Local specialty foods

A gourmet's delight
Bountiful, flavourful, colourful, ambrosial: Imagine a table mounded with a sumptuous spread including handpicked wild crowberry preserves, fragrant lavender sea salt, chocolate-dipped blueberries, crunchy peanut brittle, a basket of purple-hued garlic, flavourful gourmet mustards, a thick wedge of Prairie-grown saskatoon berry pie, light-amber-coloured blueberry-flower honey, and salad greens drizzled with nutty flavoured flax oil -- and imagine the fond memories you could gather while discovering local foods.

Local food products offer the surprise of new and unexpected crops, along with fun and interesting uses of conventional crops. Have you seen fields of crystal-blue borage flowers in the Prairies, or tasted borage oil; savoured a Canadian-grown pecan nut; or sipped a golden, tangy-sweet ground-cherry liqueur?

Explore food Canada-wide
Have fun exploring locally produced specialty crops and foods. Here's a sampling of what you could do:

Eastern Canada
See wild bakeapple berries, partridgeberries, crowberries, squashberries and blueberries as you wend your way through a Newfoundland bog; learn about bog ecology; then repair to the workshop of the Dark Tickle Company to see the wild fruit being processed into jams, sauces, vinegars and chocolates. Lavender and the sea air...in Nova Scotia? Discover lavender sea salt, lavender honey, lavender sugar and lavender tea at Beach Lane Lavender Farm, where fields of lavender overlook the scenic Northumberland Strait. The Charlevoix region in Quebec promotes local food businesses with its delicious Flavour Trail, where a day trip can mean savouring chocolate-dipped blueberries; nibbling fresh, squeaky cheese curds while visiting a cheese museum and factory; or stopping at a specialty preserve maker where a sampling counter invites you to taste delectable jams and sauces, as well as treats like grilled nuts dripping in honey.

Central Canada
If Canadian-grown peanuts are a surprise, try visiting Kernal Peanuts, a growing, processing and retail operation in southwestern Ontario where a former tobacco farm now grows peanuts to be roasted, or transformed into candies, peanut butter and fudge. Garlic and shallot enthusiasts can visit Mill Stream Farm, where the specialty is high-quality hard-neck garlic and French shallots, which have a pungency and flavour not to be matched by imported fare. Not all local food businesses are outside of urban areas: Anton Kozlik's mustard, based at Toronto's bustling St. Lawrence Market, has earned a name for quality and selection with over 30 varieties of sweet, spicy and savoury mustards.

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