Bucket List Foods: Canada
Good Morning!!
Today I have compiled a list of foods that are must eats when you come to Canada. Yes some of these foods are available elsewhere but for the most part these are Canadian created or they are just extremely popular here. For today's list there are 12 different foods that I have included.
Poutine
Poutine is a dish that includes french fries and cheese curds topped with a brown gravy. It originated in the Canadian province of Quebec and emerged in the late 1950s in the Centre-du-Québec area. It has long been associated with Quebec cuisine. For many years, it was perceived negatively and mocked, and even used by some to stigmatize Quebec society. Poutine later became celebrated as a symbol of Québécois cultural pride. Its rise in prominence led to its popularity outside the province, especially in Ontario, the Maritimes, and in the Northeastern United States. Annual poutine celebrations occur in Montreal, Quebec City, and Drummondville, as well as Toronto, Ottawa, and Chicago. Today, it is often identified as a quintessential Canadian food. It has been called "Canada's national dish". Many variations on the original recipe are popular, leading some to suggest that poutine has emerged as a new dish classification in its own right, as with sandwiches and dumplings.
Butter Tarts
A butter tart is a type of small pastry tart highly regarded in Canadian cuisine and considered one of Canada's quintessential treats. The sweet tart consists of a filling of butter, sugar, syrup, and egg, baked in a pastry shell until the filling is semi-solid with a crunchy top. The butter tart should not be confused with butter pie (a savoury pie from the Preston area of Lancashire, England) or with bread and butter pudding. Recipes for the butter tart vary according to the families baking them. Because of this, the appearance and physical characteristics of the butter tart – the firmness of its pastry, or the consistency of its filling – also vary. Traditionally, the English Canadian tart consists of butter, sugar, and eggs in a pastry shell, similar to the French-Canadian sugar pie, or the base of the U.S. pecan pie without the nut topping. The butter tart is different from the sugar pie given the lack of flour in the filling. The butter tart is different from pecan pie in that it has a "runnier" filling due to the omission of corn starch. Often raisins, walnuts or pecans are added to the traditional butter tart, although the acceptability of such additions is a matter of national debate. As an iconic Canadian food and one of the most popular desserts in the country, the raisin-or-no-raisin question can provoke polarizing debate.
More exotic flavours are also produced by some bakers. Examples such as maple, bacon, pumpkin, chili and salted caramel cardamom flavours have been made for competitions.
Montreal Bagels
The Montreal-style bagel or Montreal bagel, is a distinctive variety of handmade and wood-fired baked bagel. In contrast to the New York-style bagel, or the East Coast Style Bagel which also contains sourdough, the Montreal bagel is smaller, thinner, sweeter and denser, with a larger hole, and is always baked in a wood-fired oven. It contains malt, egg, and no salt, and is boiled in honey-sweetened water before being baked. In some Montreal establishments, bagels are still produced by hand and baked in full view of the patrons. There are two predominant varieties: black-seed (poppy seed), or white-seed (sesame seed).
Nova Scotian Lobster Roll
Lobster rolls are a popular seasonal meal, particularly among tourists throughout the Maritime provinces in Canada, especially Nova Scotia, where they may also appear on hamburger buns,baguettes, or other types of bread rolls and even in pita pockets. The traditional side orders are potato chips and dill pickles.
Montreal-Style Smoked Meat
Montreal-style smoked meat is a type of kosher-style deli meat product made by salting and curing beef brisket with spices. The brisket is allowed to absorb the flavours over a week, is then hot smoked to cook through, and finally is steamed to completion. This is a variation on corned beef.
Saskatoon Berry Pie
Saskatoon berry pie is a type of pie with a saskatoon berry filling. The pie originated in Canada and is often served with vanilla ice cream as a dessert. The primary ingredients of saskatoon berry pie include saskatoon berries, pie crust, sugar, cornstarch or flour, butter and lemon zest/juice. The pie is sometimes made with blueberries as a saskatoon berry substitute.
Pea-meal Bacon
Peameal bacon (also known as cornmeal bacon) is a wet-cured, unsmoked back bacon made from trimmed lean boneless pork loin rolled in cornmeal and is found mainly in Southern Ontario. Toronto pork packer William Davies, who came to Canada from England in 1854, is credited with its development. The name "peameal bacon" derives from the historic practice of rolling the cured and trimmed boneless loin in dried and ground yellow peas to extend shelf life. Since the end of World War I, it has been rolled in ground yellow cornmeal. Peameal bacon sandwiches, consisting of cooked peameal bacon on a kaiser roll and sometimes topped with mustard or other toppings, are often considered a signature dish of Toronto, particularly from Toronto's St. Lawrence Market.
Beavertails
The BeaverTail is a fried dough pastry that is sold in a variety of flavours. Most flavours of BeaverTails are topped with sweet condiments and confections, such as whipped cream, banana slices, crumbled oreos, cinnamon sugar, and chocolate hazelnut. BeaverTails is also made in savoury variations, such as with poutine or hotdogs.
Tire d'érable (Maple Taffy)
Maple taffy is a sugar candy made by boiling maple sap past the point where it would form maple syrup, but not so long that it becomes maple butter or maple sugar. It is part of traditional culture in Québec,Eastern Ontario,New Brunswick and northern New England. In these regions, it is poured onto the snow, then lifted either with a small wooden stick, such as a popsicle stick, or a metal dinner fork.
Nanaimo Bars
The Nanaimo bar is a dessert item of Canadian origin.It is a bar dessert which requires no baking and is named after the city of Nanaimo,British Columbia, on Vancouver Island. It consists of three layers: a wafer, nut (walnuts, almonds, or pecans), and coconut crumb base; custard icing in the middle; and a layer of chocolate ganache on top. The custard icing filling is traditionally made using Bird's Custard Powder. Many varieties exist, consisting of different types of crumb, different flavours of icing (such as mint,peanut butter, coconut,mocha), and different types of chocolate.
Pouding Chômeur
Pouding chômeur (literally unemployed man pudding) is a dessert that was created by female factory workers early during the Great Depression in Quebec, Canada. Today, it is casually served as a regional dessert, perhaps being a bit more popular during the saison des sucres, when maple sap is collected and processed and is usually part of the offerings during a meal at a sugar shack, but it is not specifically a maple dessert. The pouding chômeur is a basic cake batter onto which a hot syrup or caramel is poured before baking. The cake then rises through the liquid which settles at the bottom of the pan, mixing with the batter and creating a distinct layer at the bottom of the dish. The syrup or caramel can be made from brown sugar, white sugar, maple syrup or a combination of these. At the depth of the Depression, stale bread was also used in lieu of cake batter.
Tourtière
Tourtière is a Canadian meat pie dish originating from the province of Quebec, usually made with minced pork, veal or beef and potatoes. Wild game is sometimes used. A traditional part of the Christmas réveillon and New Year's Eve meal in Quebec, it is also popular in New Brunswick, and is sold in grocery stores across the rest of Canada, all year long. Tourtière is not exclusive to Quebec. It is a traditional French-Canadian dish served by generations of French-Canadian families throughout Canada and the bordering areas of the United States. In the New England region of the U.S., especially in Maine, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, late 19th and early 20th century immigrants from Quebec introduced the dish. There is no one correct filling; the meat depends on what is regionally available. In coastal areas, fish such as salmon is commonly used, whereas pork, beef, rabbit and game are often included inland. The name derives from the vessel in which it was originally cooked, a tourtière. Tourtière du Lac-Saint-Jean has become the traditional and iconic dish of the region of Saguenay, Quebec since the Second World War, and it has undergone several metamorphoses. During the 18th Century, "sea pie" became popular among French and British colonists, and it seems to be "the direct forerunner of the tourtière of Lac-Saint-Jean".
As well as the above other dishes that you can try that are stereo-typically Canadian are Ketchup Chips (also found elsewhere), Ceaser Cocktail, Split Pea Soup (also found elsewhere) and Bannock in Northern Canada (there are bannocks found elsewhere).
I hope you enjoyed today's post. If you head over to the recipes section of the website I have a few recipes of "Canadian Food" like Nanaimo Bars and Poutine.
Do you have an idea for a post? I am always looking for new ideas and would love to hear from you.
