Recipes · 31 October 2026 · makes 8 servings

Slow cooker tourtière: the Quebec pork pie with the filling made in the slow cooker

Name: Slow cooker tourtière
Prep time: 40 min
Cook time: 300 min
Total time: 340 min
Yield: 8 servings
Cuisine: Canadian
Ingredients: 1 tbsp vegetable oil; 1 kg ground pork (regular or lean); 1 large onion, finely chopped; 2 cloves garlic, minced; 1 medium potato (about 200 g), peeled and grated; 1 cup chicken or beef broth; 1 tsp salt; 1/2 tsp black pepper; 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon; 1/2 tsp dried savory; 1/4 tsp ground cloves; 1/4 tsp ground allspice; 2 discs pastry for a double-crust 23 cm (9-inch) pie; 1 egg, beaten with 1 tbsp water

Tourtière filling cooked low in a slow cooker while you are out, then baked in a double crust. Pork, onion, potato and the usual warm spices. Makes one 23 cm (9-inch) pie, serves 8.

A golden double-crust pie in a cast iron pan with a wedge cut out, a knife and a linen cloth beside it on a wooden table

Tourtière is the pork pie Quebec eats at Christmas and New Year, and that the rest of Canada has adopted for the same nights. The filling is ground pork cooked with onion and a little potato until it is dry enough to slice, seasoned with cinnamon, cloves, allspice and savory. Every family has its own ratio.

The stovetop version takes an hour of stirring on the day you are busiest. This one moves the filling into a slow cooker. Brown the pork in the morning, set the cooker on low and by mid-afternoon the filling is done and cooling for the pastry. The pie bakes the same as it always has.

What the slow cooker changes

You still brown the pork. A slow cooker stews; it never browns. A quarter of an hour in a hot pan is where the flavour comes from, and it breaks the meat up finely enough that the pie slices clean.
The potato is grated, not mashed. On the stove you simmer the filling until the liquid is gone. A slow cooker holds its liquid, so the grated potato dissolves into it and thickens it instead. Mashed potato stirred in at the end works too, if you have some.
Less broth than a stovetop recipe. One cup for a kilogram of pork. Nothing evaporates under the lid.
The filling must be cold before it meets pastry. That is true of every tourtière and it is the step people skip. Warm filling turns the bottom crust to paste. Make the filling the day before if you can.

Spice, to taste

Half a teaspoon of cinnamon and a quarter each of cloves and allspice is a moderately spiced pie. Some families add a pinch of nutmeg or a bay leaf, and some leave the cinnamon out. Savory is the Quebec herb; thyme stands in for it. Taste the filling before it cools and adjust then, because once it is in the pastry it is fixed.

Ahead and frozen

The filling keeps three days in the fridge. The pie freezes well unbaked: wrap it, freeze it and bake from frozen at 180 °C (350 °F) for about an hour and a quarter, covering the edge with foil if it browns early. Two pies take the same time to make as one, and the second is for the night you are too tired to cook.

This is the kind of recipe that lives on a card in the family, with the spice line crossed out and rewritten twice. Keep it in your Forktales recipe box with your own spice ratio in the notes, and cook it from cook mode with the pastry in your hands.