a mystery apple

this time of year, there is nothing more wonderful to eat than late-ripening, fresh-picked, crisp, crunchy apples. the early apples are still decent but are growing mealy after over a month of storage.

the apple of this very moment is either a brock or a northern spy—so say the labels on the apple bins at the kimball farm stand at which i have been buying these apples. the problem is: most variegated red apples look the same to my untutored eye (apple nerds, please withhold judgment).

the apple itself is about the size of a softball, a little flattened, with shallowish floral and stem depressions where there is some russeting (but not much). a little bit of ribbing, but inconsistent across the four specimens so far. it's yellow-green with zones of transparent red (the two i have here are speckled all over with little bits of russeting), the flesh is bright white with green tints close to the skin. the peel is tight and snappy under your teeth, the flesh crunches, the juice is abundant, there is sugar, there is much acidity, there is a bit of sap and quite a lot of mouth-clearing tannin, there is the flavour of a good oolong tea. it's winey, the way a winesap is.

clearly, we must get to the bottom of this.

update 1 (11.7.2011): happened on another of these incredible mystery apples in the back of the high-humidity zone of the refrigerator. the red zones on this one are so transparent they look almost orange. the apple is of medium-large size, and have little russet flecks all over that i have since learned are lenticels. it tastes just as described above, and the acidity and tannins dry my mouth out just enough that i want to eat these all year. this apple looks just like a brock, inside and out. thinking that i'd stumbled upon the answer, i took a known brock and sliced it open. you can imagine my disappointment when the two apples that looked alike tasted nothing like each other. the one i know to be a brock is insipid and has a crunch filled with initial conviction but lacking, unfortunately, in stamina. could it be a macoun, at the height of its season, a revelatory apple? the search continues. i must find a pomologist.

update 2 (11.7.2011): mystery apple photos!

update 3 (11.8.2011): though it was painful to do so, i left a slice of yesterday's mystery apple uneaten, to see how quickly it would oxidise and to what extent. the result: very little browning after 30 minutes, no additional browning even after 24h.

update 4 (11.8.2011): another of the mystery apples! perhaps, anyway. this one is labeled king luscious, but has the same flavour profile as the other mystery apples (see above). trouble is, it is not massive, and the red portions of the peel are more orange than the blue-cast red of the king luscious. i begin to suspect that the labels on the bins at the market are part of the problem. 

kødbyens fiskebar

by now, the observant reader will have noticed that i am in copenhagen. on this, more anon. today's writing exercise is about fish and dessert. lest i be mistaken for one of the capitalist bourgeoisie, please note that the dinner was occasioned by and courtesy of travel insurance and the union strike under which british airways currently labours.

based on n=2, a period of hipness and edginess appears to be an unavoidable stage in the lifecycle of meatpacking districts. a few nights ago, on half-remembered recommendations, we walked over to kødbyen for a post-drink drink and found a large expanse of functionalist architecture that used to be all slaughterhouses and rendering factories. like the meatpacking district in manhattan, it is now filled with hipsters, self-consciously dive-y bars, and galleries for exceedingly conceptual art. also, what turned out to be an exceptional seafood bar.

yesterday, i found myself back in kødbyen when i tried and failed to catch the launch party for the new danish food lexicon (only in danish and unfindable online). it had been grey all day, and drizzling, but sporadically relieved by the sun blazing through the clouds every hour or so. i went to dinner at the kødbyens fiskebar to wait out the latest shower. given the surroundings, i suppose i shouldn't have been surprised at the excellent meal i had there, but there it is anyway. you see, below, that a large, unhappy-looking cow stands over the location, while ominous stormclouds gather in the sky above.

things began with fish and chips, a cone of newspaper enclosing a piece of smoked haddock, lightly breaded, barely fried, and flecked with large and flakey crystals of salt. further down in the cone was a pile of soft fried potatoes and a slick of tartar sauce filled with chopped vegetables. tasty but not awesome.

after a short interlude, which i spent watching guests try to find the bathroom, a slab of perfectly poached witch (also known as the righteye flounder or torbay sole) showed up. it was concealed under a thin piece of crisp fried bread. the fish tasted so much like a barramundi steamed by the best teochew restaurants in the motherland that i did a double-take. cooked just to the point of perfect flake and fragrant with iodine, its complete freshness and the precision of the cooking was unobscured by any sauce. on the side, an assortment of the tweezer-placed vegetables and purées which are now almost required plate decoration in any restaurant trying to charge a premium. these were excitingly unfamiliar in the context of fish: spears of caramelised salsify, pieces of jerusalem artichoke rolled in powdered truffle, roasted hazelnuts, a purée of hazelnuts and sherry vinegar, and soft mounds of parsley cream. a bowl appeared containing an enormous quantity of a gratinéed cauliflower and turnips filled with deposits of black truffle. the side diversions were, in a good way, the flavour of earth and the ground; they were tasty, but i would have been happy with the fish alone.

the completely unexpected win was dessert, and it was even better than the previous all-time best dessert in my book (from quince). a shallow bowl showed up at the table containing a quenelle of lilleø apple sherbet in a puddle of puréed lilleø apple compote. (more here about lilleø.) two entirely different flavours from the same apples: the cooked compote, round, mellow, lightly toasty, the uncooked sherbet acid, bright, and lightly tannic. these were served with crushed toasted grains, fragments of plain, unsweetened yogurt flash-frozen in liquid nitrogen, warm salted caramel, and tiny whole leaves of young lemon verbena. separately, each part of the dessert was delicious in the peculiarly self-effacing way i previously associated only with very expensive japanese cooking. but more wondrous, a spoonful containing all these elements was a combination of textures, flavours, and temperatures that in the mouth brought to mind (at least to my mind) the platonic idea of apples: warm and cool, green, russet, and red, comfortably sweet yet bracingly snappy, aromatic. it was a marvelous thing.

and then the sun came back and the sky stayed light until nearly midnight.

ashmead's kernel

is an old english russet apple "medium size, golden-brown skin with a crisp nutty snap. Fruit explodes with champagne-sherbet juice infused with a lingering scent of orange blossom. Flesh is dense, sugary and aromatic with intense flavor, characteristic of russets."* orangepippin.com (the comprehensive resource for apples and orchards) tells us that ashmead's kernel is a homely fruit (and how) but, with flavour like that, does it really matter? once available here but now, alas, sold out.

* for erudite and mildly snarky essays on garden catalogues and their often purple prose, see onward and upward in the garden, by katharine s. white (wife of e.b.)