Fruits, Ranked

Dense, aromatic flesh with an ideal sweet-tart balance; a ripe Alphonso or Ataulfo is one of the most intensely flavored things you can eat raw.

Peak-season strawberries deliver bright acidity and floral sweetness with no prep required, and they pair with nearly everything from cream to balsamic.

Segments of snow-white flesh taste like a blend of lychee, peach and citrus; fresh imports were banned in the US until 2007, and its scarcity is matched by its flavor.

A ripe freestone peach is juicy, fragrant and forgiving, but supermarket examples are routinely picked hard and turn mealy, dropping it below the top tier.

Seedless table grapes are crisp, sweet and endlessly snackable straight from the fridge, with essentially zero prep and long shelf life.

Sweet cherries pack concentrated flavor in a bite-sized package, though a short season and pits keep them just out of S.

Explosively sweet-acidic and great fresh, grilled or juiced; the brutal peeling and its bromelain sting are the only real drawbacks.

Delicate, tart-sweet and intensely aromatic; docked slightly for fragility and a price that reflects how quickly they spoil.

The reliable everyday fruit: crisp, portable and available year-round, but flavor swings wildly and mealy Red Delicious drags the average down.

Juicy, vitamin-packed and a winter staple, but the peeling, pith and pips make it more work than its sweetness always justifies.

Cheap, filling and perfectly packaged, but its ripeness window is punishingly narrow and it's off-limits to anyone who dislikes soft texture.

Convenient and antioxidant-rich, but flavor is muted and inconsistent — many store batches are more crunch than taste.

Supremely refreshing on a hot day, but it's mostly water, bulky to store, and a bad melon is bland and grainy.

Bright tropical tartness and a striking green interior, but the fuzzy skin and the actinidain enzyme that can irritate the mouth in quantity hold it back.

Wonderful for the brief window it's perfectly ripe; the rest of the time it's either rock-hard or brown mush.

Occasionally fragrant and sweet, but frequently watery and flavorless, and its netted rind is a notorious surface for listeria contamination.

Bracingly bitter and an acquired taste that many never acquire; its furanocoumarins also interfere with a long list of common medications.

The melon everyone leaves behind in the fruit salad — pale, faintly sweet and mostly a filler with none of watermelon's payoff.

Custard-rich flesh with genuine fans, but a smell so aggressive it's banned on public transit in places like Singapore — a polarizing gamble.

Raw quince is hard, astringent and essentially inedible, requiring long cooking to become palatable — a fruit that fails at being a fruit.

Nicknamed 'cheese fruit' and 'vomit fruit' for its rancid smell and bitter taste; consumed almost exclusively as a supplement, never for pleasure.