From bizarre flavor combinations to proudly provincial delicacies, these Canadian foods can absolutely baffle tourists.
Ketchup chips
Tourists can’t believe Canadians actually eat bags of fluorescent red potato chips flavored with tomato, vinegar, and sugar. Everyone else dips their fries in ketchup, but Canadians love to have it sprinkled straight onto their chips.
It stains your fingers pink, but it’s pure heaven for Canadians.
Poutine
Canada’s number one comfort food is something tourists either love at first bite or can’t understand why people enjoy it at all. Poutine is simply French fries topped with fresh cheese curds and hot brown gravy.
Tourists sometimes find the squeaky texture of the cheese or the idea of soggy fries unappealing. To Canadians, it doesn’t get better than poutine.
Nanaimo bars
This no-bake dessert square is from Nanaimo, British Columbia. It consists of a chocolate wafer and coconut base, a thick middle layer of custard-flavored butter icing, and is topped with chocolate ganache.
These bars are extremely sweet. In fact, it is so sweet that most tourists can only eat one mini bite before they feel like bursting with sugar.
BeaverTails
No actual tails from beavers are used to make this delicious treat. It is a fried dough pastry that workers stretch by hand until it resembles a flattened beaver tail.
Toppings range from cinnamon and sugar to chocolate and fruits. Tourists don’t understand why people would line up out the door in below-zero temperatures for fried dough, but they are sure to change their minds after one cozy bite.
Donair
Donair may be close to a gyro, but the East Coast variation is entirely its own creature. It is made with spicy ground beef and shaved with an extremely sweet sauce made from condensed milk, sugar, garlic, and vinegar.
Tourists question how milk sauce can even go on meat, but if you’re from Halifax, it’s the only way to end a night out.
Coffee Crisp
This is a popular chocolate bar with layers of vanilla wafer and coffee-flavoured foam, smothered in milk chocolate.
This Canadian chocolate bar isn’t sold very much in the U.S or Europe, so visitors simply don’t understand the hype until they take their first bite. The texture is so light and crunchy, it is an instant Canadian candy aisle legend.
Butter tarts
Canada’s signature pastry is filled with a mixture of butter, sugar, and egg, poured inside a flaky tart shell.
Tourists just don’t understand why there is a debate about whether butter tarts should have raisins or pecans, or if they should just be plain.
All-dressed chips
If ketchup chips didn’t confuse tourists, then All-Dressed will. This wild chip flavour is described as a salty, tangy flavour that is the love child of barbecue chips, sour cream and onion chips, salt and vinegar chips, and ketchup chips.
Tourists find the flavour assaulting to the tongue, but Canadians love it.
Kraft Dinner
Boxed macaroni and cheese is available worldwide, but to Canadians, it is known as Kraft Dinner or KD.
From university students to families, everyone keeps boxes of KD in their cupboards. Tourists may question how Canadians can be proud to eat orange paste from a box, but rest assured, they eat it for dinner often.
Hickory Sticks
These chips are thin strips of potato chips about the size of your thumbnail. They are covered in an overpowering smoky hickory seasoning.
They are also sold in bite-sized bags that mimic the shape of twigs. Tourists hate the odd flavour and shape, but generations of Canadians have been popping these in their lunchboxes for years.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.