Red Delicious
Name Variations[]
About Red Delicious[]
Wikipedia Article About Red Delicious on Wikipedia
This large, brilliant red (sometimes streaked with green) apple has an elongated shape with five distinctive knobs at its base. It's juicy and sweet but lacks any distinguishing tartness. The Red Delicious is in season from September through April. It's good for eating out of hand but does not cook well.
The Red Delicious is a cultivar of apple. It is the most widely grown apple in the world, red with darker red streaks, and five "points" on the bottom.
The Red Delicious, like many other fruit cultivars, was a chance seedling. The legend is that a hardy seedling was found in 1868 by one Jesse Hiatt, an apple grower outside Peru, Iowa, USA. Hiatt tried to kill it, but it kept coming back, and finally Hiatt let it grow, eventually bringing its fruit to a fruit show in Louisiana, Missouri. It won first prize. All Red Delicious apples are direct descendants of this original tree.
The Red Delicious was originally called simply the Delicious but when the Golden Delicious was discovered in 1914 a name change occurred.
Apple aficionados often deride the Red Delicious for its overly sweet, relatively simple flavor compared to other apple varieties, but it is generally one of the most easily recognized apple cultivars nevertheless.