As is true of most food subjects, I know just enough about apples to convince myself I have everything under control right up to the point of culinary catastrophe. It's October, and I want apple pie. And since I've wholeheartedly bought into the cliché that everything tastes better when you make it yourself, from scratch, using only the freshest ingredients, a craving for apple pie necessarily implies a trip to the nearest orchard.

Dutchess County got its first frost recently, which means the clock has started running on apple season. This weekend my girlfriend Lisa suggested we go apple picking, so we made our way to the Greig Farm in Red Hook, which is apparently the county's third most popular tourist attraction. My friend Tony - a fairly skilled cook and equally ambivalent attorney - always says "you need spies for pies" - northern spy apples, that is - and the TV chefs tend to go with granny smith. When we roll into the Greig Farm, I think I know exactly what I need. But the Greigs have complicated what would seem to be an easy mission. There are red delicious, empires, ginger golds, jonagolds, macintoshes, and macouns; but no spies, no granny smiths. I'm now adrift.

Lisa and I made our way from row to row, tasting each variety. I try to think about the characteristics of granny smiths and spies that might make them suitable pie apples, and mostly what I recall is how much I dislike eating them. Both varieties are rock hard and puckeringly sour, and they tend toward mealiness more than most other apples in my experience. So as Lisa tries to pick her favorite (it's macintosh, by the way), I'm looking for the most unpleasant apple Greig has to offer.

No luck. The apples are all really good. We ate about half a dozen of them out of hand between the two of us, and picked as many as I could carry around the orchard without compromising my pretensions at manly strength. And although later research has revealed that red delicious and jonagolds are both perfectly suitable cooking apples, when we left Greig's orchards I had resigned myself to the prospect of baking a less-than-ideal pie. Though I hate to admit it, for a second I considered dropping by the Stop-and-Shop on the way home, with a half-bushel of fresh-picked apples in the back seat, to see if they had any spies.