I Went Apple Picking and Came Home With Way Too Many Apples

I’m standing in my kitchen looking at more apples than any one household needs.

Nobody did this to me. I went apple picking, I got carried away, and now there’s a pile on my counter and I have no plan for it.

So I did the thing I should’ve done before I left the house. I looked up how apples actually work, and it turns out I’ve been wrong about nearly all of it.

Nobody warned me how much a peck actually is

A peck sounds adorable. It sounds like something a small bird does.

It’s a quarter of a bushel, and a bushel is somewhere around 42 to 48 pounds depending on who’s counting. So that cute little peck is roughly 10 to 12 pounds of fruit.

Then I made it worse by doing the math. A medium apple weighs about 182 grams, which works out to about 2.5 apples per pound. That puts a peck somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 to 35 apples, and a bushel somewhere north of a hundred.

I’m not counting mine. I don’t want to know.

The one bright spot is that a medium apple is about 95 calories, so I can technically eat my way out of this. It’s just going to take a while.

The fruit bowl is the worst place I could’ve put them

I always assumed the fruit bowl was where apples go. It’s right there in the name.

Wrong. Apples go soft something like ten times faster at room temperature than they do in the cold.

They sit out, they get mealy, and a mealy apple is one of the saddest things you can bite into.

What an apple actually wants is 30 to 32 F, about 90 percent humidity and a little air moving around. That’s not a kitchen. That’s a cave.

Here’s the part that got me. Apples don’t freeze at 32 F like water does. They freeze somewhere between 27.8 and 29.4 F, depending on the variety, so they can sit at a temperature that turns water into ice and be completely fine with it.

My fridge doesn’t run that cold, and I wouldn’t want it to. But it’s the closest thing to a cave I own, so the fridge it is.

There’s a catch, because of course there is. The air inside a fridge is very dry, and apples want it damp.

The fix is almost insultingly simple. Plastic bags with holes in them. The bag holds the moisture in, the holes let some air through, and the whole thing goes in the fruit drawer.

My actual problem is math again. I have more apples than my fridge can hold, which means some of these are staying out whether I like it or not, and those are the ones I need to eat first.

One bad apple really does ruin the bunch

I thought this was just something people said about coworkers.

It’s literal. One bad apple can spoil the whole lot, and it does it two different ways at once.

The first is the obvious one. A bruised or cut apple lets rot in, and rot doesn’t stay put.

The second is sneakier. Apples give off ethylene, a gas that triggers ripening in fruit and vegetables. A damaged apple pumps out more of it, so the one banged-up apple in the bag is basically yelling “hurry up” at every apple around it.

So my job tonight is sorting, and I’m going to be picky about it. Every apple gets looked over like I’m working the door at a club.

Anything with a bruise, a nick or a cut goes in the eat-first pile. Only the clean ones earn a spot in the fridge.

I didn’t know any of this while I was picking, so I’m not expecting the eat-first pile to be small.

Turns out some apples just aren’t built to last

I figured an apple was an apple. They all looked equally immortal to me.

They aren’t. The varieties that ripen later in the season keep better than the early ones. The good keepers include Red Delicious, Northern Spy, Stayman, Winesap, Rome Beauty, Turley and Idared.

Those can go four or five months under ideal conditions, which my fridge is not. So I’m not promising myself anything.

The practical version is simple. If what’s in your bag is an early-season apple, eat those first and let the late ones wait.

This also cleared up something I’d never thought to ask. Commercial storage can hold apples for up to 12 months in a controlled atmosphere, which explains every crisp apple I’ve ever bought in April. I can’t build that at home, and I’ve checked how much room I have left in the fridge.

And Honeycrisp turns out to be the diva of the group. Most varieties are happy stored near 32 F, but Honeycrisp is sensitive to the cold and wants 37 F.

I’m keeping them away from the potatoes

Same gas, different victim.

The advice I keep running into is to never store potatoes with apples or other fruit, because that ripening gas is supposed to push potatoes to sprout. I’ve also seen people argue about it, and I’m in no position to referee.

So I’m taking the cautious route. The apples go on one side of the kitchen and the potatoes go on the other, and nobody has to find out who was right.

The freezer is my backup plan

I’m not going to eat all of these in time, and I’ve made peace with that.

Good news for me. A lot of apple varieties freeze well, either as slices or as sauce, and the slices can go in with or without sugar. This isn’t a recipe site and I’m not about to turn it into one, so that’s as far as the instructions go.

The one thing worth knowing is why cut apples turn brown, because I’ve wondered about that since I was a kid. Cutting an apple lets oxygen into the damaged flesh, and enzymes in there react with it and make brown stuff. A bruise does the same thing, which is why bruises are brown too.

A little lemon juice slows it down. Some varieties brown faster than others, so I’ll find out which kind I’ve got the hard way.

The freezer does want crisp, firm apples and not mealy ones. That’s one more reason I can’t leave this pile sitting on the counter while I think about it.

No, the seeds aren’t going to kill me

When you’re about to eat this many apples, you start wondering about the cyanide thing.

It’s real, sort of. Apple seeds have small amounts of a compound called amygdalin, and it can release cyanide when the seeds get crushed or chewed.

Swallowing one or two by accident is unlikely to cause a problem. The estimate I found is that it’d take around 83 to 500 crushed or chewed seeds to cause acute cyanide poisoning, and that’s a lot of chewing nobody’s doing by accident.

I’m still not eating them. I’m spitting them out like I always have, just with less drama.

I’m absolutely doing this again next year

I know more about apples now than I ever wanted to. I know what a peck is, I know my fruit bowl has been lying to me, and I know the potatoes need their space.

None of it’s going to help. Next fall I’ll walk into an orchard with all of this in my head, look at a tree full of apples, and come home with way too many again.

At least next time I’ll know which ones to eat first.