We are fruit eaters in my house. Fresh, cooked, savory, or sweet—we eat it by the bushel, which is why I signed up for Blue Roof Orchard’s Apple CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture) as soon as I became aware of its existence.
The Apple CSA is exactly what it sounds like: for 12 wonderful weeks, the Blue Roof Orchard fills their trucks with certified organic apples from its Belmont farm near the Iowa border and drops them at roughly 30 sites in and around Madison, Platteville, Paoli, Viroqua, and Dodgeville. Depending on the specific box size, each week CSA subscribers take home as few as three or as much as 20 pounds of local apples, divided into paper bags, which are labeled by varietal and a line or two of description: Sir Prize: Tart, delicate and flavorful, or Initial: Sweet, juicy and aromatic. Eat fresh. You might receive a handful of one type, a hefty bag of another. Either way, my refrigerator has become a kind of Jenga landscape of apple bags, a sight I find gratifying every time I open the doors.
Apples are so ubiquitous in American life that it’d be easy to forget they aren’t native to North America. Jennifer A. Jordan, a professor of sociology and urban studies at UW–Milwaukee and author of several books on food, history, and culture, says they originated in Kazakhstan before proliferating in the United States, where the fruit is now so entrenched that apple types are linked to particular places, such as Wolf River apples from, well, the shores of the Wolf River. Apples, Jordan says, are just one agrarian link between town and country—like orchards luring city dwellers with music and beer gardens, or a CSA that brings the country to town—but they’re a meaningful one.
“It’s about economic benefit going both ways, and supporting stewardship of the land through consumption,” she says.
In early August, my first apple deliveries arrived and I decided to try a mini apple deep-dive. I labeled six apples by varietal names and left them out in the kitchen for my family to enjoy. Then I eavesdropped.
It’s trying to be Williams Pride and doesn’t quite make it.
Akane tastes like cider.
Redfree made me want to be a bee and just live in it, in my new, juicy home.
Much of this conversation is, of course, totally unhinged, but the ardent intensity is justified. What the first few Blue Roof deliveries have revealed are the delights of a particular type of abundance. I love the variety and surprise of a vegetable CSA, but there is an inverse, almost meditative quality to trying out many versions of one beautiful thing. The minor variations become amplified: the gradation from pale green to blush to full crimson; the difference from a snappy, puckeringly tart apple you might want to cook with meat versus a sweet, delicately textured apple you want to leave alone. In a world of products with utilitarian or purely market-driven names, whoever named an heirloom apple gave us something more poetic and evocative (I’m especially excited to get my hands on Pixie Crunch and Winecrisp). To me, these varietal monikers somehow communicate not what you will be if you buy the fruit, but what this fruit is, in and of itself, and some hint of the experience of creating and growing it.
Chris McGuire, who owns Blue Roof with his wife Juli, agrees. The couple grew up in New York City and Hungary, respectively, before settling in Wisconsin. They started the farm—then named Two Onion—in 2003, growing vegetables for markets and then a CSA. They added apple trees to their 12 acres in 2012, before shifting entirely to apples in 2019, and McGuire finds satisfaction in this tight focus. Farming apples is hardly easy work, but growing a variety of vegetables is even more exhausting, both mentally and technically. After 15 years, there were few surprises left for him, and with the vegetable CSA market declining from its peak, he was ready to narrow his focus.
There are practical advantages to an apple-only farm: the harvest period is 12 weeks instead of 25, and the sloping farmland is less prone to erosion when planted with trees than it was with vegetable crops. A head of broccoli, McGuire points out, is pretty much the same whatever the variety and whenever you harvest it, but apples contain endless variation. There is an ongoing pleasure for him in the simple acts of eating, touching, looking at, and sharing an apple.
“We just started the CSA season,” he says, “and getting a few emails back puts a whole different perspective on what you were doing [before harvest season]. You go through this long period with no tangible product and no feedback and support, so it’s kind of a relief and a nice feeling when you finally start to get it.”
Even if you are an apple lover, it’s worth asking why a purely apple-focused CSA is worth it. McGuire believes the best reasons for the consumer are simple: flavor and texture. These apples don’t have to make the journey most organic supermarket apples make from Washington State. An apple isn’t like a tomato or peach, which can be picked underripe and keep ripening in transit. There is a “constant dilemma” to when to pick an apple; if you pick earlier, it stores longer without softening, but it will never reach peak flavor. “There is only so much apple in the apple,” says McGuire. Under the CSA model, the McGuires can spread their harvest out over the course of the season and pick only when the time is right, delivering a lot or a few of any variety at its peak. They also have the advantage of knowing exactly when they’ll put apples in the buyer’s hands; there are no rainy farmers market days when you truck home a pile of apples to hold in the cooler for another week. He is philosophical about what we do with them after that.
“We can’t control how long people keep them on their counter,” he says, but “our life centers around the apples; everyone else’s doesn’t.”
I was tempted to start ordering my own life around apples after a visit to Blue Roof, where the McGuires’ land is orderly and calming, with a tall yellow farmhouse surrounded by flower gardens and a few outbuildings with blue metal roofs. Apple trees blanket the slopes in neat rows, small and laden with fruit in various stages of ripeness. McGuire showed me around the farm, along with one skeptical dog and a different kitten every time I glanced down. I counted three; McGuire laughed and said there were currently eleven.
I try not to over-romanticize farm life. But the landscape, the kittens, and my suspicion that an apple pie was in the offing at any given time, made it difficult. For now, I head over every Thursday to pick up a fresh batch of apples, and see which varieties are new that week. It’s not a complicated ritual—Chris and Juli have handled the complicated part for me—but it is a simple, perfect pleasure, a little different every time.
APPLE IDEATIONS
My thirteen year old loves to layer thin slices on toast with chili flakes and sharp cheddar browned on top; I like the same treatment with a little fresh thyme and Gruyere.
I spent minutes trying to think of a cheese that would not go well with fresh apple and couldn’t come up with any.
An apple crisp is one of those throw-together ideas that probably could not fail even if you try, but please don’t. A mix of varieties in crisps and pies are always more interesting, and if you mix firm and softer types, you get a lovely melding of the two. I add almonds, pecans, walnuts, or oats to the topping to keep it interesting.
A sweet galette is never a bad idea, but neither is a savory one with a touch of whole wheat and aged cheese. And maybe a scattering of sage leaves crisped in butter over the top?
Faced with a bag of second-tier apples, I make apple sauce in the laziest manner possible: I core them, throw the chunks in a slow cooker with a spoonful of cinnamon, and cook for a few hours on low. I don’t even skin them, and they sometimes fall apart so well I don’t even have to run an immersion blender through them.
Pork and apples are a classic combination for a reason. I’m not a huge porkchop fan, but I’d do tenderloin—though dark-meat chicken seems like a good bet, too. I’d still add some thick-cut bacon, just to bridge the gaps, and a few more of those butter-crisped sage leaves, for good measure.
