Look for New Season Pears, Potatoes, Grapes, Sweet Onions

Here’s some items that are now available in your local supermarket, or will be available soon.

Starkrimson pears are among the first to be harvested early in the season and have a crimson red color that brightens as its ripens. They have a juicy texture and sweet flavor. Starkrimson pears are recognizable by their unique color and thick, stocky stem with a neck that appears to be growing up and around it.

Bosc pears are large with an elongated neck and have a distinct bronze/yellow color.

Bartlett is among the top pears in the U.S.   Bartlett pears are bell-shaped with a classic sweet pear flavor and smooth, buttery texture. Bartlett pears are excellent for fresh eating and are a common pear used for canning.

Bartlett pears are the most popular of the pear varieties.  They are picked at full mataurity in August and will ripen from green to yellow by the time they reach your supermarket shelves.  The Bartlett is a classic pear for canning and is great for fresh eating, pies and sauce.

Sweet onions from the Vidalia, GA area are pretty much history because of a smaller crop and the season ending earlier than normal.  While it may be the most famous of the sweet onions, a number of other states have established themselves in the past decade or so as providing consumers with some pretty tasty sweet onions themselves.  South Texas also grows a good sweet onions, but it has ended like Vidalia.

California is now providing sweet onions and will do so into August.

One alleged “sweet onion” I would avoid are those from Colorado.  Every year the Rocky Mountain state has bags of onions in my local supermarket labeled “sweet” and they never fail to disappoint, much less set my mouth on fire.

One of the best sweet onions coming on before long I’ve been pleased with from year to year is from the Skagit Valley in Washington state.

One of the better imported sweet onions that should be in your stores by early August are from Peru.  Sometimes, they are lacking a little sweetness at the start of the season, but get better as we move closer to fall.

You should also be seeing some good reasonable retail prices on table grapes from California, especially with the red grapes right now.  Soon to follow will be  the yellow seedless grapes.  With a good chance for a record crop from California, there should be some good prices on grapes this summer.

Another good buy in the coming weeks and months should be on potatoes with the new crop set to start.  The USA has over one million acres of spuds planted, which is 46,000 more acres than at this time last year.