Canadian · Beef
Classic Tourtière
About this recipe
Canadian home cooking reflects regional traditions across a huge geography — Quebec's French legacy (tourtière, poutine), the British baking of the Maritimes, the Indigenous and Asian-influenced cuisines of the West Coast.
As a beef dish, Classic Tourtière rewards matching the cut to the method — tender cuts for fast hot cooking, tougher cuts (chuck, brisket, shank) for slow braising where the collagen has time to surrender.
The scaler above resizes every ingredient to the number of servings you actually want; Cook Mode walks you through the recipe one step at a time with hands-free timers.
Recipe data is sourced from TheMealDB's open community database; ScaleRecipe handles the curation, the scaling math, the editorial commentary, and the conversion utilities woven into each page.
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Method
- Heat oil on medium-high heat in a large sauté pan or skillet, then sauté the onion and garlic until softened, about 5 minutes. Add the ground beef, pork, and spices and cook until the meat is browned.
- Add the beef broth and bring it up to a simmer then reduce heat to medium low. Add the grated potato and stir it in. Cook until liquid is almost absorbed, about 15 min. Remove the bay leaves and add salt to taste. Remove the pan from the heat and let the mixture cool completely — it bakes best if the filling is chilled.
- Preheat the oven to 375 °F (190 °C). On a lightly floured surface, roll out one disc of the pie dough to less than the 1/4-inch thickness and line the 9-inch pie plate. Fill this with the cooled tourtière mixture and spread out evenly. Roll out the remaining dough to the same thickness, cut a hole in the centre (for steam to escape) and place on top of the filling. Trim the dough to 1/2-inch beyond the edge of the pie plate and pinch the edges of the crust together. Brush the crust with the egg wash.
- Bake tourtière for about 45 minutes or until the pastry is a rich golden brown. Let cool for 15 minutes before slicing to serve.
- Serves: 8-10 (makes 2 9-inch pies)
Cooking notes
When scaling protein-led dishes, weigh the meat rather than counting pieces, and remember that the pan size limits how much you can sear at once.
For volume-to-weight conversions of any ingredient — flour, sugar, butter, salts — use the ingredient converter. To translate the recipe's oven temperature between °C, °F and gas mark, see the temperature converter.
When you scale this recipe up or down, remember that cooking time does not scale linearly. A doubled cake takes longer, but not twice as long; a doubled soup takes roughly twice as long. The cooking-time guide gives sensible starting estimates by dish geometry.
Scaling notes
Scaling Classic Tourtière
Classic Tourtière is written for around four servings as it stands on this page — scaling it up for a party or down for a meal-for-one is the small math problem most home cooks face every week. Here's how this particular dish responds to scaling, what changes linearly, and what doesn't.
The trick with beef dishes like Classic Tourtière is that braising time is set by collagen breakdown, not by total mass — a doubled batch takes essentially the same time as a single one. Seared or grilled beef scales by the piece, not the kilogram: budget the same per-portion sear time, and make sure your pan has space for every piece to sit in a single layer.
This recipe calls for eggs, which are the trickiest ingredient to scale to non-integer multiples. A US "large" egg weighs about 50 g; if a fractional scaling lands on, say, 1.5 eggs, beat one egg and weigh 25 g of the beaten mixture rather than guessing. The same goes for halving recipes — half an egg is 25 g of beaten egg, not a dramatic estimate.
Skip the math entirely — ScaleRecipe's scaler rewrites every ingredient line above with proper culinary fractions and smart unit promotion the moment you change the serving count. Open the scaler →
Beyond the recipe
Substitutions & make-ahead — Classic Tourtière
Two things home cooks ask about most when they're outside the recipe's exact assumptions: what swaps work for which ingredients, and how the dish behaves when you make it ahead. Both depend on what Classic Tourtière is doing structurally — here's the practical version.
Substitution ideas
Eggs
For binding (cookies, quick breads, meatballs): 1 large egg ≈ 1 tbsp ground flaxseed + 3 tbsp water, rested 5 minutes until gelled — structurally closest to a real egg. For moisture without structure (cakes, brownies): ¼ cup unsweetened applesauce or mashed banana per egg, accepting some loss of rise.
For weight-based swaps and arbitrary quantities, the ingredient density converter and the cup-to-grams chart cover most pantry staples.
Make-ahead and storage
Classic Tourtière sits firmly in the braise-improves-overnight category if it's a braise or stew — collagen continues to soften, flavours marry, and the layer of fat that floats to the top is easier to skim cold. Cool the pot uncovered to room temperature before refrigerating in a wide shallow container; this keeps things food-safe and lets reheating finish in 15-20 minutes the next day. Seared steaks and ground-beef dishes go the other way — best fresh, because reheating overshoots medium and the crust on a steak doesn't survive.
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Classic Tourtière
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OpenCooking time
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OpenPan size
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OpenLength
Inches and centimetres — for when a recipe says “cut into 1-inch pieces” and your ruler is metric.
OpenIngredient density
A cup of flour weighs 120 g; a cup of honey weighs 340. The full table of ~40 staples, with sources.
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OpenFrom the journal
Original essays on the small details.
The why behind the technique — original writing on the ingredient and equipment choices that separate a good cook from a frustrated one.
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The 30-or-so recipe terms that show up most often, decoded
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Cooking for one — scaling principles
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How long do leftovers actually last?
Beyond the USDA's 3–4 days: the variables that actually determine the safe window
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Where this recipe sits in the wider tradition.
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