broken apple taste

[mindstalk]

I'm starting to wonder if something damaged my ability to taste apples. I've been systematically trying a bunch of different varieties, and they all register as "crisp, moist", some a bit sweeter than others, none sour or tart. Okay, so then I just tried a Granny Smith apple -- famously sour. Nope. Maaaaybe slightly sourer than the others, but I feel that in a blind taste test I'd say "just another bland apple."

Can I still taste sour things? Oh sure, like diluted lemon juice.

Maybe drinking diluted lemon juice raised my sour threshold? But I've been doing that only recently, while I've been feeling apples were bland for the past few years, and for some unclear reason stopped buying them regularly years before that.

Maybe apples just suck when you're used to pigging out on clementines and berries?

But I remember actively liking Braeburn and Pink Lady apples when I first encountered them...

Comments

[squirrelitude]

Do you get a sort of piney scent from any of them? How about floral?

[mindstalk]

Dunno, not that I'd noticed, though I haven't been sniffing for that. Why?

Some varieties did have some extra flavor component I couldn't pin down: Envy, Fuji, Pazzazz. I have "pineappleish?" noted for Fuji.

[squirrelitude]

Just curious about what aspects of flavor/scent you might be missing. A lot of the differences that I find between apples are actually *texture*, not flavor, but the most important distinctions in flavor that I find are:

- Sweetness
- Sourness
- Acrid/bitter (Granny Smith has... *something* adjacent to this -- it's not just sourness)
- Floral scent
- Piney scent
- And probably pineapple, yeah

There's more that I can't tease apart. Like, why does Red Delicious taste so bland? It might just be a lack of other flavor components, but maybe it's also the presence of something else.

[mindstalk]

As a child I associated Red with horrible mealy texture. In Boston I had one from a farmer's market. It was crunchier, but yeah bland.

I just had a Braeburn, my old favorite (they seem harder to find these days, like none at Safeway) At the macro level it was Another Fucking Bland apple like all the others, but I found myself more enthusiastic about finishing it. I don't know why, there wasn't consciously some extra flavor component, it wasn't sour or exceptionally sweet.

OTOH it was also the first thing I ate today; I wasn't starving or super hungry but that might have helped.