An apple a day? Try about 600

David Bedford doesn't just eat an apple.

He approaches one, observes its colors, determines if it's ripe, bites into it, feels its textures, swallows its juices and spits out its pulp. Then, he decides its fate.

"OK, you're just keeping your head above water," Bedford told one tree last week after biting into a few of its offspring. "It's your lucky day."

Bedford is the University of Minnesota's apple breeder -- more specifically, a fruit crops scientist at the U's Horticultural Research Center at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum in Chanhassen.

In the fall, his busy season, he spends most of his workday among the dwarf and full-size trees he's bred and grown. He rates them -- categories include vigor, hardiness, bloom -- in a small green binder whose pages have the texture and antique quality of library cards. In one day, he'll walk 7 miles and taste 500 to 600 apples.

Bedford is celebrated and interviewed for his most famous discovery, the Honeycrisp. The apple is the U's bestseller, and more than 5 million of its trees have been planted around the world. But such a superstar apple comes along once in decades.

Bedford has a metaphor for this, as he does for pretty much every part of the breeding process:

"If breeding is a baseball game, the Honeycrisp was a home run with the bases loaded," he said. "If you're constantly swinging for those homers, you're going to strike out a lot."

More recently, Bedford and the U have been hitting more ground balls.

They've released Snowsweet, a rich, sweet variety with white flesh. "A double," Bedford said. The Zestar, which the U released to nurseries and orchards in 1999, was a triple.

Soon, the U will introduce a single, the MN-447.

The MN-447 was never intended for commercial release, and even now is meant only for limited availability at a limited number of orchards. It's small, often cracks at its top, and its taste is likened to such odd flavors as Hawaiian Punch, molasses and "raw sugarcane on steroids," Bedford said.

Because it's unusually cold-hardy and has a distinct flavor, the U has used it in breeding since the 1930s. It's a parent to the Sweet 16 and the Keepsake and a grandparent of the Honeycrisp.

On its own, though, the apple has few admirers. It always performs "terribly" in taste tests; one or two testers in 20 might give it high marks.

But those one or two are a new focus in apple breeding. "Everyone's caught on to the idea of niche markets," said James Luby, professor of horticulture science and Bedford's supervisor. "We're long past the stage where apples are sold as either red, green or yellow."

Bedford grew up during that stage. He always liked fruit, but remembers dreading the days he'd open his lunch box to discover a Red Delicious, then the industry standard.

"Why couldn't it have been a grape, a banana?" he said. "An apple -- you couldn't even trade an apple."

Still today, Bedford bemoans the Red Delicious, which "may not be the enemy, but is the antagonist." All apples, he said, can be judged on their levels of sweet and tart. Red Delicious apples have very little sweet and non-existent tart, he said, using a hand to illustrate each.

But a Honeycrisp? He brought both hands high.

"When both are high, your brain says, 'Oh, this is sweet! No, this is tart. No, it's sweet,' " he laughed. "I think your brain needs something to do."

Some apples tend toward sweet (Snowsweet) and others toward tart (Haralson), but every apple that makes it past Bedford's book has substantial levels of both. Including the MN-447.

Unlike other breeders, he puts taste and texture at the top of his list of requirements. He learned years ago, when he sold apples at the Minneapolis farmers market, that people might buy an apple once based on looks. But they'd come back again and again for an ugly apple with a great taste.

There, he was perhaps the first to sell the Honeycrisp. And people freaked out at the flavor. They'd pay $1.50 for each apple and be waiting when he pulled up in the morning. "It was a microcosm of the reaction at any level," he said.

Now, Bedford's searching for the next great child of the Honeycrisp. He breeds it like mad each year and has a couple of possibilities in the pipeline. He compares this process to combing a beach:

"You know there are two diamonds hidden in the beach's sand," he said. "My job is to search for those one or two diamonds... I often find some pop bottles along the way."

If a tree is producing unremarkable apples, he marks it with orange paint and has it removed. Over a period of years, 99 percent of the trees eventually reach that fate.

In the early years after he began working at the center in the late 1970s, he'd give a variety multiple chances. Now, he's more likely to go with a one-strike policy. Apple trees take up time and space, and there's less of both these days.

One morning last week, Bedford shined up an apple and took a bite. "Not good, not bad -- which is the kiss of death," he said.

He spit out the apple's pulp and grabbed another from the same tree.

He took a bite and paused, eyes engaged. "Now that... there's a bit of something there. Almost like cloves. Taste that?"

Contact the writer at 612-673-7168 or at jross@startribune.com.

Jenna Ross • jross@startribune.com