Ingredients · Fruit

Apple

Malus domestica · Rosaceae (rose family)

Apple
Dried apple pieces are the workhorse of fruit tea, and twenty-six products here carry them — more than any other fruit. They are doing a structural job rather than a flavour one: apple gives a fruit infusion its body and a mild background sweetness, and it bulks out a blend so the loud, expensive ingredients go further. A fruit tea that is mostly hibiscus is sharp and thin; the same blend with apple in it tastes like a drink. Where a label says apple, apple pieces or diced apple, this is it.

What it’s like, and how to use it

The partFruit
KindFruit
CaffeineCaffeine-free
Where it is fromCentral Asia (native range)
TasteMild, sweet and lightly tart, with a soft body; it rounds out a blend rather than leading it

How to use it

The base of most fruit infusions, steeped hot or cold. Rehydrates into a soft, sweet piece worth eating out of the pot. In mulling mixes with cinnamon and clove. It is very forgiving — apple will not go bitter or sour however long it steeps.

With food

Cinnamon above all. Caramel. Cranberry and blackberry. Ginger. Vanilla. Cardamom. Maple. Pastry.

With spices

Cinnamon, cloves, allspice and nutmeg — the whole baking chord. Ginger. Star anise for mulling. Cardamom.

With tea

Rooibos, which shares its sweetness. Black tea. Hibiscus and rosehip, which it softens. Honeybush.

Its story

Where it comes from

The wild ancestor is Malus sieversii, which still grows wild in the mountains of Central Asia — southern Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and northwestern China. The domesticated apple is thought to have originated roughly 4,000 to 10,000 years ago in the Tian Shan mountains and then travelled the Silk Road to Europe. No lot origin is named in our notes.

What happened

Every apple you have eaten is a graft. The trees do not breed true — plant a seed from a good apple and you get a tree of your own, usually a bad one — so every named variety in the world is a cutting of a single original tree, kept alive by grafting for as long as anyone has wanted it. Grafting is an essential part of modern apple production and it is unclear when it was invented, though it was certainly known by classical antiquity. Which means an orchard is less a crop than an archive. Drying is older than that: for longer storage, medieval Europeans strung up cored and peeled apples to dry, either whole or sliced into rings — the same thing in the bag.

On the shelf with it

Every product it goes into.

Every ingredient in the shop

Explore

Other ways in

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