Red Delicious Apple Review
"Coffee Grinds in a Leather Glove"
Oh how the mighty have fallen! Believe it or not, the coffee grinds in a leather glove known as “The Red Delicious Apple” was once a robust firebrand credited with reinventing the apple from mere cider-fruit into a full-fledged lunch-worthy sidepiece. It even won the Stark Brothers apple contest in 1894. Likely your great-grandma’s favorite apple, this once flavorful Prometheus has been mass-produced into desolation.
Nowadays, you can find this thick-skinned, flavorless, mealy imposter unwashed in a dirty wicker basket on the floor of a convenience store. What a sad state of affairs. It’s time to hang them up old man, your time has passed.
BONUS POINTS: +2 Historical Significance
- FLAVOR PROFILE -
SWEETNESS
1/5
TARTNESS
0/5
INTENSITY
0/5
RED DELICIOUS BIO
PARENTAGE
Delicious
ORIGIN
Peru, Iowa – USA
YEAR
1881
AVAILABILITY
Year-Round
BEST USES
Compost
OTHER NAMES
Stark Delicious, Hawkeye,
Oregon, Otago,
Red Chief, Red King, Red Spur,
Richared, Starking Starkrimson,
Starkspur
I see you didn’t even waste your time on goldens
Do you think the Delicious were actually decent originally (or why would anyone eat them??) and have gone downhill from genetic degradation? That’s started happening to some other produce varieties that were mainstays for years, with even growers agreeing they’re not what they used to be.
I believe they were never as good as the top apples of today as they weren’t cross-breeding hundreds of varieties to make the perfect apple. But they definitely were better tasting than the diluted crop of Red Delicious we now have.
Yeah, that’s what I meant. There were heirlooms back then with far more flavor, and I can’t imagine anyone used to those eating a modern Red Delicious by choice. Maybe as a last ditch resort to avoid starvation.
^Maybe as a last ditch resort to avoid starvation
Even then, it’s probably not worth it :/
Red Delicious apples have always been nasty as long as I can remember. Apples used to be the last kind of fruit I would eat, mainly because that’s what my parents would buy. I remember Golden Delicious being marginally better. This was back in the 1980s so it’s not a recent memory either.
They aren’t the apple that was actually discovered in Iowa in the 19th century. Those are still around and usually called Hawkeye. Look it up. It’s very different from what Red Delicious became.
I think so! It makes sense… the gene pool got too stagnant.
That’s gotta be it! I remember them tasting much better in my childhood but as the years wore on they just got worse and worse and worse. Maybe this is a quality thing or a tastebuds evolving thing but I’m still suspicious.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the flavor dropped off a fair bit – because the growers were so focused on the skin. Red Delicious feels like an emblem of mid-1900’s capitalism, selected for marketable beauty and efficiency with a skin that stays crimson red as it’s transferred from warehouse to warehouse to warehouse to backstock to cafeteria basket, where it sits unmoved as more apples are dropped on top of it for a week. It’s impressive that it can still look good after all that, but flavor and texture must have been afterthoughts for growers, and it shows.
Definitely true. When I was a kid (I’m 67 now) Reds were very tasty. I worked a produce market in the mid 70s and their flavor was already starting to fall off. At their best, they were not as good as the top apples these days in that the flavor was quite sweet and pretty much one note. But you’d definitely not hesitate to eat them They always had thick bitter skin, but the flesh was awesome. They taste like sawdust now.
That definitely happened. I am sure Red Delicious would never have ranked up with SweeTango/Honey Crisp, but they *did* accidentally bred all the flavor out of Red Delicious to make an aesthetically perfect red apple. It used to have ocassional yellow streaking on the skin, but The Powers That Be decided that would not stand and they selected for apples that were perfectly red.
What they didn’t know was that the genes for the yellow streaks were in the same genetic neighborhood as genes that synthesize flavor compounds and the perfectly red subvarietal was missing that entire chunk of the chromosome.
I’m sure there’s a bunch of other examples of that in Red Delicious that we don’t know about. The philosophy of 20th century American apple growing was that you produce The Prettiest Apple to convince the customer to grab it at the supermarket, everything else is secondary. So you grow the most homogenous looking apples that are the most resistant to bruising in transit that have the longest shelf life, taste and texture be damned. Red delicious are the hyperbrachycephalic dogs of apples.
Of course in the typical fashion of short-sighted capitalism it eventually backfired, because they forgot that groceries aren’t a one time purchase. Once Fuji and Gala apples became widely available in the US everyone started to abandon Red Delicious. It was so bad that Washington state’s Red Delicious dependent apple industry almost collapsed and even decades later still doesn’t seem as strong as it used to be.
I have tasted good homegrown ones before, before they go mealy, and they were surprisingly good, though certainly not earth shattering. They go bad so fast though that its not even worth it trying to find a good one.
It tastes like dirt, like I shoved a butload of dirt in my mouth and somebody took a shit in it.
I swear these apples were better in the 80’s. I loved them when I was a kid, my mom couldn’t buy them fast enough as I would eat 3 – 5 of them per day. But some time in the 90’s they went downhill and it became hard to find the crisp ones that I remembered. 90% of the times I have tried a Red Delicious since childhood, it’s been mealy and extremely unappealing. Perhaps it’s my memory that is faulty and that as a kid I didn’t even notice when apples were mealy. But I don’t think so. I think that red delicious once were good.
The thing is they were! But their popularity became their downfall. They were used as “display pieces” more and more, and so they were bred for longevity instead of taste. Their looks became a more profitable selling point than their flavor, so everything that GAVE it the flavor – the interiors of the apple- were bred out to be as long-lasting as possible, resulting in interiors that are incredibly dry. Little fluid means little rot- and little flavor.
The thing is that there is no breeding. Every red delicious tree is genetically identical to every other. That is how an apple cultivar works.
@Alex that is mostly true but you can still get random mutations (sports) and clone from those, resulting in clones that *are* genetically different from the parent varietal. Whether or not you give those sports a different name than the parent then comes down to marketing, and back in the day varietal names weren’t nearly as closely guarded as they are now. Also keep in mind that Red Delicious was THE red apple for decades in the US, so there wasn’t a big desire to change to marketed name even if there were genetic differences. That’s my conspiracy, anyway.
If I remember correctly there is genetic evidence that the modern Red Delicious is different from the original though.
That being said, it seems probable to me that anyone who is less than 50 years old who says Red Delicious is different from their childhood might be down to other factors (having better red apples since, nostalgia, growing years/places and storage conditions) besides genetics.
I was in elementary school in the 1970s and red delicious apples were terrible even back then. My mom always put one in my lunch box and I threw it in the trash every day. I feel guilty about that now, but I couldn’t stand the texture or the flavor. It seemed like one side was always bruised, but even the unbruised side was awful. I don’t recall seeing my parents EVER eat a red delicious apple! They only bought them for the kids, and for some reason, expected us to eat them even though they wouldn’t.
I get a certain feeling when I see Red Delicious apples, and it isn’t good. It’s like a fake apple.
I’m surprised it ranked higher than any other apple. By far, the worst commercial apple today.
I have never laughed so hard at someone roasting an apple in my entire life! Except you would never roast a red “delicious”, as it’s better left to rot on the ground under the tree that produced it. I feel bad for the deer that go to the trouble of jumping fences and find these instead.
Hahha – thank you for reading!!
Cathartic to read some truth telling about these fruit facsimiles. I still remember the horrible sensation of the mealy flesh, and watery flavourlessness of these apples when I was saddled with them in my school lunches throughout the 90s.
The Red Delicious is single handedly the reason so many mid-tier apples are held up as agricultural wonders. After a childhood of eating this handful of gritty snow stuffed into the skin of a dead rat, anything that can pass for actual fruit is a marvel. The lasting legacy of this crime against God and man is to give every mediocre apple on Earth something to look down on and make traumatized consumers say “At least it’s not a Red Delicious” like it was an abusive ex.
This should be in a published book of poetry
Genuinely surprised this wasn’t in last place, like it is in my personal apple ranking. I don’t think I’ve ever had a red “delicious” that wasn’t dry as a desert and bitter skinned.
I ate these as a kid in the early-mid 2000’s and I swear they were /still/ good then. I remember them being crunchy, though they still had a slightly sandy texture, they we’re dense enough to not really care, unless you got a “bad” one. I VERY specifically remember comparing the taste to a blue raspberry slushie. I remember buying my first one as an adult and feeling some of the most immense food disappointment I’ve ever felt. That shit is bleakly nasty, it tastes like tap water with 1 (one) diluted apple flavour droplet, it is alarmingly wet without being juicy, and it’s so soft and sandy I could probably crush one with just my pinkie finger….girl, what happened to you :/
Now I can’t unthinking your words!!!!! There exactly like a slushy!!!!!
Whoops sorry about my grammar. I blame auto correct.
i have always been an apple eater and still had to deal with these apples in the early to mid 2000s, when i was a teenager. i can promise you they were absolute compost fodder by that point. i don’t know when they went downhill but it was long before the millennium.
Having looked at your reviews of a dozen or so varieties, I can’t say I agree with a single one of them. Except for Red Delicious. Well, what’s worse than Despicable in your book? Maybe they’re that.
“Tim” doesn’t like your review of an apple product.
But we know what’s up.
My great grandmother would buy me Red Disgusting apples back in the late ’80s to early ’90s, and I remember them being sweet, crunchy, slightly mealy, with a papery leathery skin. As the years went on they got worse and worse. Then I saw the light, and was graduated to Granny Smith. That sour crispness cannot be rivaled. Overtime I’ve come to love Pink ladies, opal, or braeburn.
I steered clear of these pretty much my entire life lol. They’re just sooo mealy……
I remember hating Red Delicious when I was a kid in the ’70s, as a teenager, and as an adult. I used to wonder how they could taste unripe even when they were mushy, then I stopped caring. A few years ago my local natural foods carried the older variety, and they were pretty good. BTW, here’s a video on how they came to be so bad but so ubiquitous.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgZNDTJSvJQ
Although you may have your points and i do believe youd be correct for most people, i loved these apples growing up, and nowadays, they hit harder than my mother
I don’t think I’ve heard of a single person who enjoys red delicious apples. Sociopaths maybe. They seem to be universally hated and yet without fail, there they are in the fruit and veg aisle. How can they possibly be profitable to sell? Is the product we see in the grocery store actually for the secondary market with their prime customers being livestock? It baffles me.
they last forever…. the ones in the grocery may be 2 or 3 yrs old 🙁
This review is hilarious and so are the comments.
The first time I ate a Red Delicious as a kid (circa the late 80s), I thought it was the best apple I’d ever had. For years they were practically the only apple I ate. Then sometime in my mid teens, they stopped tasting good to me. They were suddenly mealy, dry and flavorless and I didn’t understand what had changed. I blamed my inability to find “good” ones and stopped buying them entirely. I don’t know if nostalgia tells me they used to truly be good or if they were never good and I realized it when my tastebuds matured.
Red Delicious apples prove that humans can destroy anything if it means making a quicker buck. Capitalism is great! /s
now and then you get a good one, and it just makes you sad you couldn’t have been there to experience it’s better days
the ONLY thing these are good for is when you’ve just had your wisdom teeth removed, as they are soft enough to not cause pain.
While I think this is mostly dead-on, I have a couple issues with this review:
-You list Cortland apples as apples that the Red Delicious is better than, despite giving Cortland apples over double the rating
-You have Red Delicious maxed out for cost/availability—while they’re certainly found damn near everywhere apples are sold, they’re really not that cheap (at least in my area)
Oh my, everyone hates these. Do I defend the Red Delicious or not? I suppose not, since I know exactly what folks are talking about here. I spent many years where I couldn’t find a good RD, and just wrote them off as bad or “not the same as I remembered.”
However, my experience with this apple has changed over the years. Like many here (I presume) I eat a ton of apples. Red Delicious is currently in my list of apples to buy at the store. The thing is, you have to be super picky when selecting them. If there is the slightest hint that they are anything but under-ripe you risk getting that mealy flesh. (Most apples you buy are in fact under-ripe by “design.”) Even now, as a decades experienced apple selector, I once in a while get some bad ones, and after biting into them I throw them out. But overall as long as the crop at the particular store looks good, I’ve been having a decent experience with them. They also feature lower tartness which is a positive for me.
I’ve had some good red delicious apples. Key word, SOME. They aren’t consistent at ALL [unlike my favorites, granny smith and honeycrisp], and when they’re bad, they’re hellishly, INTOLERABLY bad. A mealy apple is terrible to you, to my autistic ass a mealy, poorly-textured apple is one of the greatest Texture Sins out there, I’ll toss it after one bite without any guilt or shame.
I just cut and ate a red delicious last week I bought last week, I was shocked at how crisp it was. I only bought a few because I noticed the ones there at the time weren’t glossy like normal, they had a matte finish. I proded at a few and was surprised that they felt firm. It was the crispiest red delicious I’ve ever had. I was astounded. Very crisp and sweet. However, it didn’t taste like anything. It just had a few phenol molecules to only infer it’s an apple, but that was about it. Still, it was crispy and not gagworthy soft like they normally are, so I had no problems eating them all.
I’ll have to agree with you about this one! Lol
But, how are these not even lower your list?
Consulted your site yesterday choosing apples to taste test. Honeycrisp, Cosmic Crisp, and Opal were all $1.27/lb and Red Delicious were $2.69. Absolutely appalling. My mom’s theory: “It’s because transport costs twice as much. Once to bring them into the store, once to bring them out to the dumpster.”
Hahaha your mom is hilarious
Happy to see my least favorite apple is so appropriately scored.
These shitty apples ruined apples of any kind for me for 20+ years. I remember the mealy nastiness and the yellowish interior, it was truly repulsive. Thank God for honeycrisp and Fuji’s, they changed my mind about apples.
Friend showed me this site last night and I am so fucking vindicated reading through this. Throughout my high school career my cafeteria couldn’t decide which apple to stock, so every day you’d be rolling the dice of something even halfway decent like a Granny Smith or Gala, or getting stuck with the very aptly put coffee grinds in a glove experience of this fetid beast. I thought I was crazy for not liking these. Thank you.
These apples caused every problem in my childhood
im old! yum..
i’m young! yum.
Red delicious are better than: Road Apples (but not by much)
These (and golden delicious) are actually decent if you pick em ripe off a tree. Very very crisp and incredibly sweet. I have no idea how these get so bad commercially.
i fucking love red delicious and i will not apologize for my blasphemy. they’re great and i will die on this hill.
then again my favorite candy is black licorice i think i just shouldn’t be allowed to have opinions
Describing the so-called “Red Delicious” as a leather glove filled with sand is horrifically accurate. If any were to ever give me a Red Delicious, I would from there on out assume that they hate me personally and want me to suffer.
I simply do not trust people that dislike red delicious apples. RD’s are my favorite apple and haters of it are bandwagon riding sheeple that are on the same level as people who are uncomfortable by the word moist or afraid of clowns.
I agree with you, Red Delicious is the best apple, and its not even debatable.
Oh no, Clowns!
Nah, these apples are trash and so is your opinion.
Red Delicious taste must differ between countries… I’m from Germany and have eaten these regularly since my childhood, and I’ve encountered both the “old” and the “new” variant people have mentioned here: The disgusting, mealy, dry, and flavorless ones and the crisp, sweet, and flavorful ones. In my experience, it depends strongly which shop you go to and when in the year you’re buying. At least over here, your best chances at getting a good Red Delicious is during the winter months (November – January), and at local markets or more “fancy” supermarkets (i.e. definitely not ALDI). If you buy these anywhere between March and August, they’ll probably be the mealy variant, perhaps because those are bred to last longer?
Anyways, never understood why they’re so universally hated. Sure, if you’ve only ever had the bad ones, they are some of the worst apples out there, but the good version is REALLY good and worth “hunting” for, if you can reliably get it somewhere.
They try to gaslight you by naming it “delicious”. Be not deceived.
Bro red delicious apples are delicious. I don’t understand the hate. Everyone who hates on these don’t have taste. I’m being so serious these are literally the only apples I can tolerate.
Same!!
What sort of deviant doesnt like red delicious apples?
best apples in the world, should be in first place only.
I remember eating a Red Delicious while underway on a submarine for months, and I was shocked to see real apples served during mid-rats. It was the best thing I ever tasted, after eating Filipino fried rice and SOS for months. I ate the whole thing, even the core because it tasted so good. The cover story is that submarine food is of high quality, but we got food that was stamped “unfit for human consumption” and “rejected by Washington State Prison System” during stores load outs. The cooks couldn’t destroy an uncooked Red Delicious.
The threat of death is the only acceptable motivating factor to eat a Red Delicious.
I acknowledge that Red Delicious apples are pretty terrible. However. There is very realistic decorative fake fruit at Hobby Lobby, made of some kind of dense foam with a thick “skin.” Red Delicious apples are incredibly effective at scratching my lifelong itch to eat those dang fake apples. So at least they’re good for that.
I grew up with a Red Delicious in the 1950s. We had one small healthy tree, and I used it to torment our old Hereford heifer. She was a mean old gal, but she (unlike me) loved those apples. I remember screwing a red delicious onto each of her horns and then rolling on the ground laughing while she tried to find them. (She could smell the juice running down her horns, but she couldn’t see the apples.) Good times. I always gave her the apples in the end. Eating a red delicious is like biting through a leather bag (no, really) into a mouthful of dried rice. Ugh!
I didn’t eat apples for probably close to two decades after too many experiences of biting into what looked like a promising shiny red delicious apple, only to experience an awful, mealy, tasteless mess. If cardboard could be turned into a fruit, it would be a red delicious apple.
Arguably, the Red Delicious could be the emblem of how the industrialization of our fruit and vegetable supply has destroyed the quality of so many species. Capitalism and greed will destroy everything if allowed.
I have been growing heirloom apples for over twenty years. Originally, Red Delicious was called Hawkeye before Stark Bros. bought the rights to the apple and rebranded it. Hawkeye was juicy, crisp, and aromatic. What we see today shows how Big Agriculture selects for cosmetics and size at the expense of flavor and so now most Red Delicious taste like a lump of Styrofoam painted red. If one were to taste the original vs. the modern they would be shocked at the difference.
Red delicious are my favorite 🙁
Red Delicious should have been a 0. There’s absolutely nothing delicious about them. I believe they became popular because they were long-keepers, meaning you could put them in vending machines and gift baskets. Ugh, ugh, ugh.
A few years ago I had an RD from upstate NY. It didn’t have the common elongated shape that the photo above shows. It was nice – not too dry, nice flavor, skin okay. Was it what they used to be like? Was it a misidentified Cortland?
Good for feeding to horses or parrots… other than that, these are not worth any sort of review.
I am eating my first Red Delicious apple in over 15 years and am shocked at how good it is. Have we returned to the days of old? Remains to be seen….
one of the best apples 5 out of 5
My dad called me up at the grocery store and said there was a display of fresh Pink Lady apples and came home with this.
agreed. had these in my lunchbox as a kid and were – and still are – complete shit.
I ate a Red Delicious and it was the best apple i remember eating, truly delicious. I went to the same fruit shop the next day and bought more from the same batch; they were awful. And there is the problem with Red Delicious, they are totally inconsistent, two apples off the same tree will be totally different, but a good one is heavenly.
I am a Person of Colorblindness. These apples are not delicious. I can’t be sure they’re red. They are nothing.
I usually can’t stand Red Deliciouses, but one time when I was a kid, my dad bought a Costco bag of them and they were actually great. The flesh was firm instead of mealy and they tasted sweet. Maybe there’s been a push to make them taste good in the last decade or two?
An odd thing I noticed was that the outer layer of flesh was stained red, so it seemed like the skin was bleeding.
Does anyone here know why that is?
they used to be better. it’s the nostalgic taste that keeps me comin back. something changed, i swear
I’m not old enough to know what a good Red Delicious tastes like. With that said, these are the only apples I’ve had and liked less than a McIntosh.
Growing up as a kid we never had much to eat. My family never made much money and when my father left, my mom was left living paycheck to paycheck barely making it. There were nights were I would go to bed hungry and over time this caused me to develop an eating disorder. The only thing that I had in life to look forward to was being able to come home from school and play Mario 3D land on my 3DS. Each month our grandparents would drop off food for us to help out my mother and one of the things that they bought were Red delicious apples. No matter how hungry I may have been, if I saw a red delicious apple in the fridge I would hang myself before every scarfing that thing down. There is no apple on this list that quite captures how unpleasant the skin is to eat, how slimy the insides are and how unsaturated you feel afterwards.
I wanted to like it.
Went to the grocery store and wanted something different other than my regular fuji (which I now know might be changed by the all mighty sweet tango). In the apple section, I smelt something sweet. Sweeter than fuji. I had an image of what I was going to experience in my head. I got closer to the scent and found it. A red delicious. I bought 2.
Just finished it. First bite, a bit tough, but still as sweet as it smells.
Second bite. Apple skin in my teeth. I had to bite harder than usual which is really weird because I don’t even have to think about my bites when I eat apples. A little less sweet but still fine.
Third and the rest of the bites.
It was inbetween fruit leather and beef jerky.
Apple was about 1 squeeze away from applesauce.
It felt like what I imagine biting into plastic decorative apples would be like. Still, it was mushy in my mouth.
I tolerated the sweetness or lack thereof, barely.
The taste still on my mouth is basically equal to a granny smith.
I still have to eat another one. May god be with us all.
That’s funny because both my wife and daughter love them so much – as no other apple. That combination of the sweet & bitter is driving them crazy. I’m not as big apples lover as they are, but I also like Red Delicious. It’s sad that it’s hard to find them these days. Only IGA is still selling them.
More like Red Undelicious
I don’t know how this “apple” made it this high in your rankings…. or why you gave that misshapen beast points for beauty! Foul! Today’s Red Delicious aren’t genetically the same as Red Delicious from the late 1800s. (I’ve heard that some non-commercial orchardists have the older variety and that it actually tastes like an apple!) Today’s has been cross-bred with cardboard and plastic to produce the fire-engine red, lumpy, shelf-stable, and shippable monstrosity that haunts grocery store shelves today and has made certain friends of mine think they don’t like apples (poor souls!).
More like “Red Revolting.” These are junk, zero flavor and a terrible grainy texture. They’re like an attractive person without any substance or brains.
These are legitimately my favorite apples. The slight chew of the skin and the subtle bittersweet flavor is amazing. The texture is also a little rough while not being straight up mealy. I would eat these apples over any other apple. I wish I had one right now.
These are the standard gas station, free continental hotel breakfast, cafeteria apple, often found with the obligatory banana and dry navel oranges. As a kid I tolerated and maybe even liked them a little. As an adult, I refuse to eat them. I can’t remember when they started to seem mealy. I don’t know if my taste buds have evolved or the quality has declined over the years due to repeated inbreeding
iunno if i’m just an apple peasant whose never tasted better or if you’re all buying your apples from The Store That Makes Your Apples Taste Bad but i enjoy a red delicious. good flavor good texture good firmness adequately juicy. if red delicious were a man he would be rather handsome in a plain average guy sort of way. strong and firm but not too muscular. and he would be an excellent kisser
The name is an oxymoron if there ever was one. This apple is truly revolting mush. Every one I’ve ever been served as an adult over the last 48 years went straight to the trash.
I absolutely despise this apple. They are served at my university’s food court and every time I see them, I wonder “why?”. It is like eating a chunk of salt. Despite being a fruit it somehow sucks more moisture out of your body than it adds. It leaves an absolutely abhorrent, ghostly aftertaste in your mouth as if it’s trying to suck your soul away. If I was the leader of a cult I would deem them heretical and have their trees burned on sight.
I was a young lad through 96 born and the early 2000’s oddly I remember that apple sweeter up till 2005 when Golden delicious. Then after only more bitter but throw against a wall never bruised like a golden. After that golden then after anything. Don’t even see golden no more.
I searched for Hawkeye Apple because of a recent Hyperfixed podcast episode which dug into the history of this despicable apple, and the search results redirected me here to Red Delicious!
Hawkeyes are allegedly quite good before they were bred into oblivion into this nightmare of an apple but I haven’t had the opportunity to try.