From the moment I enrolled in culinary school a decade-and-a-half ago, people started asking me to rank all sorts of food things, usually with the intent of confirming whatever their pet favorite was. I think it's just as ridiculous now as I did back then.
Just like any other produce, the best variety depends on culinary context, season, setting, and geographic location. I've had about a dozen and a half varieties of apples fresh off the tree and there's more good/bad variance between individual apples than there is between varietals. The only ones I consistently dislike are the delicious varieties. Pulling a fresh, bright red McIntosh off of the tree in early October is an experience that rarely disappoints.
The new proprietary apples are designed to be extremely commercially useful-- essentially a replacement for the more opinionated and less pleasant red delicious-- and they succeeded. They will be "pleasant" and very sweet for more than 6 months in refrigeration without atmosphere modification, but even right off the tree, they're not really different than they are in month 7. Sweet. No real character. They're also living material that was initially patented, which is automatically a black mark in my book. That anybody would be sued for patent infringement by putting a seed in the ground and growing it is pretty fucked up.
Just like any other produce, the best variety depends on culinary context, season, setting, and geographic location. I've had about a dozen and a half varieties of apples fresh off the tree and there's more good/bad variance between individual apples than there is between varietals. The only ones I consistently dislike are the delicious varieties. Pulling a fresh, bright red McIntosh off of the tree in early October is an experience that rarely disappoints.
The new proprietary apples are designed to be extremely commercially useful-- essentially a replacement for the more opinionated and less pleasant red delicious-- and they succeeded. They will be "pleasant" and very sweet for more than 6 months in refrigeration without atmosphere modification, but even right off the tree, they're not really different than they are in month 7. Sweet. No real character. They're also living material that was initially patented, which is automatically a black mark in my book. That anybody would be sued for patent infringement by putting a seed in the ground and growing it is pretty fucked up.