Jack Tame: The perfection that is the Cosmic Crisp

Author: Jack Tame,
Publish Date: Sat, 29 Aug 2026, 10:28am

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It’s a bold claim, but I’ve made it often enough and I can’t back out now.

There is nothing in this world —nothing— worse than a floury apple. It’s not the actual flouriness that is the problem, per se, it is the fact that the flouriness is amplified by the knowledge of what once could have been. If this apple had been eaten at the right time, it would’ve been so good.

So it more or less goes without saying that if there’s nothing worse than a floury apple, there’s nothing better than the opposite: a sweet, crisp bite of appley perfection.

Perfection in the fruit aisle is basically an impossible ask at this time of year. If, like me, you love your fruit, you’ll be well aware we are getting very close to the absolute worst few weeks of the fruiting calendar.

We’re into the bowels of the cold store for almost everything. The citrus is holding on by its fingertips. Same with the kiwifruit and a few of the pears. But this is the biggest chasm in which nothing’s peaking. Yes sure, maybe you can buy a few early season berries, but you’ll be harvesting a kidney and mortgaging off your home to do so.

Enter the Cosmic Crisp. For someone who professes to like his fruit, I’m embarrassingly late to the game on this front, but in a household riven by illness this winter, the Cosmic Crisp has proven the stand-out option for anyone who fancies something healthy, fresh, and delicious.

You can tell from the name —Cosmic Crisp— that it’s an American apple. They bred it at Washington State University and in a relatively short time it’s become one of the most popular apples in the US. It’s a crossbreed of a Honeycrisp and an Enterprise. It has a maroon colour with a few greeny-yellowy hues.

The taste is perfect for my apple sensibility – sweet, but not the absolute sweetest. And tart, but definitely not a Granny Smith. Still, it’s the crisp that does it. I don’t really understand how this is possible, but although of course, the fresher the better, apparently the Cosmic Crisp will last in a cold store for the best part of a year.

Even now in the depths of winter, it’s pretty good. But if you reckon they're tasty now, take my word for it, to be good at the start of September, a New Zealand-grown apple has to be nothing short of exceptional when freshly picked.

I still recall my first Cosmic Crisp. I saw them at the local supermarket. They were the most expensive variety available, but I figured I’d treat myself. And you know that feeling when you open your mouth almost as wide as it’ll go, you sink your top and bottom teeth into the flesh, and then your pull the apple back from your lips? There’s a little fraction of a second... a moment of appley truth where you wait to see if the flesh will carve off in a giant, crisp chunk? I swear almost half the apple snapped off in my gob. I could barely fit the flesh in my mouth. Forget your fancy Michelin stars and foie gras foams, that feeling is as close to gastronomic perfection as you’ll ever find.