My holiday recipe: Let the smell of fresh-baked tourtière fill your home | CBC News (2024)

FAQs

Why is my tourtiere dry? ›

Most people make Tourtiere with ground pork, but regular ground pork has a tendency to get dry (as I learnt that first Christmas with Robyn”s family). To combat that, I had my my butcher grind me some extra fatty pork, essentially unseasoned sausage meat, and used that instead.

The French-influenced pie is often made with pork, veal, beef, or game and sometimes a combination of the two. Mashed potatoes are folded in to help bind the meat, while celery and onion are other common aromatics. The spices give the pie character, such as allspice, cinnamon, clove, and nutmeg.

Freshly Baked

If your Tourtiere is already baked, please store it in the fridge. For best results, the pie should be consumed within 4 days of purchase. To warm, place on a baking sheet in a preheated oven at 350°F.

For best results, freeze your Tourtière after assembling and before baking. When ready to enjoy, cook from frozen, brushing the top with the egg wash before putting it in the oven. Baking time will be a longer from frozen. Cooked tourtière may be frozen for 4 months or so.

Meat pie is primarily made of ground meat (pork, beef or veal) and aromatics (onion, garlic, spices, etc.). In Saguenay–Lac‑Saint‑Jean and Charlevoix, however, “real” tourtière is a lot heartier than meat pie and contains other meats (such as game) and potatoes that have been simmered in stock.

Traditionally, Tourtière is served with roasted vegetables or a light frisseé salad. An assortment of pickled foods is always delicious; pickled beets, spicy carrots, gherkins or pickled onions. Many enjoy a tomato-based chutney but most… just break out the ketchup.

Tourtiere is a traditional part of the Christmas and New Year's Eve meal in Quebec. While typically made of pork and beef, Tourtiere can be made of other meats, such as chicken, venison, rabbit, or any other type of game. Some recipes have more potatoes than breadcrumbs, some have just potatoes.

Acadian tourtière, or pâté à la viande (pâté is casserole or pie), is a pork pie that may also contain chicken, hare and beef. Pâté à la viande varies from region to region in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.

Wine Pairing Advice: Tourtiere can be served with either whites or reds, but I think that reds go better (and in Canada, where the dish originates, red is what is traditionally served). Try pairing meat pies with light to medium-bodied reds and wines that are big on fruit like a Beaujolais or a Pinot Noir.

If a pie contains eggs or dairy products, it should be stored in the refrigerator and not left out at room temperature for more than two hours. Pies that do not contain dairy products, such as fruit pies can be stored, loosely covered at room temperature for up to two days.

Does cooked meat last 7 days in fridge? ›

USDA recommends using cooked leftovers within 3 to 4 days. There are two different families of bacteria: pathogenic bacteria, the kind that cause foodborne illness, and spoilage bacteria, the kind of bacteria that cause foods to deteriorate and develop unpleasant odors, tastes, and textures.

For raw ground meats, poultry, seafood and variety meats (liver, tongue, chitterlings, etc.), refrigerate them only 1 to 2 days before either cooking or freezing. Beef, veal, lamb and pork roasts, steaks and chops may be kept 3 to 5 days.

Most pies will freeze well from a raw or cooked state. However, custard filled pies do not tend to freeze well. When freezing a fruit pie, you'll see the best results if you freeze a combination of cooked fruit filling in a raw pastry. Raw fruit filling can become watery on thawing and may require additional thickener.

You can freeze Meat Pies either baked or unbaked. Either way, when you want to bake the Pies, you can bake them off frozen. They will, however, take a little longer to bake then the time stated in the recipe.

But tourtière's history can actually be traced back to at least the 1600s when Quebecois settlers, after attending a midnight mass on Christmas Eve, would get together for a huge late-night feast called a réveillon. There would be sweets, wine, hearty dishes, seafood and always a tourtière.

You may need some sweetness and acidity to bring up the tough meat. Simmer in liquid. Just like for burnt meat, if your meat gets tough and dry then you can simmer it in a little bit of broth for a couple minutes. Don't allow it to overcook again but just allow the liquid to penetrate the meat.

It sounds odd, but meat can become dry even when it's cooked in moisture. The most likely cause of this is overcooking. As meat cooks, its muscle fibers shorten in both length and width and eventually squeeze out the juices they normally hold. As you can imagine, this leaves meat dry, and often stringy in texture.