New variety of apples can stay fresh for 12 months

PanARMENIAN.Net - Move over Granny Smith and Red Delicious, there’s a hot new apple in town and it’s built to outlast them all. The Cosmic Crunch apple is hitting shelves in the US, and through careful development across two decades, is promised to offer fans of the fruit an extra juicy and crispy experience, with a storage life of up to 12 months when kept in the right conditions, New Atlas reports.

The Cosmic Crunch apple is the result of a cross-breeding research at Washington State University, where scientists began working on a hybrid fruit based on the Enterprise and Honeycrisp apples in 1997.

Now patented, the resulting Cosmic Crunch apple is said to be large, juicy and remarkably firm with a crisp texture. It also offers naturally heightened levels of acidity and sugar, so will very much be on the sweeter side. So much so, the team says it can allow home bakers to rely less on added sugar for their recipes.

The shelf life is billed as exceptional. In addition to high resistance to bruising, the Cosmic Crunch apple can be kept in controlled atmosphere storage for 12 months, in a fridge for six months or longer and on the shelf at room temperature for several weeks.

According to the researchers, this is because the Cosmic Crunch exhibits none of the typical storage disorders that plague lesser apples, such as internal browning, chilling injuries, shriveling or a sensitivity to carbon dioxide and low oxygen.

The bi-color Cosmic Crunch is so named for the white speckles that dot its skin and after more than 20 years of study and research is now ready for the world, with shipping to selected stores kicking off today.