We all woke up nice and refreshed this morning after a whopping 10 hours sleep! The beds in Toronto’s Chelsea Hotel are wonderfully comfortable and the sound-proofing is so much better than in The Manhattan on Times Square Hotels’ New York rooms.
For our first full day in Toronto we kicked things off with a Breakfast tour around St Lawrence Market with Kevin of Culinary Adventure Co. and his lovely daughter, Taylor. Kevin’s company organises Toronto’s best food tours to numerous neighourhoods across Toronto, and we selected their VIP Early Access St. Lawrence Market Food Tour - which allow you to get in to the market before it gets super crazy with the regular public.
We had the most incredible All Butter Double Chocolate pastry freshly baked by the Stonemill Bakehouse and then headed for a coffee at Balzac’s, and these guys really do a superb coffee. It was nice to finally meet Kevin in the flesh after exchanging tweets for months; and we managed not to eat the Cadburys’ Flakes that we’d brought over especially for him.
St Lawrence Market is located on Front Street; originally this was right on the water front of Lake Ontario, but Kevin told us that about 1Km of land has been reclaimed from the lake. It was strange to think that where we were standing would’ve been underwater at one time.
Kevin had forewarned us to bring our appetites and given the amount of traders that we visited and sampled foods at it’s a good job we were hungry. I’m not going to mention the food in chronological order, mainly because I can’t actually remember the exact sequence in which we did it, and to be perfectly honest everything we had was amazing.
Toronto is famous for its “Peameal Bacon” which is Bacon flitches covered in green pea-meal to preserve it; nowadays corn-meal is used instead as it’s cheaper. Carousel Bakery does the city’s best version and they also bake their own breads and rolls, so on the VIP tour we bit into the Breakfast version with peameal, fried egg and cheese it was fabulous. The bacon had a softer texture than our normal bacon, and it was cut into lovely thick slices too so you really got all its flavour coming through in the mouth; the bacon is salted less than other bacons too and this makes a difference to its taste.
Next stop was Churrasco St Lawrence for their Rissois (Roasted Shredded Chicken, Béchamel sauce, Portuguese spice in a dough round, which is coated in crumb and deep-fried) and a wickedly rich Custard tart. Rissois are a Portuguese item are normally filled with Shrimp or Beef, but this local Toronto version with chicken, can’t be beat.
Anton Kozliks Mustard stand does 40 different mustards and rubs and he very kindly let us snap pretzel sticks and try as many as we wanted. We worked our way along from mild to extremely hot and some of the highlights were the Mustard with Balsamic, Fig and Dates, one with Lime in, and the Triple Crunch variety which is a wholegrain mustard containing 3 different mustard seeds bound together with Canadian Whiskey. There is a XXX hot Mustard which although gets your tongue tingling isn’t harsh taste-wise, unlike the mustard that the New York street vendor used on my Hot dog.
My face lit up when we tried some cheese, prosciutto and little red peppers called “sweet drops” from Scheffler’s Deli. The cheese was lovely and mild with an edible rind and the prosciutto was excellent in flavour and cut wafer thin so that it literally melted on the tongue! Kevin said to give 4 seconds to experience the peppers, so I was expecting them to be tongue-tingling hot; they were the exact opposite with a gorgeous round sweetness to them.
Even their seeds didn’t contribute any heat. We sampled some Ukrainian Perogies at European Direct; these had the perfect ratio of dough: filling and were served with a generous dollop of fresh soured cream, yummy.
Caviar Direct provided us with some of their “Indian Candy” to try; this is a Maple Syrup-cured Salmon rather a salt cure or a citrus cure (used to produce Gravadlax). It has a drier texture than we’re used to, is also less salty, and is absolutely delicious I have to say :)
One of the popular stall holders was a guy called Rube who has unfortunately passed away, although the new owner has kept the trading name for the stand. This rice and bean outlet remains popular and just opposite all the items on sale, Rubes’ chair that he used to rest in is still insitu with his name on it!
Future Bakery was where we had a plain Butter tart. This delight was a short pastry case filled with a buttery, treacly filling that managed to be wickedly gooey in the middle. I was licking my fingers for ages afterwards, determined to get every last scrap of it eaten. A guy called Borys and his Dad still run this business that his Polish Grandfather originally set up after leaving Russia post WW2. It gets its name from the fact that Borys’ grand-dad wanted to leave the past behind and look to the future in Canada.
Kevin and Taylor took us downstairs to look at some historical pictures of how St Lawrence Market has developed over the years, and its purpose has also changed. This downstairs area used to house the jail cells for the police station and you can still see some of the black bars on the side walls of the original central area of the market .The central area is unchanged structurally other than more stalls occupying the back area that used to store waste from the butchered carcasses of the meat brought there. Over the years side extensions have been added to the market to extend the footprint of the building.
There is an upstairs space and Kevin mentioned that St Lawrence Markets’ cooking school has used it for cooking classes and demonstrations as well.
Literally everything food-wise can be found in this gastro-paradise and some of the counters of exotic meats were phenomenal with their Crocodile ribs, Goat steaks, Alpaca sliders and Camel and Pork sausages. The time passed by so quickly thanks to Kevin’s engrossing stories and tales of the areas history.
Another tour that Kevin runs is a canoe tour of Toronto’s islands that culminates in dinner freshly prepared for participants, lasting about 3 hours in total. However, due to ridiculously large amounts of rainfall this year a lot of these islands are only accessible to their inhabitants so although the canoe can still go into the lake, the food element of the tour is back in the City for now. It still sounds an incredible experience though.
If we had such a brilliant market near us I would be down there buying fresh produce most days. Obviously supermarkets can shave pennies off the price of goods, but sometimes it’s worth spending a bit extra to know the provenance of what you’re eating and also to support local independent traders. Imagine being able to go and get super-fresh produce to cook a special meal for loved ones; that would be fantastic to me. Monthly farmers markets and food fairs are about as close as I get to this wonderful experience.
Culinary Adventure Co. run a variety of tours, not just in Toronto but also in Kingston, Ottawa, Halifax, and Charlottetown too; if you visit any of these Canadian locations it’s well worth booking a tour with these guys, they really know their stuff.
Thank you Kevin for your heart-warming hospitality, you gave us a fantastic insight to this vibrant market; it really did get busy once the public were allowed in! I hope you enjoy the Cadbury Flakes :)
