The Flavor of Quebec Is Sweet, Savory and Worth the Trip
(Long and fascinating)
An agro-tourism route through the Charlevoix region offers a hyperlocal bounty, charming towns and farms that preserve traditional methods of production.
It is a culinary adventure that started with a bang: Some 400 million years ago, a meteor more than two miles wide slammed into what is now the Charlevoix region of Quebec, Canada, creating an impact crater 34 miles wide. . .
The savory trail is built around hyperlocal food, everything from duck to foie gras to beef, and foraged sea buckthorn berries, whelks and wild mushrooms. “We use pretty much everything we can find around here,” said David Forbes, a chef at Camp Boule, a buvette, or small restaurant, atop the ski area Le Massif in Petite-Rivière-St.-François. . .
The road around the island is only 14 miles and bikes can be rented here for leisurely touring. We drove to a small bakery, Boulangerie Bouchard, which offers everything from brioche to croissants and pizza bread, as well as a dessert made with butter and brown sugar on pie dough called, pets de soeur (or nun’s farts) and a local specialty called pâté croche, or crooked pie, a pastry crust stuffed with crumbled meat. We passed a couple of miniature stone chapels as we left, open to visitors. These simple and elegant chapels were built in the early 19th century for Catholic Corpus Christi processions, part of a move, according to the church, to bring “God down into the street.” . .
On the way back to the ferry we stopped at Cidrerie et Vergers Pedneault, where workers pick fruit from 6,000 apple trees and 3,000 other fruit trees to make cider and liqueurs. We sipped several types of cider, from cherry to apple, and pear and plum aperitif ciders, in an elegant tasting room, and took several bottles with us. The cidery also make a highly regarded mistelle, an ice cider. . .
We joined about 30 other people at Faux Bergers in one of the farm buildings for a spectacular four-hour, seven-course meal with wine pairings, made with almost entirely local ingredients, from arctic char sashimi with a bright and tangy fermented carrot juice and koji syrup sauce, to radishes served with a whipped mix of browned butter, whelks, kimchi and radish greens. Duck served with beets roasted for 12 hours and then smoked were both earthy and savory. “We call it instinctive cuisine,” said Émile Tremblay, a co-owner and chef. “The way we roll is we look at what is available either in the fridge, the pantry or the farmer’s offers as a starting point, that dictates what the dishes will become.” . .
With all the eating we decided it was time to visit one of the two national parks in the area for a little exercise to work up an appetite for the next round. The Haute-Gorges-de-la-Rivière-Malbaie park was less than an hour away, so we tooled up there, stopping at Laiterie Charlevoix, a dairy farm where we glimpsed cheese being made, and picked up a brie-like, soft triple cream cheese and pâté to go with a fresh baguette for a picnic. We walked a few miles in a forested canyon in the park while rain pelted us, and stopped for a soggy lunch on a platform overlooking the steep, thickly forested gorge.
The meteor-induced terroir is only part of the story here. “People here are proud of what they do and do the most with what they have,” said Mr. Forbes. “It’s the mix of the two together that make this possible.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/16/travel/quebec-charlevoix-region-local-food-trip.html
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