Ontario’s best butter tart? Team Raisin would like a word

“We don’t have to bow to Big Raisin,” said Pie Commission co-owner Patrick Blessing after the Toronto bakery’s best-in-show win for their pecan butter tart at the 2024 Ontario’s Best Butter Tart Competition.

Turns out nobody ‘bows’ to Big Raisin and it’s unlikely such an entity exists. In fact, it’s almost assured that if you enter a raisin butter tart in the traditional category (which also includes plain, pecan, walnut, coconut and molasses), you have zero chance of winning.

It may be all sweetness on the surface in the butter tart world, but there’s a dark and sticky (but still delicious) underside to the annual competition to crown Ontario’s best butter tart.

Team Raisin does have its fans (guilty), and there are plenty of purists who go for the classic plain butter tart, but pecan lovers wrestled control of the judges’ hearts and votes at this contest years ago.

Except for a two-year blip in 2018-2019 when plain tarts came out on top in the professional ‘traditional’ category, it’s been all pecan for the win.

Classic Plain butter tart

Raisin lovers have not been completely shut out – there’s still lots of love in the amateur category, as the Pecan Illuminati neglected to let the home bakers into their secret cabal. In 2018-2019, while classic lovers were enjoying a brief run of success with the pros, home bakers Debbie Lloyd (2019) and Tonya Louks (2018) were winning blue ribbons in the amateur division for their raisin butter tarts.

Perhaps home bakers remember the first printed recipe for butter tart filling, published in 1900 in Barrie’s Royal Victoria Hospital Cookbook, which called for 1 cup sugar, ½ cup butter, 2 eggs and 1 cup of currants – and know that adding raisins was not a sin.

Perhaps the judges in Midland didn’t get the same memo. Maybe they just hate raisins.

In any event, Team Raisin would like a word on the pecan privilege rooted deep in the gooey heart of Ontario’s most famous and – who knew? – controversial dessert.

I enjoyed many (many) tarts at the recent Ontario Best Butter Tart Festival in Midland and in the days and weeks that followed. Strictly in the interest of science and investigative journalism, of course.

I had raisin tarts from the finest baker in the land (Lisa Filion at BEST Butter Tarts of Orono), I hit up seven-time winner Doo Doos of Bailieboro to sample Diane Rogers’ raisin (just okay), peanut butter and chocolate (good, if a bit dry) and classic plain (spectacularly delicious). I tried a plain tart from a former favourite bakery that disappointed (oi), and I visited The Pie Commission, the 2024 winner (for their pecan tart, natch), to taste test their plain tart, which was fabulous and very close to perfection.

Doo Doos and The Pie Commission both have championship baking pedigrees and are also smart enough to be aware of the pecan privilege when deciding which of their delicious tarts had the best chance of impressing the judges.

Not that there’s any conspiracy to keep raisin down – heaven forbid. But let’s look at the champions in the ‘professional traditional’ category since the pros were given their own group in 2016:

• 2025 – Maple Pecan
• 2024 – Pecan
• 2023 – Maple Pecan
• 2022 – Pecan
• 2019 – Classic Plain
• 2018 – Classic Plain
• 2017 – Pecan
• 2016 – Pecan

Pecan tarts topped the traditional class in the first three years of the competition in 2013, 2014 and 2015 as well.

Even Filion, who won first place at the Barrie Butter Tart Festival in 2024 for her raisin tart, has learned to enter her pecan creation at the big event in Midland.

The prejudice is real. Team Raisin needs our help.

The Pecan butter tart

I never found Circles and Squares, a three-time winning Toronto bakery who swept both the traditional (Maple Pecan) and Wild Style (Coconut Cream Pecan) categories on festival day last month, so I circled back and paid a visit to their extremely busy bakery off the Don Valley Parkway the next weekend on my way to see family.

No raisin available, as they, like The Pie Commission, are very much in the anti-raisin camp. But their classic plain was simply divine and the award-winning Coconut Cream was … something.

Coconut flakes, cream for days and a super-rich filling, it was well worth the extra price and would be a showstopper at the swankiest of high-end restaurants.

But is it a butter tart? I’m not so sure, but it won in the wild style category, so I have no bone to pick here.

Maybe the solution is to break up the traditional category into (1) plain, (2) raisin and (3) pecans or walnuts. Heck, make it fair and split the wild-style entries into sweet (such as peanut butter and chocolate) and true wild-style (such as the 2023 winner, a plain tart from Rosemont General Store made with potato chips).

Sure, that would mean a lot more entries for the judges to judge and a lot more butter tarts to taste. This year, there were more than 70 butter tart vendors in Midland, and I know taste-testing all those submissions is an arduous task.

On the bright side, there are no calories in butter tarts on contest day (fact) and if the overworked judges need any help, I am available. Friends don’t leave friends hanging when there are butter tarts to taste.

I suppose I have to admit I would be bringing in my own bias to the contest if I were invited, but that’s okay. I own that.

I don’t have to bow to Big Pecan.

Ontario’s Best Butter Tart festival in Midland