It’s vast and deliciously diverse, but Canada is surprisingly underrated when it comes to food. Look a little closer, though, and you’ll discover this amazing country has an eclectic array of dishes that showcase its history, multiculturalism and abundant produce. From Indigenous inventions like pemmican bars to hearty home-cooked pies and fast food favourites, we take a look at the weird and wonderful foods you’ll only find in Canada.
Click or scroll through our ranking of the foods you’ll only find in Canada, counting down to the most unusual of all.
An essential road trip snack, Timbits are Canuck-created doughnut holes. The bite-sized treats were introduced to the nation by the now-ubiquitous Canadian coffee chain Tim Horton’s in 1976, and they've remained popular ever since. The classic varieties are Old Fashion Plain, Old Fashion Sugar and Old Fashion Glazed, but you can get them in a veritable smorgasbord of flavour variations these days – including Birthday Cake, Sour Cream, Toasted Coconut, Honey Cruller and Apple Fritter.
A Halifax signature, the donair was created in the 1970s by Greek immigrant Peter Gamoulakos, the owner of the King of Donair restaurant. A bit like a classic gyros or döner kebab, it's made by cooking spiced beef on a rotisserie spit, then wrapping it up in a pitta with tomatoes and onion. But what truly sets the donair apart is its sweet and garlicky sauce, made with condensed milk. King of Donair now has several outposts in Nova Scotia and beyond.
When it comes to chocolate bars, there's one brand that Canadians love more than any other. Mostly only available in Canada, the Coffee Crisp is an irresistible combination of coffee cream and vanilla wafers, all wrapped up in a chocolate coating. It was introduced to the country in the 1930s by British confectionery brand Rowntree’s, but it's now produced by Nestlé. The brand is also responsible for the (equally tempting) Coffee Crisp ice cream dessert bars.
Introduced by Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the 19th century, smoked meat is a Montréal must-eat. It was traditionally made by dry-curing brisket, rubbing it with salt and spice, leaving it to marinate in a barrel for a month, then hanging it up to smoke. Today the Montréal delicacy is cured with salt and spices for around 10 days, then smoked and steamed before being cut (always against the grain) to order. It's best eaten piping hot in a rye bread sandwich, with a good smear of yellow mustard and a punchy pickle.
Can’t decide what flavour crisps you're in the mood for? Think like a Canadian and go for the all dressed variety. This taste sensation is a mash-up of barbecue, sour cream and onion, ketchup or salt and vinegar flavours and is one of the country’s most popular crisps. Ruffles and Old Dutch Ridgies – an iconic Canadian brand that began making potato chips in Winnipeg in 1954 – are the go-to brands.
There are bagels, and then there are Montréal bagels. Sweeter, chewier and denser than other bagels, they're utterly delicious. Lots of love goes into making these doughy delights: they're hand-rolled and stretched, dipped in boiling honey water, dusted with poppy or sesame seeds, then baked to perfection in a wood-fired oven. The result? Gorgeous golden-hued bagels with an irresistible crust. Montréal is packed with small-batch bagel bakeries, but Fairmount and St-Viateur are among the most historic.
A no-bake slice of deliciousness, the Nanaimo bar is named after the British Colombian city where it originated in the post-war years. It looks similar to millionaire’s shortbread, but this Canadian classic is very much its own sweet self. The layered teatime treat has a coconutty and chocolatey biscuit base, a creamy vanilla custard centre and a thick layer of chocolate on top. Who could resist?
A tooth-numbingly sweet dessert, maple syrup pie is a French Canadian winter warmer that’s often baked around Thanksgiving and Christmas. Also known as tarte au sirop d’érable, the decadent dessert makes a star of maple syrup, an ingredient that’s long been part of Canada’s culinary heritage. The thick brown syrup is added to a batter of brown sugar, egg, vanilla, cream and cornflour, and the mixture is then poured into buttery shortcrust pastry to bake.
A traditional Newfoundland dish, Jiggs dinner is a little like a British Sunday roast with a unique Canadian twist. The protein is usually salt meat and the veg – including potatoes, cabbage, turnip and carrots – are usually boiled before being served without gravy. To make this a true Canadian feast, it should come with a side of pease pudding (a side dish of boiled and mashed split peas) and the dessert should be figgy duff (a fruit-studded steamed pudding). It's called Jiggs, by the way, after a character in the comic strip Bringing Up Father.
Swedish Berries are soft, red berry-shaped candies bursting with flavour. The much-loved Canadian candies have no discernible connection to Sweden, but the squishy jelly sweets are one of many fruity favourites made by the Maynards confectionery brand owned by Mondelez Canada. Other old-school favourites include Fuzzy Peach gummies and Sour Cherry Blasters.
A traditional dish from Newfoundland, toutons are essentially fried bread pancakes. Made with leftover white bread dough, these humble pan-fried treats were typically served with butter, molasses and scrunchions (crispy bits of pork fat). Today, you’ll find the pancakes on breakfast plates around Atlantic Canada – either with jam or syrup, or with crispy bacon, eggs and beans.
The story goes that Bennett's Bakery first created Persian rolls in Thunder Bay, Ontario in the 1940s. They're oval pastries that are fried and then frosted with pink raspberry or strawberry icing. They're kind of like a glazed doughnut or a cinnamon bun and are also popular in certain US cities. Believe it or not, these frosted treats have nothing to do with the Middle East – some say they were named after famous US General John Pershing.
Creative pizza toppings are all the rage in the Great White North. Not only did Canada give the world the Hawaiian pizza (the pineapple-and-ham combo was first dreamt up by Greek restaurateur Sam Panopoulos in Ontario in the 1960s), but it also pioneered the far less controversial Canadian pizza. It may not have gone global like its tropical sister, but it’s still a much-loved takeout favourite in its homeland, featuring a taste bud–tingling combination of pepperoni, bacon and mushrooms.
Some people link date squares – or matrimonial cake, as it's sometimes called – specifically to Newfoundland, but these treats are popular throughout Canada. There's no reason why they shouldn't be enjoyed by people all over the world, either. They're a simple combination of sweet, sticky dates spread between two layers of crunchy biscuit crumble. What's not to like?
Pouding chômeur translates as 'poor man's food' – yet this dish is incredibly rich in flavour. It was invented in Quebec during the Great Depression as a cheap and cheerful way for struggling folks to enjoy comforting and calorific food. The dish is essentially a cake batter that's drowned in a cream and maple syrup mix before being baked. The syrup works its way through the batter as it bakes, leaving a caramelised base and a layer of delicious sauce.
A Québécois Christmas classic, the tourtière is a traditional meat pie that's baked in a shallow dish and spiced with cinnamon, cloves, allspice and nutmeg. While it invariably contains onions (and perhaps potato chunks too), it might be made with minced or hand-chopped beef, pork or veal (or all of the above). Encased in a flaky lard-based pastry, the dense delight is known by Acadians living in the Maritime Provinces as pâté à viande.
Both Québec and Ontario lay claim to these tasty little mouthfuls. To make a traditional butter tart, a dainty, flaky pastry shell is filled with a batter made of sugar, butter, golden syrup (or maple syrup) and egg – and raisins and nuts are sometimes added too. When it’s baked, the top gets a lovely crust to it, and the whole thing tastes great served warm with lashings of whipped cream. Butter tarts are so beloved that they have their own festival, Ontario's Best Butter Tart Festival, and a dedicated road trip, the Kawarthas Northumberland Butter Tart Tour.
Brought to Canada by European settlers and fur traders, bannock is an unleavened bread, similar to soda bread, that became a staple carb for Canada’s Indigenous communities and is still a cornerstone of many Indigenous cuisines. It’s often pan-fried and is sometimes twisted onto sticks to cook over the fire. Many Indigenous-owned bakeries and Canadian chefs have come up with their own take on bannock over the years. Its origins have been traced back to Scotland and the Gaelic word bannach, meaning 'morsel'.
What’s not to love about this Canadian sweet treat? A chocolate-dipped red velvet sponge cake sandwiched with vanilla cream, the Jos Louis was created by French Canadian baker Josef-Arcade Vachon at his bakery in Sainte-Marie-de-Beauce in Québec in 1932. The now-iconic bake was named after his sons Joseph and Louis. Still around today, the Vachon brand makes many other popular sugary snacks, including Passion Flakie and May West.
BeaverTails pastries are a must-eat, especially after ice skating along Ottawa’s Rideau Canal. Shaped like a beaver tail (what else?), the long, flat wholewheat pastries are deep fried and then drenched in cinnamon sugar. Chocolate spread, bananas, crumbled cookies and whipped cream are all popular toppings, too. Inspired by his German Canadian grandmother's recipes, Grant Hooker and his wife Pam founded the original BeaverTails stand in Ottawa’s ByWard Market in 1980. Today, there are BeaverTails stores all over the country.
Cherry Blossom candy was the 19th-century creation of the Walter M. Lowney Company of Canada, a confectionery brand based in Ontario. Now made by Hershey Canada, these individually wrapped treats have lashings of old-school charm, from their vintage packaging to their cloyingly sweet centre. Inside a mound of thick chocolate, desiccated coconut and roasted peanuts, you'll find a pink, syrupy middle complete with a maraschino cherry.
You won’t find this savoury sauce on the menu in any real-life Swiss chalets, but you’ll most definitely find it on the plates of Canadians up and down the country. Created by the Swiss Chalet restaurant chain as an accompaniment for its rotisserie chicken, the recipe for this sweet, tangy and herby sauce is a 'treasured secret'. You can also buy packets of the powdered sauce in supermarkets.
Born in the home kitchens of Western Canada’s prairies, this cream pie has become a Sunday supper classic. It’s a simple but delicious creation, with a cinnamon-sprinkled graham cracker base, a vanilla custard filling and a fluffy meringue topping (often scattered with additional biscuit crumbs). Flapper pie's origins have been traced back to the late 19th century, but it’s thought it got its name in the 1920s. Calgary’s long-running Blackfoot Truckstop Diner is known for its towering version, which has an extremely generous meringue-to-custard ratio.
Canadians love a dollop of ketchup with their food – so perhaps it’s no surprise that ketchup-flavoured crisps are the country's salty, savoury snack of choice. Thought to have been created by Hostess Potato Chips in the 1970s, the tangy flavour is now one of Lay’s and Ruffles' most popular varieties. The sweet, vinegary tomato seasoning is often sprinkled onto homemade popcorn, too.
Native to Canada, the deep-coloured saskatoon berry looks like a blueberry, but smaller. It has a different flavour profile, too, with a slight hint of almond. Highly prized by the Indigenous people of western Canada, the hardy plant produces antioxidant-rich berries typically used in meat soups and leaves that were boiled to make tea. Today saskatoons are commonly used to make jams and pies, allowing their sweet, nutty flavour to shine.
Swirled with ribbons of liquorice, this creamy orange ice cream might not be to everyone's taste, but the unusual flavour combination causes some Canadians to go misty-eyed with nostalgia. The distinctive tiger-coloured frozen treat had its heyday between the 1950s and 1970s – and it can still be found in some ice cream stores in Ontario, where it was most popular. Chapman’s Ice Cream also sells tubs of this Canada classic.
Traditionally a thrifty fisherman’s reward, these crispy bites made the perfect pick-me-up for men working on Canada’s wild East Coast. Now a classic Newfoundland comfort food, cod tongues aren't tongues at all – they're little muscles found in a cod's neck. The tasty morsels are drenched in seasoned flour, then deep fried until golden, and they typically come served with scrunchions (crispy salted pork bits), perhaps with a comforting portion of pease pudding (a seasoned paste made with split peas) on the side.
May is peak fiddlehead season in Tide Head, a small riverside village in New Brunswick. The self-styled Fiddlehead Capital of the World draws foragers to the banks of the Restigouche River, where these tightly curled fern fronds flourish. Plucked from the ostrich fern, fiddleheads are similar to asparagus in texture and flavour. You’ll see these coiled green beauties for sale in many Canadian farmers’ markets in spring.
It’s a sure sign of spring when you see maple candy (or, in French, tire sur la neige) on the menus of sugar shacks in Québec’s maple forests. The annual tradition sees newly harvested maple syrup boiled to a thick concentrate, poured onto fresh snow until it sets a little and then rolled up with a wooden stick to eat like a lollipop. Want to get your candy fix in the city? Some sugar shacks, such as Sucrerie de la Montagne, are open year-round, and urban sugar shacks sometimes pop up in Montréal.
Moose steaks, moose sliders, pulled moose, moose sausages, moose and barley soup... when it comes to Canadian meats, moose is where it's at. Dark, lean and full-flavoured, moose is incredibly versatile and can be found in a variety of dishes on menus up and down the country. It's especially popular in Newfoundland, where the large forest dwellers are abundant. Elk, caribou, bison and Arctic hare are other native meats traditionally hunted and eaten.
Rappie pie is an Acadian delicacy that might not win any prizes for looks but will warm your heart with its comforting flavour. It traditionally takes centre stage on special occasions in Acadian culture and despite seemingly only having three main ingredients – shredded potatoes, tender meat and pork fat – takes a day to prepare. But it's a family affair, with the dish bringing everybody together to both prepare and eat it. There should be plenty of leftovers for the next day, too.
Chewy, salty, sweet and smoky, candy salmon is a tasty West Coast snack. Here, wild Pacific salmon, caught off the coast of British Columbia, is cut into thick strips, cured in sugar and salt, then brushed with maple syrup before being wood smoked. The idea behind smoking salmon stems from Pacific Northwest Indian tribes, who smoked the prized fatty fish over alder wood to preserve it.
Pemmican is the original energy bar. Packed with protein, calories and plenty of flavour, it was historically an important part of many Indigenous communities’ diets. This dense delicacy is made from a mix of tallow (rendered fat) and dried pounded meat (traditionally bison), often with wild berries like saskatoons added. Today you can buy the age-old fast food in packets – and some Indigenous chefs, such as Inez Cook, have put a modern twist on the old recipe. Pemmican mousse is a signature dish at her Vancouver restaurant, Salmon n' Bannock.
Canada’s Maritime Provinces have some distinct culinary traditions, dating back to when they were a French colony in the 17th and 18th centuries. Many of these (including poutine râpée) are still preserved by the Acadian communities who live there. This potato dumpling is made by combining raw grated potatoes and mashed boiled potatoes, then using the mixture to encase salted pork. They're then boiled or simmered in a stew. Typically eaten at Christmas, the hearty dish was likely introduced to the region by German immigrants. You can grab a taste at no-frills spots like Menu Acadien in Shediac, New Brunswick.
Newfoundland has many traditional foods that haven't reached the mainstream, and fish and brewis is a prime example. The heart of the dish is hard tack, which is an incredibly sturdy biscuit made of just flour and water. These are soaked in water and then cooked together with salted cod to give you a portion of fish and brewis. Fried cubes of pork can also be added for an extra boost of flavour.
Flipper pie is a seriously acquired taste and is usually saved for Good Friday (if it's made at all). Its full name is seal flipper pie, so that should clue you into the meat used as the filling. To make it, cooks traditionally coat seal meat in flour and fry it before it's added to a pie with onions, pork fat and root vegetables. This unique dish hails from Newfoundland and Labrador and is normally served with a dash of Worcestershire sauce.
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Last updated by Luke Paton.