OFF - Ultimate Power Ranking - Fruit Edition

Everybody has their own personal preferences of fruit, which is what makes these preferences personal. When it comes to food, and fruit specifically, rarely do people's likes and dislikes align in perfect unison, but what we've done here at Sounder at Heart, is try to take these preferences and boil them down into one easy list. That's right: we Power Ranked fruit.

Now, there's a lot to each fruit, whether it's ripe or underripe, one type over another, how it's prepared, whatever. We ignored that nonsense in ranking. One person's dried banana is another person's durian. You can argue over the minutia all you want in the comments, whether an underripe peach is better than an overripe peach, whatever, but for the sake of not driving ourselves crazy, we kept it simple. We also didn't include any quasi-vegetable-fruits like tomatoes or avocados, so if you want to rage about them not being in this list, by all means. There were many more fruits included that didn't make the list. Rank your own favorites down below.

There, disclaimer over. We polled the most attractive and intelligent amongst Sounders fans and averaged out the results, which means this list is pretty much infallible.

Without further ado, we bring you Sounder at Heart's Ultimate Power Ranking: Fruit Edition.

Power Ranking - Fruit

20. Plum

19. Satsuma

The Satsuma is basically an orange perfectly engineered for children. It fits exactly into a lunchbox, is easy to peel, has no seeds, and has a lot less of the bitter pith that whiny children whine about so much. Adults can enjoy them too, but you should know you're eating kid-food.

18. Lychee

17. Blueberry

16. Kiwi Fruit

Pound for pound, Kiwi fruit is one of the healthiest foods you can eat. They're packed with vitamin C, fiber, omega-3 fatty acids, and antioxidants. And they taste great. The only downside is that they're a pain in the ass to peel if you don't want to eat the skin (which, it should be noted, is perfectly edible). But see below for one weird kiwi-peeling trick.

15. Grapefruit

14. Orange

A Satsuma for adults. Stock up before they're driven extinct by huanglongbing.

13. Pear

12. Pineapple

11. Blood Orange

A Satsuma for vampires and vampire cosplayers.

10. Peach

9. Mango

8. Grape

7. Banana

6. Raspberry

5. Lime

The only fruit on the list not intended to be eaten by itself, the lime was a controversial addition. But it's such an important part of dessert-making and cocktail-mixing (I'm looking at you, Moscow Mule) that it can't be excluded. Anyone who's tried to mix a gin and tonic with a lemon because they forgot to go to the store the night before will know how barren the world would be without limes.

4. Blackberry

3. Cherry

2. Strawberry

1. Apple

It shouldn't surprise anybody from the Northwest that the apple ranks number one. The quality and variety of apples around this region are unmatched in the rest of America. Get outside the PNW though, and that quality drops. Whether it's Pink Lady, Granny Smith, Fuji, Gaia, Macintosh, or Golden Delicious, you've got a lot of options with this fruit.

Honorable Mention:

Worst Fruit Ever - Durian

If you never have to smell a durian you'll be able to say on your deathbed that you've lived a good life. Imagine a dog eating a rotten onion and then pooping the onion into a used gym sock you found in the compost. They smell similar to — but slightly worse than — that sock. Also, they look like a facehugger mated with an echidna. People do eat them, and apparently the flavor isn't as bad as the smell (so like imagine it was a particularly adorable dog pooping into the sock), but I'm pretty sure they just eat it for the same reason people eat ghost peppers — so they can say they did it, not because it's a thing that humans should be eating.

You can get durian-flavored candies at Uwajimaya, which avoid the worst of the smell and are still horrible.

Fruit Most Improved by Drying - Apricot

Look at that fresh apricot. Looks good, right? Well, it's not bad. At best it's a pretty good little morsel of fruit, eaten in a bite or two - but doesn't really wow the taste buds. At worst it's like eating mushy, flavorless pulp with a hint of stone fruit flavor. In other words, a disappointment. Enter the genius of the ancient Mesopotamians. Cuneiform clay tablets circa 1700 BC describe a diet including dried fruits, apricots becoming especially popular in the fertile crescent after spreading from China. Sure, drying extended the shelf life of the fresh fruit harvest, but in the case of the apricot it also created these golden gems of flavor AKA fruit candy:

There, now all that flavor (not to mention fiber and vitamins) is concentrated into the perfect bite-sized snack that you might even forget grew on a tree. Thanks to modern science (and a healthy scoop of sulfur dioxide), they'll last pretty much forever. Try not to think too much about the wrinkly skin, just go for it.

Mango/Kiwi Hack

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