Can You Actually Eat Crab Apples?

Crab apples, those dollhouse-sized miniatures of your favorite apples, are safe enough to eat, but if you've ever popped one into your mouth, your first thought may be: Why would you even want to? Chalk that response up to the fact that these teensy weensy apples taste sour at best and bitter at worst, despite being cousins to the apples you do eat. They hail from the plant genus, Malus, a part of the Rosaceae family. Yep. Apples of all sorts, including crab apples, are part of the rose family, which may explain why people grow crab apple trees. They produce pretty flowers, just not particularly tasty apples, despite the fruits physically resembling their larger, sweeter, cousins.

This isn't to say that crab apples' uses are purely ornamental. Due to their sourness, crab apples taste good in pies, strudel, and other pastries, and their pectin content makes them good for jams and jellies. However, given that crab apples usually come in diameters of two inches or less, you'll use way more of the tiny apples if you swap out your full-sized apples for crab apples in your pies and pastries. 

Finally, crab apples are red, or sometimes, red-yellow, and can look like cherries due to their size and makeup. If you're not certain that it's crab apples you're dealing with, you're better off buying crab apples from the grocery store or farmer's market. 

There is a belief that crab apples are poisonous. That's not entirely true. The seeds of the tiny apples can become poisonous once they're ingested, due to the cyanogenic glycoside in them. When your tummy metabolizes that substance, it turns into cyanide, the stuff that rat poison is made of. 

However, as Healthline pointed out, you'd have to eat large quantities of crab apple seeds to get enough cyanide in your system to do you harm. That said, some animals like sheep and horses will eat them in large amounts (and probably without reservation), increasing the possible harm that can come to them. Small animals, like pups who like apples, may eat them as well. Because of their size and body weight, it takes fewer crab apples to cause them harm than it would a human who ate one or two seeds. In either case, it's best to keep your furry friends away from the crab apple tree in the yard if you have one. Feed them one of the delicious hand pies you made from crab apples instead.