It was 102° Fahrenheit here yesterday and I wanted to eat an apple. I like apples, but the problem with them is that there’s no consistency of quality amongst supermarket apples. When it comes to a good Fuji apple, for instance, the word “good” doesn’t cover it; it’s more of an otherworldly experience in appley delight. The trouble is that only a small fraction of the apples you buy are going to live up to that standard. A bad Fuji can send you into despair in a single bite.

That’s why I’m always very excited when the Honeycrisp season begins. Honeycrisp apples are always equally good. Even the runty, tiny, misshapen ones that settle to the bottom of the display basket and get ignored by inexperienced apple consumers still have the perfect flavor, consistency, and degree of juiciness. Scientists have finally done something useful by bioengineering the Honeycrisp, which is, of course, the world’s most perfect apple.

You can only buy Honeycrisp apples though for a few weeks before they’re out of season. For years it was the most painful thing in the world. Once Honeycrisp season was over you wouldn’t necessarily be guaranteed another delicious apple for an entire year. Sure, you could buy lots of Fuji apples just hoping they’d be up to par, but you’d have no real assurance of quality.

Well, I’ve always known that you can make a terrible apple taste slightly better by chilling it. You can also increase the shelf life of your apples after purchase for a bit by keeping them in the refrigerator instead of on a fruit dish/bowl/platter (protip: having a fruit dish/bowl/platter on display, like on your coffee table or something, makes you a snob and an asshat anyway, so don’t do it).

However, it wasn’t until yesterday in the 102° F heat that I thought of actually freezing some apples. This makes apples with poor flavour much more tolerable and prevents succumbing to despair. Please consider this option the next time you’re sitting and crying in the bathtub, cutting yourself and contemplating suicide after buying yet another apple that, though attractive on the outside when you chose it in the store, turned out to have a putrid taste when you brought it home and tried to eat it.