Granny Smith Is Vile and Wretched! Apple Tasting Reveals Shocking Reviews
Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Radio
Milk Street Radio
4.2 • 3K Ratings
🗓️ 3 October 2025
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, your favorite apples get ranked, mercilessly. Find out which apples comedian Brian Frange deems “horse food” and “indigestible filth,” and which crisp, glorious apples rise to the top of the heap. Plus, reporter Katie Thornton joins us to discuss the history and ingenuity of the Frankfurt Kitchen, the blueprint for space-saving kitchen design; Adam Gopnik revels in the alchemical wonder of stovetop cooking; and we make Indian-Spiced Smashed Potatoes. (Originally aired October 13, 2023.)
Get this week’s recipe for Indian-Spiced Smashed Potatoes here.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Mill Street Radio from PRX. I'm your host, Christopher Kimball. |
| 0:08.0 | Is there such a thing as the Perfect Kitchen? |
| 0:11.0 | Well, one model may have come close. It was called the Frankfurt Kitchen. |
| 0:15.0 | It was designed in the 1920s in Germany. |
| 0:17.0 | It was sleek, it was supremely functional, |
| 0:20.0 | and they even chose a paint color and unconventional blue on purpose. |
| 0:25.3 | That's like the one unappetizing color, right? |
| 0:28.8 | So imagine making this beautiful food and then it's in a blue kitchen. |
| 0:33.3 | But the reason it's blue is because it was thought to repel flies. |
| 0:39.2 | That was Jennifer Comar Olivares, curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. |
| 0:44.1 | Later on in the show, we'll get a tour of the Frankfurt Kitchen. |
| 0:48.4 | But first is time for a lesson in apples, the good, the bad, and the just plain, inedible. |
| 0:57.2 | Macintosh, the national apple of Canada. |
| 1:00.4 | This dense curling stone has the refreshing tart kick of an icy northern winter. |
| 1:05.9 | Unfortunately, this tumor-swollen reindeer nose has perhaps the thickest, most intractable skin of any |
| 1:13.4 | apple this side of the prime meridian. Final score, 45 out of 100 horse food. That's comedian and |
| 1:23.7 | self-proclaimed appleist, Brian Frangy. He joins us now. Brian, welcome to Milk Street. |
| 1:30.2 | Thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here. You run a website called Apple Rankings. |
| 1:36.6 | So just to give our listeners the taste of your style, here's what you've written about the |
| 1:42.0 | Lucy Glow Apple. Quote, the lucy glow is a circus freak apple |
| 1:46.7 | with yellow skin and a red interior that shocks skeptics into submission here's a good part |
| 1:52.5 | most would expect this to taste like an unheeled surgical wound since each bite resembles a freshly |
... |
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