Pink Lady Apple Review
"A Fiery Troublemaker"
🏅 #7 RANKED SOUR APPLE | 🏅 #5 RANKED BAKING APPLE
The perfect blend of sweet and tart, this fiery bitch is a headliner at supermarkets worldwide. Not as snappy as you’d like, and dense enough to hammer a nail, this unflappable cart-stopper is a true trailblazer as the first apple name to be awarded a trademark.
But the name “Pink Lady” isn’t just snappy branding. It’s a badge of honor bestowed only upon the worthy. Every year, millions of pitiful Cripps Pink apples desperately cling to the ever-vanishing hope that they would one day ascend past their beggarly form to the vaunted moniker of “Pink Lady.” But only the true standouts meet this high standard while the undeserving are relegated to the *gag* discount stores. This taxing gauntlet results in a remarkably consistent apple.
BONUS POINTS: +3 Historical Significance, +1 Branding / Consistency, +1 Baking
- FLAVOR PROFILE -
SWEETNESS
2/5
TARTNESS
3.5/5
INTENSITY
3/5
PINK LADY BIO
PARENTAGE
Golden Delicious x Lady Williams
ORIGIN
Western Australia
YEAR
1985
AVAILABILITY
Year-round
BEST USES
Munching, Applesauce,
We’re definitely on the same page! I embarked on my varietal taste test because I recently picked up some Pink Ladies on a whim after ignoring them for years and was highly impressed. Right up there with Honeycrisps as my favorite grocery stores varieties, especially if I’m in the mood for more tartness.
Pink Lady is a joke Many apples are sold as so called Pink Lady. Eg Cripps Pink and Rosy Glow are very different looking and tasting. The consumer is being conned
The Pink Lady is packed out of high-color Cripps Pink, they all come from the same orchard off the same trees. While it is technically a branding standard, the higher color often translates into higher brix (sugars), and thicker skins. Rarely high-color Pinks that have no sales as Pink Lady will packed into a Cripps Pink box and sold for less… Even though it could have been a Pink Lady.
ur sad
This is a very popular apple in New Zealand. They grow a lot of them there. They are good, and my favorite until I discovered Honeycrisp.
Pink Ladies are like goddamn candy. Not the most consistent apple (does my grocery store mix them in with Cripps?) but the good ones melt my face off.
I’ll bet they mix them. I picked up a bag of “Pink Lady” apples at Aldi and they’re all marked with a Cripps sticker.
I’m a complete newby to this site, but I actually do what you do, only just for my friends. Why I can’t find my favorite Pink Lady apple in the grocery stores these days? It’s always been a year-round presence, yet now they’ve disappeared. Any intel you can share?
That’s awesome! Yelling about apples is a great past time. What region are you in? Pink Lady’s are available on the west coast of USA right now in grocery stores
I found some Pink Lady apples at my local HyVee in the heart of the Midwest in Lawrence, KS. I hope your quest to find them is successful! The batch I got were especially flavorful.
Golden delicious, such an oxymoron of an apple — I’m stunned that my favorite comes from such humble stock.
I used to think golden delicious apples were bad, too, until I tasted them right off the tree. OMG they’re so, so good. They start out crisp, but it doesn’t last more than a week or so from picking, so by the time you get them in the store, the texture is mush. Try one fresh-picked if you can (we have a farm nearby that sells local produce in the summer and fall) and you’ll see how delicious they can be.
You are so right – I haven’t had one lately but when I had a good one it was very very good. Crunchy sweet and thin skinned. Perfect.
Thank you for respecting the Pink Ladies!!! I can’t believe the disrespect I hear from other corners.
Appreciate you!
I love ranting about apples and I will never shut up about superiority of Pink Lady apples. She is my goddess, my best friend who holds your hair while you’re throwing up in the club. the sun and moon both pale in comparison to her glory. Just thinking about her I begin to salivate, dreaming of the next chance I’ll have to enjoy the pure bliss that is her gentle tart flesh. No other apple has come close to her beauty and none ever will (unless i find a new one). Fuck you honeycrisp. Pink Lady is the only apple for me.
you’re so real. these apples make my day
I love going to big Tescos and picking them out, there’s something so innately feminine about this apple. I could only ever eat this apple.. eating another would be a betrayal to the mistress of my mouth.
This is the best review I’ve ever read for anything I love it
(and you’re so right, I worship at the altar of her glory)
Sweetness 2/5, really? It’s definetly sweeter than a banana.
Banana 1/5
Pink Ladies taste like dish soap.
Dude! How do you know what dish soap tastes like anyway??
Yeah, when I had one I literally thought it had dish soap on it. Other than that overwhelming nasty flavor they are excellent.
Embarrassing tech. Pink Lady is easily 93 or above. Get with it people. One love.
oh fuck yeah i love these i am shoving these down my gullet as fast as i can. deserves to be rated sweeter though unless the rest of the apples you’re rating are covered in honey
In Australia, Pink Lady is the default choice for everyday eating apples. We have a few others like Jonathan, Red Delicious, Fuji etc but people only eat those if they’re short on cash and can’t afford a Pink Lady.
She really is a saucy little minx. Once you have a taste, you ain’t never going back honey!!! 😛
I apple-solutely agree with you here Bailey!
I apple-solutely agree with you here Bailey!
Pink Lady is a special apple. My father’s orchard and others here in Western Australia were the first to plant Pink Lady in the world. I knew the breeder, the late John Cripps well and it was wonderful to see him rewarded for all the years of work put in to breed this amazing apple. Actually, we preferred Pink Lady’s sister apple Sundowner to eat but Pink Lady captured the public’s imagination and grew in popularity very fast. I would say that it saved our industry.
Pink Lady is not my favourite apple but I have to say that this years harvest was the tastiest ever and so consistent, a lot of very positive feedback this season.
Great review, thanks for your passion.
Yes not consistent because they mix Cripps Pink with eg Rosy Glow and call them all Pink Lady
You say that a sister apple to Pink Lady is Sundowner ? Another example of generic misuse of a trademark. The actual variety name is Cripps Red. Also Rosy Glow a distinct apple in taste and appearance is being sold as Pink Lady The consumer is being conned
The cultivars Cripps Pink (fruits branded as Pink Lady on condition of meeting some quality standards) and Crips Red (Branded as Sundowner or Joya ) are siblings originated from the same cross GD x LW.
Both have a number sports (mutated variations of the original cultivar, naturally occured in orchard which are slightly different and can be patented as deferent variety if distinctive enough).
Hence you got Rosy Glow, Lady in Red, Pink Velle etc different names but all are natural sports of Cripps Pink, and some of them were integrated into the Brand Pink Lady. Hope this clarify some confusions I noticed in the comments section.
I think you meant apple-lutely
My favorite apple ever. A former empluyee brought a box of apples from the orchard he was working for, I think this was aboout 1990. I chose the Pink Lady and my world changed. I couldn’t find them locally for several years but I kept hoping and was finally rewarded. I’ve tried others and found some of them pretty good but none have the glory of Pink Lady.
Actually Cripps Red has some Ganny Smith in it.
It is a grand son of Granny Smith, a parent of Lady Williams apple, which is a pollen parent of Cripps Red
The Pink Lady is overly sweet, overly soft garbage, suited for children, the elderly and anyone who craves the sweet embrace of death.
You can’t use it to cook, and you can only use it as food in extremis when it’s either that or eating a pile of rotten offal in the gutter. Ranking this higher than an actually useful and edible apple like the Granny Smith is madness.
Your taste buds are bad my friend. Just ate a Pink Lady apple today. It’s fantastic. Right up there with Honeycrisp apples. Granny Smith is unique. It’s more of a gimmick than an eating apple. Use it to make apple sauce. It’s great for that.
Actually Cripps Red has some Ganny Smith in it.
It is a grand son of Granny Smith, a parent of Lady Williams apple, which is a pollen parent of Cripps Red
Tried a bag of NY-grown pink lady apples from the local price chopper instead of my usual empire due to this website. There is nothing tart about them, just a bland sweetness, like a customer service worker’s well wishes. Exceptionally disappointing. Flavor thin as mist. Texture is good. I can’t believe this is the apple I’ve heard so much hype around. Perhaps I’ve been swindled with a falsely named apple, but these make me doubt the validity of the rating system.
You probably got a cripps pink instead, definitely try them again and make sure the skin is vibrant & pink, like he said they should be very dense. to me theyre perfectly tart (i dont really like sweet apples) & they taste like perfume in the best way its light, floral & only as sweet as it needs to be.
Sampled one today and found it to be very good. Sweet but balanced by some acidity – it may lack the Honeycrisp crunch but it is superior in flavor.
We find that our customers who love Pink Lady are people who love hard apples with great flavor. Whereas people that don’t like hard but like crisp like Honeycrisp or Top Secret apples.
My parents used to get me granny smith apples everyday, they said they tasted the same. they didnt understand… they… couldnt understand… The pink lady apple is made from trees of the garden of eden
If eating Pink Lady apples is a sin then at least they arent granny smiths
I prefer baking with them but if you freeze then thaw them individually they are a slushy treat if you thaw them to perfection.
Just had a Pink Lady with my lunch. An all-around excellent apple. Aesthetically pleasing, delicious, a true lady.
I live in Australia and I have to say that the pink lady is hands down the worst in the line-up. The texture is always consistently grainy and they’re usually sporting some type of bruise because they don’t travel well. They’re moderately juicy which is fine, but they’re stupidly sweet, like I need a glass of water afterwards to calm the tastebuds. Im pretty sure everyone in Australia just grabs them to fill out the fruit bowl. They’re so average that If you go on a corporate getaway for team building, I can guarantee they’ll offer pink ladies. They’re the sliced-up apple pieces for the health-conscious parents who opt for apples instead of chips at Maccas. You might argue that this is a reflection of their popularity – perhaps – but I think the real reason is because they’re cheap and available everywhere. If people dared to try something different instead of living like a bunch of sheep, they might find something like the bravo (which I note is not listed on this website), which is an apple worth paying $2 extra a kilo for. In summary, Australia needs to grow up and start eating apples they can be proud of, not this horse feed.
perhaps its extremely lesbian of me that my favorite apple is this, however i’m willing to perpetuate the stereotype since this apple strikes such a chord with me. for being so readily available at most grocery stores, it’s like a cheap luxury to be able to access an apple that provides different aspects of what makes apples so good. only problem is that they’re strangely very messy? every time i eat one the juice makes everything sticky. not enough to knock it down from favorite though.
Hello, I am a newcomer and clueless. So, why is there no rating for the Royal Gala?
Some I have had were better. My favorite all time apple is McIntosh. I’m eating a Pink Lady right now and it is disappointing. Not tart and mildly sweet. I believe the first bag I purchased was better. Timing may matter. Have friend who raved about Red Deliscious apple which I never thought much of but she said “when you’re on horseback and pick one off a tree it’s wonderful”!
Second only to the Kanzi imo (but not by much)
A good eating apple and a great keeper. For eating apples out of apple season, this is the best variety I’ve found. Very hard, so I recommend cutting it into wedges instead of biting right into it.
are the loose apples you bag yourself better than the prebagged ones for this apple? bc when my father bought some prebagged pink ladies and i deigned to try one, i felt like i had to pry open its skull with my teeth to get at this thing. it was SO TOUGH! it wasn’t even that juicy. it is pretty difficult to bite into a lady’s skin, so i do understand that the name is accurate…
In my experience, bagged apples are often small and unripe.
Pink lady makes superb cider in Australia.
What are you, in Kindergarten? If you think this is a 95, no wonder all of your review of other great apples, like Mccoun, Empire, etc. are completely offbase. You only think cloyingly sweet apples are good.
You’re wrong bro, I showed this review to a classroom of 6th graders and they all agreed you’re crazy
#PINK LADY APPLES ON TOP
#S TIER
#KANZI APPLE WHO?!?!?!?!?!!?!?!
I don’t know what that Australian reviewer is on about. America seems to do everything better, so maybe our American Pink Lady apples are simply superior than their inferior Australian pink lady apples, because what he’s describing is not the apple that we have in America. The Pink Lady has a nice firm texture and snap to it. The flavor isn’t one note of sweetness. It’s tangy. It has sweet and sour notes. The apple can stay on a counter for weeks and it remains firm. Try that with a lot of other apple varieties! They will get soft/mushy. Of all of the Apple varieties that you can find at an every day Super Market in America, the pink lady apple stands out. It’s a great eating apple. I have had off tasting Pink Lady apples though. There was a period of about a year where every Pink lady had this really awful chemical like taste to it. I haven’t encountered that since. I’m not sure what was causing that taste. Maybe we were importing the Australian version of the apple.
Couldn’t disagree with this one more – pink lady is what turned me off of apples as a kid, they all taste fake and artificial.
I used to love snacking on apples religiously as a child. I’d sneak them into bed to have at night, hiding them from my parents (not the smartest, but to be fair, I was 7). We would buy locally produced, classic apples from a nearby orchard throughout the season.
And then my mother started buying pink lady.
And it just does not taste the same. They are sweet, sure, but they are also perfumed as hell – cloying and powdery, not to mention overpriced to hell and back. Definitely not worth it.
If I want a sweet apple, I pray they have ambrosia in stock, but nothing will ever beat locally grown
WOW these are a really good apple. Got a bag from an orchard here in Georgia, early November. Easy to bite through (yielding skin & perfect density). It tastes like a candy flavour, but not too sweet that I think it’s not a real apple. There is definite tang.
Pink Lady is my ride or die. I love the density, I love the nuances in the aroma, I love the tart to sweet balance. I bought some visually older ones recently and they were still good. Not the highest heights but still a great snack.
Eating a pink lady (with dark chocolate pb, because I’m ironmaxxing rn) and this shit is so good. Best texture out of any apple