The rich rewards of Canadian cuisine

Australia's favourite food blogger, Not Quite Nigella, aka Lorraine Elliott, embarks on a journey around Vancouver to road-test some of Canada's finest food markets.

I'm not a naturally early riser. Let me sleep in and I'll get up around 9 or 10am. Getting up for pastry, however, is never a problem. Judy from The Fairmont mentioned the magic words "double-baked croissant” and suddenly I was setting my alarm early for a visit to Vancouver's Thomas Haas, a chocolatier and purveyor of wickedly good croissants. I love a good almond croissant and to me it's not an almond croissant unless it is baked twice. First, the croissant itself must be baked, after which it is dipped in a sugary syrup, filled with almond frangipani paste, covered in flaked almonds and then baked again to a crunchy goodness. Done well, it can induce a bliss-like state of total time and space freeze. Done badly, it's a waste of calories.

And I'm holding a double baked croissant in my hot little hand. Before I take a bite I first offer some to Mr NQN who is, quite frankly, not a pastry lover. He likes juicy things like fruit, and pastry is too dry for him. But then I watch him take a bite. And then another. Hmm, I'm thinking this might be good. I take a bite and I can hear the crunchiness in my ears. The sugar syrup and flaky, buttery pastry lulls me into a state of bliss. A car could have crashed into the shop and I would not have known.

Thomas himself is in the corner being interviewed by a local newspaper. The pastries are baked every morning at this location and Thomas' food philosophy is one which he strictly adheres to. Control over quality and sourcing the best ingredients from anywhere in the world (so really the opposite of the local movement). His vanilla beans are from Tahiti, his chocolate is from Belgium and he buys limes from Brazil.

We also try the macarons with my favourite being the caramel and the coffee, which has a whole coffee bean in the centre.

I take a sip of my London Fog tea. It's an Earl Grey tea that has been made with frothed milk and has a shot of vanilla. Oh my, can I set up camp here? And I haven't even gotten to the chocolates yet. I order a few chocolates to take with me which are the exotic – merlot and caramel fleur de sel, which is made with smoked salt and the green cardamom. The individual chocolates are $1.10 each. But with no time and no stomach space we go for a bit more of an adventure around Vancouver...

Just 20 minutes outside of downtown Vancouver, Granville Island has a great market that tourists and locals flock to. We arrived at Granville market on time but spent the first 30 minutes wandering around trying to find our Edible BC guide. We walked around and it was only when we spotted someone in a chef's uniform that we realised that our guide was already giving a tour so we quickly joined it. And just in time too as they were handing out blueberry sourdough bread samples. The Granville market is busy this Thursday morning as a cruise ship has just docked and people are busy shopping and sampling.

We see huge stalks of fresh garlic that were literally picked out of the ground yesterday. Our guide Rohan is one of the chefs at Gotham restaurant in Vancouver and he is proud to show off the local produce and range. One of our fellow tour participants asks him about morels and he explains that they are great here but expensive at $20 a pound ($40) a kilo. He explains that morels are best after a forest fire as they need nitrous and phosphorous to feed them. A few years ago there was a huge forest fire that wiped out one twentieth of British Columbia and the following year they had incredible quality morels.

We enter La Baguette which is owned by French proprietors. It is operational 24 hours 7 days a week as they supply many of the restaurant trade with bread. We try some of their pain au chocolat and I spy macarons in vivid colours for $2. They also offer picnic baskets for $9.95 a person so people can sit on the boardwalk and enjoy their food.

We see an heirloom tomato specialist who grows 21 varieties of heirlooms in their South Langley farm. These tomatoes are grown in soil, not hydroponically and they originally grew about 30 varieties but whittled it down to their current range of 21.

We try a donut from the Lee's donuts stand. There is nothing like a freshly fried donut and these are very good indeed and are what real donuts are all about.

We enter one of the bottle shops and Rohan shows us the ice wines which are a Canadian speciality. Interestingly, tax on wines in Canada is quite high so a bottle that might cost you $10 in the United States would perhaps cost you $20. One thing, however, is the mark-up on wine in a restaurant is usually capped at about 100 per cent and not above that unless it's a particularly inexpensive wine, which is marked up at 150 per cent.

Rohan shows us a range of beef and explains that in Canada, there are three grades of beef available to the general consumer – A, AA and AAA, with AAA being the best quality. However, there is an extra grade that is available at restaurants called prime grade. At the Amanados stand consumers can actually buy the restaurant grade quality prime beef, and beef tenderloin here is priced at $55 a kilo. The grade depends on the marbling, aging and the feed that the beef gets and most of the beef is corn fed here.

Time for a something sweet! We try a birch syrup caramel chocolate, which ChocolaTas made for the 2010 Olympics. It's sweet but very nice indeed.

One of our last stops is the Oyama Sausage Co, which produces artisan sausages and smallgoods for many of the Vancouver restaurants. The owner is from the South of France and we sample some prosciutto, Czech beer salami and a Milano salami which has black peppercorns in it.

We end the day at Granville Tea House where we get a fascinating run down on the different types of teas and how each one is produced. And did you know what makes orange pekoe tea orange pekoe? It's not orange or pekoe (whatever pekoe might be). It is the size of the tea leaf which needs to be 8-15mm long. As part of the tour we are offered a complimentary cup of tea, which we are eager to take up after our early morning.

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