My very favourite apples are Cortlands, which aren't available all year, and my second-favourite are McIntosh, which are available nearly all year. I make do with Paula Reds and Ida Reds during the summer gap, but I don't like those ones nearly that much. I actively dislike Red Delicious and similar varieties. I find Granny Smith too tart and Honeycrisp too crisp.
Currently, the Loblaws I usually go doesn't have either Cortlands or Macs. Metro had Cortlands up until this week (although they were the kind in the bag rather than the kind in the bin), and now they still have Macs. (This is an interesting reversal - usually Loblaws more reliably has produce I like better.)
However, I've noticed in both supermarkets a sudden influx of apple varieties I don't recognize. There may well be apples I like among these new varieties, but I have no way of knowing which ones, and I don't much fancy the idea of buying and eating a bunch of apples I don't like just in case one of them meets needs already met by existing varieties.
I think Foodland Ontario could help me with this.
Foodland Ontario's mandate is to encourage people to buy local produce. Surely helping us discover new things we like falls within this mandate! Foodland Ontario is also basically the "official" source of information about produce varieties. If there's such thing as tasting notes for apple varieties, they'd be the ones who have them.
So they should take the information they have about all the different apple varieties, and use it to make a grid, or a flowchart, or a nifty little interactive website where I can input the fact that I like Cortlands and Macs and dislike Red Delicious, and it would tell me what other varieties I'm likely to enjoy. The more varieties you can give your opinion on, the better results it could get - so if you do find yourself going through the produce section doing trial and error, it can help you pick better next time.
8 comments:
Copletely asid from your main point, the reason for the apple shortage was last summer's weather. Many Ontario apple farmers lost their entire crop due to the funky weather.
Yeah, one of the orchards that has a stall at my usual market told me only 30% of their crop survived. And another one didn't even had a stall this past summer because none of their crop survived.
But I did read somewhere that this will mean there's more apples next year, because the crops were lost at the bud phase to the trees never grew any apples and therefore put that energy into growing bigger, which means they'll be able to grow more apples for this coming crop.
But even if that's true, we've still got a long way to go before the next harvest...
Ha! Good luck with that. Even the parentage of some of those cultivars is proprietary information.
Can the taste of food that they're selling for the purpose of people eating it really be proprietary information?
Well, flavor is of course subjective, but of course one of the reasons that this is the case is differences in genetic endowment of taste receptors, so if your chart of flavor similarities would have to be compiled by so-called supertasters (or perhaps with statistical analysis over a very large panel of tasters). Another approach, which I'm sure is being worked on and will almost certainly be fleshed out pretty thoroughly in our lifetime, would be identification of those compounds in apples (or any food) that interact with which taste receptors (and of course which genes are responsible both on the apple side and the human side), and yes, I suspect/expect that research is mostly on the proprietary side of the fence.
I figured it could work like sommeliers do for wine.
Update: turns out this idea wouldn't work as well as I expected, because I noticed today that the unfamiliar varieties in Loblaws are from the US, probably because we had such a bad fruit season here.
I would like this, too, and I'm surprised Whole Foods doesn't do it. The cultivating process may (or may not) be proprietary, but people can still market foods any way they like.
It could be done with a simple set of descriptors, like wine. A store I love in NYC does this. Beside a fruit or vegetable, there'll be a description like "crisp, tart, slightly vanilla taste" (Honeycrisp apple) or "smoky, meaty, dense" (some mushroom variety). They also do this with their huge variety of cheeses.
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