Bringing back the glory of autumn with an apple showdown

I have an apple obsession. It is my favorite fruit, but I'm not sure why. Apples are not a rare food, exotic or hard to find. So my attention soon turned to discovering the best apple, an apple that can be enjoyed raw, filled with sugar, juicy, crunchy and with a wonderful flavor. I think I've found "the one", but I had to compare it against all the others to make sure that it really was as good as I thought it was. I purchased 11 varieties. My husband, Seth, tasted with me, and we both took notes. Here's what we thought.

Pink Lady was pretty, pink and yellow-green. I knew this was a good baking apple, so I wasn't expecting much out of it, but wow! It was crisp, bright, just a tad sour, juicy and zingy. I loved the intense flavor. Seth wrote that it was like a Sweet Tart candy.

Gala, a popular, well-known variety, had a lot less flavor than Pink Lady. It was more watery and not as crisp. Seth wrote that it had a more traditional apple taste.

One I hadn't had before was Jazz. It tasted like a carrot to me and wasn't near as sweet as Gala, but it had a nice crunchy texture. It wasn't in my top five for sure.

Fuji, another old and familiar strain, was very sweet but not extra crispy. I thought it had a good "appley" taste, which is hard to pin down, but we all know it when we taste it.

I have known since childhood that the name of the Red Delicious apple is a lie. It is red, a lovely deep red, and the apple itself has a pretty shape, with those long sloping columns that start on the blossom end of the fruit and run halfway up the sides like an elegant built-in globe holder. But the taste is almost like a vegetable and not very sweet. I thought it tasted musty, like towels that had been left wet too long. Seth said that it was the peel that gave it that musty taste, but the flesh was OL. I still can't recommend Red Delicious.

Honeycrisp is one people seem to love, and after the Red Delicious, I am a fan. The flavor was good and bright; the texture was crunchy. The whole thing was light, playful and sweet. This is a good apple.

Granny Smith green apples are the penultimate baking apple, but I've never eaten one raw. Mine was pretty darn sour, and a little fishy was the only word that came even close to the taste. It wasn't as crunchy as I like, but if you don't want a sweet apple, this one's for you.

Pazazz is another type I've never tried yet, so I was excited. It had a pretty golden flesh, was really sweet and tasted a bit of bananas. This was a unique flavor that I enjoyed. Seth just said it was "not bad", so take my critique with a grain of salt.

The Jonagold captured a little of my heart with its slightly sour taste that reminded me of the wild apples that used to grow at the end of the driveway at my childhood home. Every year, I'd wait for months until the tiny apples were ripe enough to eat, and some of that came through in the Jonagold flavor.

Cosmic Crisp is a fairly recently developed variety. I just discovered it last fall, and it is good. Big beefy apples, deep red, super crisp and sugary sweet with a honey note, I thought Cosmic Crisps may have been good enough to unseat my favorite. But after tasting them side by side, I'm still stuck on...

Autumn Glory — a lovely name for a lovely apple. I first tasted it in the fall of 2022, and you are going to think I am ridiculous, but this is an amazing fruit. Crunchy without fail, an Autumn Glory tastes like cider with hints of spice already built in. Sometimes, I think it tastes a little like wine, but faintly, and there is a complex perfumy undertone that none of the apples come close to. This apple is delicious, and I can't encourage you enough to try one if you love apples. A perfect 10 out of 10 on the scale, and then some, and Seth agreed that the Autumn Glory was No. 1.