fruit Opinions. Choose well!
I REGRET NOTHING
You are my third least favorite Toast employee right now.
The only acceptable use for apples is horse bribery. NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION.
AGREED. THERE IS CONSENSUS.
Well, we find ourselves at an ideological impasse for the vast majority of this opinion piece, but I agree with you passionately, vehemently, on your stance re: lukewarm apples. Lukewarm fruit is made of garbage and I do not understand when people have it just lying around in cute little bowls on their countertops or whatever, like, Hey guest in our home, here is some garbage we have lying around for the taking, also flies, if you want to sit here that’s cool also.
Also do any other commenters find that by submitting their comments they automatically “+1/thumbs up” it? Obviously not a big deal, but some part of me feels like the moderators can see that I’m liking it and are like, “God, what a douche”?
lolll “the moderators” honey it’s literally just me and it happens to me too and i have no idea why
Oh fuck, if Id’ve known you were modding this thread I would have been much more respectful of your (terrible) stance on apples!
NO RESPECT. FUCK HER “FUCK ALL APPLES” STANCE.
p.s., Mallory, if you come over for dinner someday, I promise not to serve apples and also not* to yell “FUCK HER STANCE” a whole lot.
*I mean, probably not. I’m not made of stone.
What I really want to know is why some of them say +0.
You don’t. You really don’t.
It’s an IntenseDebate thing where registered commenters automatically get a +1, is my understanding.
It’s IntenseDebate! You give yourself a nice pat on the back just for saying something.
IT HURTS SOME PEOPLES TEETH TO EAT COLD FRUITS OKAY
this is the most fun i have ever had
The troll is coming from inside the house!
I spent a far-too-long two years in upstate New York, prime apple country, when I was in grad school. I had so many (then) delicious apple varieties, fresh picked. I ate so many though that now I almost never want another apple again. Like, I’ll eat one if it is offered to me, but I don’t ever buy them for myself.
Pears have always been the worst. Always. The. Worst. Inedible.
Pears are redeemable ONLY in the smittenkitchen pear and chocolate scones.
Yes! Pears! Terrible! Ugh.
What I do hate about apples, especially, is that apple juice is in pretty much every other non-apple fruit-juice drink, which is straight up bullshit. If I’m paying like $3-4 for a drink (looking at you, Odwalla), I don’t want any trace of apple juice in my clearly non-apple-flavored drink.
Mallory it is callous of you to not even bother disclosing your payment from the Banana Lobby. You act as if you have your own independent reasons for criticizing an honest American fruit, and not just a big paycheck from the promoters of the coquettish, never-ripe Nature’s Go-Gurt that’s sneaking in to steal its job.
bananas are fine and nick sucks
But are the black bits in them tarantula’s eggs?
I’ve heard the black tips of bananas described as Satan’s asshole.
Yeah, they all suck. HEYYYYY
“Nature’s Go-Gurt” is the best thing in this whole comments section. And I say that as someone who loves bananas.
Honeycrisps, are you kidding me? Get out of here with your high-end designer apples.
Mallory, the National Apple Harvest Festival is only two weeks away!
It comessss, Mallory. It comessssssss.
I have a fruit bowl full of apples. I buy them every week to replace the shrivelled up ones that came before them. I don’t eat them. I don’t LIKE them.
I think soup is seriously overrated, but I keep making that slop too.
Mallory, have you ever had pumpkin apple cider? It’s like fall in a (boozy) glass.
OK thank you, I spent so long trying to like apples – so convenient! Don’t go bad quickly! Always at the grocery store! But they suck. I’ll say it too. And the only thing worse than a fresh apple is baked apples. Like those awful square chunks you get in a muffin, the horrible chewy knob ruining a good muffin!
I love apple juice though. And apple cider.
chunks of apple in a muffin are inexcusable. Apples put into muffins should be shredded or minced.
Say what you will about the fall of man into sin fruit, that’s fine, but how dare…(tears welling up) HOW DARE you so casually push pears even lower than this vitriol? I’m appalled.
Hating kiwis I can understand. They are green and slimey and weird-looking. Pears are prima donnas that go from cement hard to spoiled in nanoseconds. But a fresh Virginia Stayman, or Mountaineer, or York..those are ambrosial. It’s pistols for two, coffee for one time, my apple-hating “friend”.
I will only eat Pink Lady apples. How has no one mentioned those yet?
I love Pink Ladies, but sometimes they’re just *too* tart. Like, I want a little zing with my apple, but I don’t want to be wiping at my eyes and ruining my mascara just for the sake of some tasty fiber.
Amen. Amen amen amen.
I literally got up, got an apple from the bag of apples I picked last weekend, started eating, and came back to read the rest of this. Your apple hate made me crave an apple.
What happened here? I could’ve sworn I typed in “the-toast.net” but my browser seems to have taken me to Slate instead! 😉
(LOL at “whimsically held positions”)
I cannot wait for the next installment of food trolling. What will it be? PLUMS (also not a pear)? TOMATOES ( another instance of “grainy globs of cold, tasteless flesh”)? HONEY?
why would a tomato ever be COLD
I DUNNO, because its in the compost heap with all the apples?
anyhow it’ll probably be peanut butter
How very continental (the hating of peanut butter)
You leave honey alone, you bee-slaying fascist!
I thought I liked apples but now I see the light. My God, what have I been putting in my mouth.
Two things:
1) what is up with you guys hating on pears, have you not had the succulent deliciousness that is an Asian pear??
2) I could probably summon up a similarly vitriolic piece on bean sprouts, and I’m wondering if anyone else hates them too.
Bean sprouts I am indifferent too, but alfalfa sprouts are like getting a mouthful of vegetative pubic hair. I think whatever Gods may be (1) I no longer live in California and (2) the 80s are over (but I live in terror the Sprout will return in perverse retro food glory).
It’s the texture! Pears are so …weird and grainy and mushy, eugh.
I am with you on bean sprouts, though. I love how crunchy they are; I do not love how friendly they are to e.coli.
Bean sprouts are pointless and look way too much like they were unearthed from far underground.
Yes, let’s discuss bean sprouts, or as I prefer to call them, the devil’s pubes. They are the worst.
Blech. They taste like dust.
I feel kinda average about raw apples. But I vehemently hate cooked apples. Warm mushy apples are horrific. In fact I hate most cooked fruit in general. Fruit should be cold.
THANK YOU, MALLORY. My memory of apples is faint because I’ve been allergic to them for nearly 30 years, so I was never sure if they were actually gross, or if I played up their grossness to convince myself that I wasn’t missing out on anything. Thank you for confirming that my reasons for not liking them are valid (and happen to be the same as yours, unsurprisingly).
Oh, and since you hate apples so much, never watch the movie In Dreams. The apples were even creepier in that movie than the deranged and murderous Robert Downey, Jr. I’ve never seen so many apples in my whole fucking life.
I for one will not be forced back into the produce closet. I urge all right-thinking people to join me in partaking of the #ForbiddenFruit at 8 PM EST tonight. I’m making an apple-brown sugar glaze for pork chops. You can take them from my cold dead hands. And I ask you: What will children polish in order to curry favor with their teachers? The implications are unsettling, to say the least.
To all you oppressors, I ask: Today she came for the apples, but what will Mallory Ortberg deny us next? Hot fudge topping? Salted peanuts?? Fine white wines??? No. Resist! Join me.
Apples make my mouth itch. Thus, they are demon food.
Macintosh apples are the BEST, because they are the only apples that taste like anything. Actually I have a book somewhere that says that like, not planting in their natives soils and all this other factory farming bullshit is what have made apples so tasteless now.
Also: FUCK RED DELICIOUS FOREVER, THE ONLY THING THAT IS TRUE ABOUT THEM IS THAT THEY ARE RED.
McIntosh.
WHATEVER
Word. Give me macs or give me no apples.
I am torn on my allegiances. On the one hand, i can eat a skinless piece of a granny smith or a Cortland or McIntosh anytime.
On the other hand I think gold delicious, pink ladies and any kind of tall skinny red apple are garbage and I’d rather chew glass, and apple skin is a nightmare, its like a carrot, you chew and chew and it never compacts and goes away.
My dad also makes a really good apple crisp- again using our regional good apples- the macintosh and the cortland. And as a firm new englander there’s nothing so good as a warm apple pie with a real chunk of cold sharp vermont cheddar atop it.
team tentative apple? But also team anti-apple eaters?
“Perhaps the kindest thing that can be said about an apple is that it is not a pear.”
This is why I invite you to things. You are the only person who is ever allowed to bring a fruit salad to a potluck organized by me.
Then again your idea of “bringing fruit” is wine.
This is also why I invite you to things.
I cannot go with you on this Mallory, but I do wonder about your stance on Apple Cider, alcoholic and non-
I’d imagine your American apples are terrible. In Europe we have real apples, they’re as big as ones head and extraordinarily sweet.
I thought European food snobbery had its limits, but here we are!
I live deep in apple country, and the first thing people do when they grow up and get educated is try to get the heck out of apple country. Bottom tier fruit!
I can take or leave raw apples. I never crave them. I LOVE apple pie, baked apples, apple cider, etc.
I would like to take this opportunity to express my hatred of YOGURT. Ughhhhhhhhh. Acidic super sweet dairy liquid crap occasionally mixed with sweetened preserved fruit that only tastes like the chemicals it was preserved in. SO GODDAMNED GROSS.
Well for heaven’s sake stop eating flavoured yogurt.
Apples are average. There are many fruits that are worse and many that are better. I do like apple pie but that’s because you could bake anything into a pie and I’d eat it.
Grapes are stupid, nectarines are stupid, oranges are stupid. Plums are mostly stupid.
(Can’t wait for the hummus post.)
I’m going to go into my backyard and pick all the apple pears off the tree and then joyously eat many of them whilst projecting my joy directly to the naysayers.
Cut apples seem to oxidize about 30 seconds after they’re stripped and displayed on the plate. Not pretty! Prefer my apples fully clothed.
Anything that shares a species with Red Delicious is evil
Apples are the best fruit and I feel sorry for anyone who can’t see that and also this is offensive and I’m never reading this website ever again
“Mon ami, an apple is an excellent thing–until you have tried a peach!…How can one describe the quality of a peach or a nectarine to those who have only known apples?”
-Trilby, George du Maurier
What everyone really needs are Haralson apples, but they are only found in Minnesota and therefore my life has been terrible for the last tenshit, FOURTEEN years.
ladies i think u and your [round pink apples] are beautiful send me pics i am real [wo]man who appreciates real [pink] lady [apples]
(see also: honeycrisp for life)
SOLID REFERENCE.
You are my third least favorite Toast employee right now.
Most commercial apples are sold far from ripe, so like a commercial tomato they are horrible.
The pitiful few preferred varieties; delicious, golden delicious, granny smith and their variants are pretty tasteless, and best used as a cooking apple. The other popular modern apples are bred for crunch, sugar (especially Japanese like Fuji) or skin color or hugeness.
But there are many fabulous apples out there at farmers markets or backyard trees; Macintosh, Winesap, Gravenstein, Northern Spy, Rhode Island Greening, Cortland, Arkansas Black, Opalescent,Pippin,,.. The list is endless.
Picked ripe, eaten fresh, cooked or brewed they have amazing flavor. You need to get out more.
I'm standing in the awesome orchard down the street from my house, eating a delicious apple right off the tree and laughing. Heartily.
I love apples. Always have, always will. Though I do believe my love was enhanced by a painful separation in the form of braces. But I’m rather surprised no one’s mentioned Graples. All the delicious sweetness of red grapes in the crisp juicy packaging of a huge apple.
Also, AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO LIKES TO GO VAMPIRE ON MY APPLES AND SUCK OUT THEIR JUICES?!
That’s cause the French have extra-large slits. Filled with cream.
Oh god I’m sorry.
Isn’t apple spice flavour basically just cinnamon?
Also; there’s some serious pear libel in this article >:(
Mangos forever.
That is all.