Canadian Cuisine - Part 3 (Stereotypical Canadian foods & drinks)

Maple syrup

This quintessential Canadian sweetener is made by boiling the sap collected from maple trees. Different cooking temperatures and processes are used to make maple sugar, maple butter and maple taffy. It's best eaten on waffles or pancakes, but I've also seen maple flavoured cookies, maple fudge, maple chocolate, maple doughnuts, maple coffee, maple beer, maple sausages and even maple potato chips.

Poutine

Poutine is Quebec's version of the dirty late-night kebab. In it's most basic format, poutine is a pile of french fries smothered in gravy and topped with cheese curds. Many interesting variations exist, including poutine with pulled pork, poutine with curry sauce, duck poutine and so on. McDonald's has even started serving McPoutine! I know it's not pretty, but it tastes a lot better than it looks, I promise.

Double Double & Tim Bits

Tim Horton's is an extremely popular Canadian coffee & doughnut chain. It's fiercely loyal following is due in part to the rock-bottom coffee prices, but it's also based on a strong sense of national pride. Not only was the company's creator a famous hockey player, but the brand itself is uniquely Canadian, and therefore considered the 'anti-Starbucks'. The most popular beverage by far is a Double Double (coffee with two creams and two sugars). Doughnuts and doughnut holes (called Tim Bits) are available in many different flavours and offer a welcome distraction from the awful tasting coffee.

Butter Tarts

Butter tarts are a simple yet delicious pastry, with a sweet and gooey filling made from butter, sugar and vanilla. Controversially, some butter tarts contain raisins or pecans, but purists such as myself prefer the plain, unadulterated version.

Nanaimo Bars

The Nanaimo Bar is a no-bake slice made with a chocolate biscuit and coconut base, a vanilla custard layer and a chocolate topping. They are named after the city of Nanaimo in Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Nanaimo bars are readily available in most bakeries and cafes (including Tim Hortons).

Beavertails
Picture a cinnamon doughnut that's been flattened into a long, thin slab in order to maximise the deep-fried surface area, thereby exponentially increasing the yumminess (and calorie content). These are best wolfed down piping hot in freezing cold conditions, such as ice-skating along a frozen canal.

S'mores

A tasty treat best enjoyed by the campfire. Take a graham cracker (a square, sweet biscuit), place a couple of pieces of milk chocolate on top, then add a toasted marshmallow and sandwich the whole sticky, gooey, delicious mess together with another graham cracker. Bonus points awarded if you can eat one without getting any on your face!

Montreal smoked meat sandwiches

Montreal smoked meat is seasoned, cured beef that is cut into thick slices and typically served in an enormous sandwich with yellow mustard. The oldest and most famous placed to get a smoked meat sandwich in Montreal is Schwartz's Deli (which incidentally, is co-owned by Celine Dion).

Mac & Cheese (Kraft Dinner)

This is a Canadian comfort food that fills people with a profound sense of nostalgia as they recall the heavily processed, artificially coloured and flavoured snack of their childhood. For the sake of cultural research, I consumed a serving of Kraft Dinner and was not entirely convinced that it qualifies as a food product.

Peameal Bacon

I'm not really sure why this is a thing, but I'll tell you about it anyway. Peameal bacon is made from pork loins that are rolled in cornmeal. It doesn't sound very appealing and the taste did nothing to change my initial opinion. Back in the day, the coating was made from ground peas (hence the name 'peameal') in order to preserve the meat. Eating a peameal bacon sandwich from the St Lawrence Market is considered to be an authentic Toronto experience.

Ice Wine

Ice wine can only be made from grapes that freeze naturally on the vine during winter, when temperatures drop to between -8 and -14 degrees celsius overnight. Once the conditions are just right, the grapes are harvested and pressed immediately. The water molecules in the grapes are frozen, so the juice that's extracted is high in sugar content and flavour which results in a sweet dessert wine. It's also much higher in price, with a 375ml bottle (half the size of a normal bottle of wine) often costing anywhere from $40 to $100. Although ice wine is made in other countries such as Germany, Canada is the largest producer of ice wine, with over 75% of its vineyards located in the Niagara Peninsula in Ontario.

Caesar

A Caesar is a cocktail similar to a Bloody Mary, with one notable exception. Instead of tomato juice, this drink calls for Clamato juice, which is a mixture of clam broth and tomato juice. It's typically served with a salt and pepper rim, plus a garnish such as celery. This drink is very popular, so bars and restaurants in Toronto have been creating increasingly more elaborate garnishes to set themselves apart, like asparagus, sausage, cheese, olives and so on. The craziest one I've heard of included a mini cheeseburger on a skewer - it's a drink and a meal in one!