LIKE DENIM JACKETS, CBS SHELDONS, AND AIR, apples are everywhere this season.
You can almost smell the "generic apple promotion" of National Apple Month in the increasingly chilly wind! It only makes sense to rank them -- all of them.
If only there weren't 7,500 varieties of apples in the world! Even though many of them have provocative names like Ashmead's Kernel, Westfield Seek-No-Further, Criterion, and the twin lovers of industry, Enterprise and Wealthy, I wasn't going to get to every apple out there. So I limited my taste test to a dozen from the US Apple Association's list of the popular varieties in America, which collectively account for 90 percent of domestic sales, plus four other regionally abundant apple varieties that would have been weird not to include.
To conduct this ranking, I secured a conference room under the guise of a calendar event named "Important Meeting" and assessed piles of apples by taste, texture, and sheer apple-ness of each variety until I'd meal-replaced myself to pectin shivers. It is an honor and a privilege to present my perfect ranking of -- along with proposed slogans for -- 16 popular apples in North America: https://www.thrillist.com/eat/nation/best-apples-for-baking-eating/food-and-drink
