Gold and Delicious
"And this sweet cider filled the air far and wide with its delicious fragrance. This fragrance really was the best part of the year, for it is the very essence of ripeness and harvest. It is good to suck it into your lungs with winter so near since it makes you grateful and brings back a host of memories..."
This passage from Beneath the Wheel by Hermann Hesse is a reminder of the watercolor painting of an apple hanging on our wall, shades of red, orange, yellow, green, and brown all bleeding together. Apples are one of the few foods that appeal to all the senses. Sight, touch, taste, and smell are the more obvious ones but for us it's the sound of an apple that has brought back the memories that Hesse wrote of. There is something so satisfying about the crisp snap of the first bite into an apple that makes soft, mealy apples such a letdown. With apple season in full swing, hearing that crunch of a firm apple is unavoidable and brings back memories of a friend that passed away last year about this time. Brisco loved eating apples from the moment he could chew. Sometimes we'd feed him apples just to listen to the sound they made and wondered who enjoyed the experience more.
There are several thousand varieties of apples, which can be divided into four basic categories. Cider apples tend to be acidic with a high level of tannins, which make them ideal for cider production. Eating apples are juicy and well balanced in flavor in raw form, but become bland when cooked. Most market varieties fall into this category. Cooking apples are tart when raw but achieve a more balanced flavor when cooked. These apples are also more likely to maintain their structure when cooked. Dual-purpose apples are used raw and cooked. This category includes apples that have been traditionally thought of as baking apples, such as Granny Smith or Golden Delicious.
Much has been written about apples, from their symbol of the fall of man into sin to their ability to keep the doctor away. And there may be as many apple recipes as there are varieties. But for a unique look at cooking with apples we suggest viewing the e-cookbook All About Apples by Scott Carsberg and Hillel Cooperman.
