Ingredient

Apple

The one thing worth knowing about apples in the kitchen is whether the variety in your hand collapses when heated or holds its shape. Everything else — sweetness, acidity, when it is in season — matters less than getting that right.

Collapsing and holding

What holds an apple together is pectin in the cell walls. Heat breaks it down, and how fast depends on the variety and on how much acid is present. High-acid, low-pectin apples fall apart quickly; firmer, sweeter varieties hold their shape for far longer.

That is the real distinction behind "cooking apple" and "eating apple", and it is more useful than the labels. A Bramley collapses to a purée in minutes, which is perfect for sauce and disastrous in a tart where you wanted slices. A Braeburn or a Granny Smith holds, which is perfect in a tart and slow going if you wanted purée.

Which apple for what

Bramley

The classic British cooker. Very sharp, very high water, collapses completely. Apple sauce, crumble filling, baked apple.

Granny Smith

Firm and sharp. Holds its shape well. Tarts, pies, and anything sliced.

Braeburn

Firm, balanced, holds. Probably the best all-rounder for cooking if you can only buy one.

Cox

Aromatic and complex. Softens but does not fully collapse. Excellent flavour, worth using where you will taste it.

Golden Delicious

Sweet, soft, low acid. Fine in a tart tatin where sweetness and softening are wanted.

Pink Lady, Gala, Jazz

Eating apples. Sweet, fairly firm, and they hold well enough for most cooking.

Cooking with them

• Mix varieties in a pie. A collapsing apple gives you the sauce that fills the gaps; a firm one gives you the pieces. Bramley plus Braeburn is the standard answer.
• Sugar firms them up. Apples cooked in a sugar syrup hold their shape considerably better than apples cooked plain, because the sugar draws water out and reinforces the pectin.
• A cooking apple needs far less sugar than you think if it is going into something already sweet. Taste before you commit.
• Do not add lemon to keep apples pale in a pie. It does keep them pale, and it also accelerates the pectin breakdown, so they go softer.
• Cook the filling first for a pie where the top has to stay crisp. Raw apple releases a great deal of water into pastry.

Browning and storage

• Cut apple browns for the same reason avocado does: an enzyme meeting oxygen. Acid, cold, or excluding the air all slow it, and none of them stops it. See brown apple.
• Whole apples keep for weeks or months in a cold place. Apples are exactly the fruit that were traditionally stored all winter.
• They give off a lot of ethylene, so they ripen everything stored near them — useful for avocados and bananas, unhelpful for potatoes and carrots.
• A wrinkled apple has lost water. It is fine for cooking and unappealing to eat raw.
• The waxy shine on supermarket apples is mostly a food-grade coating over the fruit's own natural wax. A scrub in warm water removes most of it.

What to make when there are too many

An apple tree gives everything at once, and there is only so much crumble a household can eat.

• Apple jelly, made from whole chopped fruit including skins and cores. Windfalls and bruised apples are ideal, and the pectin is in exactly the parts you would otherwise throw away.
• Apple chutney, where eating apples hold their shape and cooking apples collapse into the base. A mixture of both is better than either.
• Apple sauce, frozen in small portions, which is a better use of Bramleys than almost anything.
• Dried rings, cored and sliced thin and dried slowly. They keep for months and are far better than the bought sort.
• Apple as a pectin source for any jam that will not set — grated in, it contributes body without much flavour.
• Juice, and then cider or vinegar, if you have a press and the patience.

Common questions