We Made Tourtière & Brushed Up on Our Terrible French
Tourtière. A French-Canadian delicacy that is something like a Shepherd’s pie pot pie. Yes, yes, we know it’s not actually a pot pie, and we know it’s not actually a shepherd’s pie. It’s called a simile. You know, a comparison of deux things.
We’ve had this one sitting in our to-do list of blog posts for ages, so nous sommes très heureux to finally be writing this post and telling you all about our experience making this delicious meat pie. (Oh, and it’s Canadian and so helps with our CanCon requirements? Huh, what a weird coincidence.)
If you’ve missed out on our previous Canadian cuisine posts, consultez-les ici:
Author’s Note: We (Brittany and Trevor) took French as a Second Language up until Grade 11 and Grade 9 respectively. We’ve lost most of what we’ve learned, but we’ve sprinkled in some French words and phrases for fun. Feel free to correct us, we are most likely wrong. (The only thing we can read is Canadian-French packaging labels, so at least we have that going for us.)
Tourtière Filling
The filling is very simple! You’ll need:
🥩 Viande. Beaucoup de viande. Une tonne de viande. What kind of meat? In the recipe we followed, a 2:1 mixture of ground pork to beef. If you want to be super traditional, apparently you should only use ground pork, but lots of recipes use a combination of beef and pork. Or if you want to be fancy, you can use veal instead of beef. One reddit comment even suggested forgoing beef and pork entirely and just using ground duck. We think it’s probably pretty safe to say that you should use both pork and beef. (Better texture, better flavour.)
🧅🧄 Oignon et Ail. You’ll want at least one onion and the recipe we used called for two cloves of garlic. But if you’re like us, you should measure garlic with your heart. Dice the onion, mince the garlic, and cook it with your ground beef and pork.
🥔 Pomme de terre. You’ll want one large russet potato. Peel it, cube it, and boil it until you can stab it with a fork easily. Mash it, then combine it with your ground meat, onion, and garlic.
💧 Liquide. The recipe we followed asked us to use beef broth. We have un petit problème with the quantity used in the recipe though: we needed to basically double the quantity of beef broth that was being asked for. ½ cup of beef broth basically made no dent in the filling consistency wise, so we had to add another ½ cup or so to get the consistency that we were looking for.
Tourtière Spices (Épices)
The internet doesn’t agree on what spices must be included in a Tourtiere — everyone has their own combination. But overall, the spices are a mix of both savoury and warm (spices that you’d find more in desserts).
Sage
Thyme
Herbs de Provence
Oregano
Savory
Mustard
Allspice
Cloves
Cinnamon
Nutmeg
Ginger
Black Pepper
Salt
Since Tourtière is really just ground meat and mashed potato in a pie crust, the seasonings really do the heavy lifting to make the pie sing. You don’t want to underseason your Tourtière. (Ce serait triste!) We would be ça va très mal.
The first time you make it, we recommend following a recipe’s recommended spice blend and tweak it to your taste! The first time we made it, we followed this recipe which used salt, pepper, sage, thyme, allspice, and cloves.
Tourtière Pie Crust
Listen, we’re going to level with you. You could probably get away with just using a store bought pie crust. But then you would have un groupe de Québécois en colère. At least we think.
Pie crust is surprisingly easy to make, especially since you can use a food processor to blend the flour and butter together. (It’s so much easier than cutting in the butter yourself!) When we made the dough it felt a little drier than it probably should have been, so we added a little extra ice water and it all ended up coming together.
Honestly, the hardest part about making the pie crust was rolling it out. It kept coming apart during the initial roll, so we decided to do an initial roll, then fold it back on itself, reform it into a ball, and roll it out properly. After that the dough rolled out more or less exactly how we needed it to.
“Channel your inner Claire Saffitz.”
N'oublie pas to brush an egg wash over the top of your crust! It’ll make your crust come out a perfect golden brown colour!
Our top crust fell inward (we’re just mediocre chefs, after all) but it was still delish!
Mediocre Thoughts
👨🍳 Trevor: As the resident weirdo who doesn’t like ground meat here at Mediocre Chef, I was expecting to really not like this one (#BusinessPartnerGiveAndTake). It was…okay. Not a fault of the recipe or the dish, but moreso a fault of me being a slightly picky eater when it comes to certain things. That being said, it was fine. I think for me it was a little on the dry side, and I would have preferred a sauce or gravy of some sort to help it. The spices in the filling reminded me a lot of the garbage plate we made eons ago. Not really for me, but I’ve had worse.
👩🍳 Brittany: My sincere apologies for scheduling not one but TWO ground beef recipes at the beginning of 2026. (#WorstFriendEver) Thanks for being a good sport and eating both spaghetti and meatballs and tourtiere. That being said, I’m a carnivore and the texture of ground meat doesn’t gross me out, so I enjoyed this. I’m excited to make it again and experiment with other spice combos. Also, as someone who typically doesn’t like leftovers, this makes délicieux leftovers.
Our Final Review
Taste: 3.5 Justin Trudeaus out of 5 😋😋😋
Presentation: 2.5 Montreal streets in spring out of 5 ❄️❄️
Affordability: 4 Canadian dollars out of 5 💰💰💰💰
Tourtière isn’t going to be for everyone. If you don’t like ground meat: tu devrais passes. If you do like ground beef and pork, combining it with seasonings that you’re used to having pumpkin pie might be kinda weird. Or, it might just be what you were missing in life.
If you want to make it cheaper, buy a box of Tenderflake pie crusts instead of the butter for homemade pie crust. (Seriously, why is butter so damn expensive??) You can also opt for all ground pork because the price of beef is too damn high right now.
If you try Tourtière, or you have the best spice blend to use, let us know in the comments below!
Bonus Rant
While we were writing and researching this blog post we were trying to think of fun French-Canadian specifics things that we could reference and present to a wider international audience. And what better French-Canadian thing than our favourite Quebec Cryptid: Bonhomme Carnival.
For those of you who don’t know, Bonhomme is a 7 foot tall, ageless being who is made of 400 pounds of magical snow. And he presides over the winter carnival each year.
During our research Google decided to correct “bonhomme carnvial” to “bonhomme carnival creepy”.
Creepy?!
Bonhomme Carnaval is not creepy. Bonhomme is the good man of the carnival. He must be protected. What is wrong with you people? Just look at this website. Look how jovial he is as you scroll.
Beware the good man of the carnival…
…okay, point taken.
Extra Bonus Content
Around the time we made the tourtière, Minute Maid had announced that it would discontinue its line of frozen juice concentrate. Both of us grew up drinking (probably way too much) of their frozen juice concentrates. So, the day we made the tourtière, we decided to get a can for old time’s sake and bask in the nostalgia.
Shit still slaps.
Bon voyage, mon ami. 🫡
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.