How One Man Has Dedicated Himself to the Art of Apple Trolling

Margaret Eby

Tue, August 27, 2024 at 5:00 AM UTC

6 min read

Bon Appétit / Image courtesy of BHL / Getty

Fruit is a gamble. Even when you select your produce with care, what’s inside is ultimately a mystery. This is particularly true with apples, whose shiny, bruise-less exteriors in the supermarket rarely reveal their contents.

Pleasingly tart, overwhelmingly sour, or cloyingly sweet? Will your first bite be snappy or reveal the dread mealiness lurking within? Luckily, a hero helping sort through the endless varietals of apples and their potential pitfalls exists: Apple Rankings dot com.

At Apple Rankings, you can browse through extremely opinionated, often hilarious descriptions of apples, all rated on a scale from 0 (worst) to 100 (the best possible apple on the market). Each of the 69 apples on the site is ranked on characteristics like taste, crispness, beauty, and cost/availability. There’s also a meter for sweetness, tartness, and intensity, as well as categories for baking apples, cider apples, and sour apples.

Apple Rankings is an extended comedy bit, but it’s also one man’s devoted pursuit of excellence in fruit. The website is the brainchild of comedian and cartoonist Brian Frange, who admits that, until 2015 or so, he wasn’t even really a fan of apples. “If you had asked me then what my favorite fruit was, I would have said mango or grape,” Frange tells Bon Appétit. “I would pick up a Red Delicious and it would be a mealy disgrace. It was like I was in Pleasantville and my whole world was black and white.”

One day at a Whole Foods in New York City, he picked up a SweeTango apple. “The world went into color,” Frange said. “It makes no sense that this could be the same fruit as the trash I had been eating.” Feeling betrayed by the forces that kept him from the joys of great apples, Frange decided to start a site objectively ranking them. “I don’t want anyone to eat a trash apple ever again,” he says.

Frange, who also goes by “The Appleist,” developed his own ranking scale, which he calls the F100, and calls it “my legacy. I have nothing else. I have no children. When I die, the only thing that will survive me is this system.”

“I don’t want anyone to eat a trash apple ever again.”

The worst-rated apples on the site are Newtown Pippins, ranked 19/100, described as “Long Island’s sand-filled condom” and “a tasteless hunk of malformed donkey shit that should’ve been abolished during the reign of King George III.” Anything below 55 points is filed under the category “Pure Shit Apples.” The worst apples, from 0-19 points, are labeled “Apple Hell.” These are further demarcated as “Not Worth Eating,” “Horse Food,” “Despicable,” “Vomitous Filth,” and, finally, “Criminal Malfeasance.” On the other side of the spectrum are “Top Apples.” SweeTango Apples (97/100) and Honeycrisp Apples (95/100) are the top-rated specimens, described as “The Holy Grail,” and “injecting its genes into some of the best apples mankind has to offer,” respectively.

Despite the humor of Frange’s reviews, his commitment is serious. He has a system. First, he buys five apples, tastes one fresh, and stores the rest in the refrigerator for a few days, when he tastes them again. Then two weeks later, he repeats the process, trying to ensure that the sample that he got didn’t represent a particularly good or particularly bad batch of the fruit.

Frange scours farmers markets for new varieties and keeps up on the latest apple news. He sometimes orders apples directly from orchards if there’s one that piques his interest. At several points in our conversation Frange veered into the science of apple grafting and storage, and on the “apple scam” in which unscrupulous grocers give the “Pink Lady” label to the lesser fruit, Cripps Pink. (Though Cripps Pink and Pink Lady are the same variety of apple, to earn the name “Pink Lady,” apples have to pass certain quality standards.)

Sometimes when a new apple comes to market, the orchard will ship fruit directly to Frange for his consideration. He aims to keep his ranking objective, but notes freshness and seasonality are part of the equation. “When it’s overnighted after being picked fresh from a tree, it’s a little unfair, because of course it’s going to be better than one that’s been sitting in storage,” he said.

The fun of Apple Rankings isn’t just Frange’s frequently profane, extremely passionate reviews of the fruit—it’s how much engagement the reviews get. Granny Smiths (according to Frange, 57/100, “barely worth it”) has devoted defenders. “While the Appleist usually has pretty solid takes, his apparently inferior gum strength prevents him from enjoying a delicious treat,” one commenter, Brad, observed.

“Sometimes people write me nasty emails and call me a fraud,” Frange said. “But usually people are in on the bit.”

Frange pays attention to the comments, particularly ones that ask him to reconsider his initial ranking. For one apple, the SugarBee, Frange upset reviewers by putting an initial score in the 70s: good but not great. After clamoring from the comments, Frange tried the SugarBees again, this time fresh from the orchard. “I was like, you know what, I was a little biased by the horrific bee mascot,” Frange said. “I gave it a lower score than I should have. I raised the score.”

Other apples, even with devoted defenders, have had worse luck. One apple, the Hunnyz apple, which Frange described as “the worst named apple of all time” (one of the “n”s is backwards, Winnie the Pooh-style), has such fans that Frange has retried it every year since 2021. “It’s got a great snap and a thin skin, and it has Honeycrisp heritage—but it’s juicy without a lot of flavor. It’s just kind of wet,” Frange said. He quoted his updated review: “I’ve tried the new crop with an open mind based on reader’s comments and, I have to say, the commenters are wrong. This apple is exactly what I remember it being: Barely Worth It. Yes, it is snappy and crunchy and juicy, but it tastes like a sack of wet air with an occasional hint of bathroom cleaner mixed in.”

Frange acknowledges that some apples are simply not as good in the United States, like the Fuji apple. “Fuji in America are totally different than Japan,” Frange said. “I give them bonus points for being culturally significant. In Japan, they’re enormous, and people will bring them to dinner parties or houses as gifts. But in the US, it’s a different thing.” Frange stands fast in his opinion, despite the ire it invokes. “A lot of people get mad at me because they like it. We really do live in a divided nation.”

Originally Appeared on Bon Appétit

Don't Miss

How One Man Has Dedicated Himself to the Art of Apple Trolling

Recommended articles