
1 large or 2 small red onions, cut into wedges. In 2017, a full 20 years after the first seeds went in the ground, prospective growers could finally order trees of their own. Once the fruit had been thoroughly evaluated by the rest of his team-How crispy was it? How firm? Did its sugar or acidity levels change during storage?-the whole cycle started all over again. Then I put them in cold storage to see how they would hold up after a few months,” he told PopSci in 2018. “Most were terrible, but when I found one with good texture and flavor, I’d pick 10 or 20 of them. In 1999, after two years of greenhouse germination, the very first Cosmic Crisp trees were planted, and a few years later after that, they bore fruit for the first time.Īccording to Barritt, this is when the real work began-he walked the orchard rows, randomly picking apples and evaluating them by taking a bite. The Cosmic Crisp as we know it today began its life as a bit of pollen from a Honeycrisp flower, applied by hand to the stigma of an Enterprise. In 1981, Barritt started lobbying WSU to invest in identifying and developing that apple.īut before all that, you need to actually create the seed. He set out to create an apple bred for flavor and long storage, rather than appearance alone-one that could compete with the crispy, flavorful new varieties on the market, such as the Fuji from Japan and the Gala from New Zealand. Newtonīruce Barritt, a now-retired horticulturist at the Washington State University Tree Fruit Research and Extension Center in Wenatchee, Washington, figured there had to be something better. Cosmic crisp apple taste how to#
How to invent a new apple in just 20 short years If you manage to not eat them all as-is, Cosmic Crisps will beautifully compliment any recipe that includes apples.
Consumers are no longer content with a pretty apple that tastes like wet cardboard-they expect something delicious, and each stage of the production line threatens deliciousness in different ways. Sacrificing taste for appearance may be on its way out, but the tension between them is still a huge challenge for apple growers eyeing wide distribution.