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.”
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.