Every Apple Explained

There are 7,500 named apples. Your grocery store sells maybe eight on a loop all year. That's not an accident. It's chemistry. Here's every apple explained. Start with the one you've eaten without noticing. New Zealand, 1930s. A cross of kids orange-red and golden delicious that nobody expected to take over the world. It did anyway. Thin skin, sweet not sharp. The apple equivalent of background music. That golden delicious parentage matters. Remember it. It's about to show up again, and again, and again. In 1892, Stark Brothers Nursery ran a blind judging contest for the best new apple in America. A farmer named Jesse Hyatt entered a chance seedling growing on his Iowa farm. He'd cut it down twice, and it kept coming back, so he finally let it live. It won. It was called Hawkeye First. Stark Brothers bought and renamed it, and for decades it was the best-selling apple in the country. Bread for how it looked in a bin. Not how it tasted out of one. That trade-off caught up with it. Sales have been sliding for 30 straight years. No relation to Red Delicious. Different species entirely. Same marketing instinct. Found on a West Virginia hillside by Anderson Mullins in the early 1900s. Stark Brothers bought the rights in 1914 for $5,000. A staggering sum for one tree. That purchase is the reason almost every modern supermarket apple in this video has Golden Delicious somewhere in its bloodline. It's the single most influential parent in American apple breeding. Waxy yellow skin, honeyed flesh, and it still tastes like it knows it. Japan 1930s, breeders cross Red Delicious with an old American variety called Rawls Janet. Then World War II happens, and the project sits untested for over two decades. It isn't released until 1962, 23 years between the cross and the fruit reaching anyone. Today, it's one of the best-selling apples on Earth. Dense, syrup-sweet, and the one most likely to still snap like day one a month after you buy it. Australia, 1868. Maria Ann Smith found a seedling growing from a pile of discarded French crab apples behind her property. She didn't design it, she just noticed it. She died two years later, in 1870, with no idea her name would end up on more apples than almost anyone else in history. Bright green, mouth-puckering, built for the oven. The one apple here that isn't trying to be sweet. Here's the part nobody tells you. None of these apples are actually fresh. Warehouses drop the oxygen to 1 to 3% and pump up the carbon dioxide, which puts the fruit into something close to suspended animation. Some get sprayed with a compound that blocks the ethylene gas apples used to ripen, so the apple simply stops progressing. That's how a gala picked in September is still on shelves in June, and why some of them taste like cardboard, since the same chemical that blocks ripening also blocks the enzymes that build aroma. One apple skipped the arms race entirely. Slice into an opal, a cross of Golden Delicious and a European variety called Topaz, and it just sits there white for hours. No spray, no gas. It's missing the enzyme that causes browning in the first place naturally, by accident of genetics. University of Minnesota, decades of breeding, a lab designation, MN1711, before it ever got a name. Bred purely for texture, the cells are built to shatter instead of bruise, which is why it sounds like biting into an ice cube instead of an apple. Its actual parentage was recorded wrong for years and had to be corrected with DNA testing. Even the university that made it didn't fully know what was in it. Minnesota didn't stop there. Cross Honeycrisp with an earlier apple called Zestar and you get Sweetango, locked into an exclusive grower's cooperative royalties and all. A grower actually sued over that model in 2010. Thrown out? Turns out a state university isn't bound by antitrust law the way a company is. Washington State University spent 20 years developing this cross of Honeycrisp and Enterprise, then locked the growing rights to Washington growers exclusively for a decade. Deep red, almost black in the right light, dense enough to feel like a small weapon. No other state was allowed to plant it. That's not folklore. That's the actual contract. Technically not a variety, it's a trademark. Blushed pink over pale green, the apple underneath is called Cripps Pink, and growers can only stamp Pink Lady on it if it hits a specific sugar threshold. Same tree, two different products, depending on whether it passes the test. Braeburn is a New Zealand chance seedling from the 1950s, spicy, almost wine-like next to the others. Jazz and Envy aren't related to it by name, but they are by blood. Both are licensed crosses tracing straight back through Braeburn and Gala to that same golden delicious tree from 1914. Three different apples, three separate shelves, one grandparent. Ontario, 1811. John McIntosh finds a cluster of seedlings on his land and keeps one. His son Alan grafts it in 1835, which is the only reason it still exists at all. The original tree survived a house fire in 1894 and kept fruiting for another 12 years before a second fire finally killed it in 1906. Grafted descendants of that exact tree were still alive as recently as 2011, a 200-year-old genetic photocopy of one Ontario seedling, and the reason its flesh still breaks down soft and almost fizzy when you bite it. McIntosh turned out to be such a good parent that a research station in Geneva, New York, used it twice. Cross it with Red Delicious Wait 20 Years, and in 1966, you get Empire, built to combine Macintosh's flavor with Red Delicious's sweetness. Cross it with an older apple called Ben Davis instead, and in 1898, you get Cortland, sliced flesh that resists browning on its own, which is why it's the one you'll find fanned out on a cheese board instead of turning brown in a lunchbox. Before controlled atmosphere warehouses could keep any apple looking fresh year-round, a handful of varieties did that job just by being tough. Wine sap dominated American orchards from the colonial era into the 1950s. Sharp, wine-dark red. So common, nobody bothered writing down exactly where it started. It didn't fade because people stopped liking it. It faded because storage technology finally made pickier, sweeter apples viable 12 months a year. Northern Spy did the opposite trick on purpose. Discovered around 1800 in upstate New York, it was so good at simply keeping in a root cellar, unrefrigerated, all winter, that it got its own postage stamp in 2013. And Rome Beauty has the strangest origin story on this list. In 1817, an Ohio farmer named Joel Gillette planted a seedling by accident along a riverbank. His cousin propagated it into an entire orchard and the original tree was eventually swallowed by the river itself in the 1850s. Bite into one raw and it's flat, almost bland. Bake it and the flesh holds its shape instead of collapsing into mush. Exactly the job it was built for. Two apples on this list were full-blown obsessions of the men who founded the country. Newtown Pippin, Started as a chance seedling in Queens, New York, in the early 1700s. And Benjamin Franklin loved it enough to ship barrels of it to London in 1759 and hand them to the Queen, who then removed British import taxes on the fruit entirely. One apple. Negotiating trade policy. Thomas Jefferson grew it too, calling it better than anything Europe had. But it wasn't even his favorite. That title went to Esopus Spitzenberg. He planted... 32 of them at Monticello between 1807 and 1812, and one 19th century writer called it the first of apples. Neither one is on a supermarket shelf today. A handful of apples survive purely because someone refused to let them disappear. Roxbury russet, rough, matte, almost bronze-skinned, is one of the oldest-named American apples still alive today. Calville Blanc Dever was served at French royal tables in the 1500s. Harrison nearly vanished by the 1900s. Bitter, small, almost black-green, grown for one purpose. A cider so prized it once sold for more per bottle than French wine, and saved from a handful of surviving trees. Arkansas Black turns nearly black in cold storage, and actually gets sweeter with age, like it's aging on purpose. Ananess Renet is pale gold with a waxy shine, and the first bite genuinely tastes like pineapple, which is exactly what the name means. None of these were chance seedlings that simply got lucky. They exist today because someone, generation after generation, chose to keep grafting them forward. Johnny Appleseed, real name John Chapman, spread trees across the frontier, almost entirely from seed, on religious principle, refusing to graft. Seed-grown apples don't come true to their parent, so most of what he planted was only ever good for cider, not eating. Isaac Newton's tree tells the opposite story. The actual flower of Kent. blew down in a storm, but grafted clones of it were propagated and still exist today, including one growing at MIT. A seed makes something new. A graft makes an exact copy forever. Every apple on this list that still exists, exists because somebody grafted it. So that aisle isn't fruit. It's a 1892 contest, a $5,000 handshake, a tree that outlived a fire, and two centuries of grafting. Subscribe. We're doing this to another food next week.