Sharing a fantastic Reddit post re: butter tarts in Toronto by user icecreamnstickers for those who may not frequent Reddit:
hey all, in the last few months I made myself a project to try different butter tarts in Toronto. I tried 25 in total and here’s my notes: (side note: I tried to get the classic butter tart, without any added flavours or fillings, unless it was unavailable at the store, so that I could compare them directly.)
- Circles and Squares Bakery (classic butter tart $4.25) : My first butter tart I tried which convinced me to try more butter tarts. The first thing you notice is the size. It’s quite big and thick, almost as if they made the tart shell in a muffin pan rather than a cupcake pan. The crust is buttery and flaky, with a satisfying bite. The filling is soft and gooey, slightly sticky and some parts stuck on the edge of my teeth but it quickly melted. It’s sweet, rich and full of caramelized flavour. It is sweet, but pleasantly so. I can see why Circles and Squares Bakery won multiple times in the Midland festival, it’s a really well balanced butter tart.
- Charmaine Sweets (butter tart $3.75): Both the crust and filling are soft here. The crust is thin with minimal layers. The filling is more liquidy, almost runny and has a predominantly white cane sugar flavour, with not much caramelized flavour. I think if someone likes a less rich filling with a clean sugar profile, they would enjoy this butter tart.
- Spirited Tarts & Coffee (pecan butter tart $4): Their tart is brown all over, especially the tart shell. This tart seems like it’s based on pâte sucrée dough: sweet, crisp and almost cookie-like. The crust is really buttery and well baked. The filling is firmer than usual butter tarts, not too sweet, with a nice caramelized brown sugar flavour. The pecan adds a nice crunch and nutty flavour.
- Ba Noi (butter tart $3.50): This butter tart gets recommended everywhere, and I can see why. It’s quite a different variation from a traditional butter tart. First, it uses flaky layered pastry dough rather than the usual shortcrust pastry dough, making the crust light, flaky and crunchy. The filling is not sweet at all, which was surprising. It was soft and light, with flavour notes of brown butter, light molasses, and maple. It’s not as rich compared to Circles and Squares, but the taste is more complex with various layers of flavour. It has generous sprinkles of sea salt on top, giving a nice sweet salty contrast in each bite. The filling itself wasn’t sticky, but the outer edges of the tart were all caramelized, so that became the stickiness factor here. It really is a different type of butter tart, and it’s really good. And since it’s not so sweet, I could eat a couple of these in one sitting.
- Bakerbots Baking (guava butter tart $3.98): This is a typical butter tart you find in most places: thick, mealy pie dough crust with a sweet, gooey, sticky filling. The filling is sweet, mostly brown sugar flavour. It tastes even sweeter because the crust is bland. The crust is crumbly and pale, lacking the rich buttery flavour of a classic pie/tart dough, suggesting they maybe used shortening instead of butter.
- Evelyn’s Wholegrain Bakery (maple butter tart $3): These butter tarts are small, about the size of the Two-Bite Brownies I used to eat when I was a kid. This tart is an explosion of maple syrup. It tastes exactly like when you drench fluffy pancakes in maple syrup and leave them for a while until they become that sweet, soft, moist maple cake. The filling is gooey and slightly runny at the bottom. The tart crust is really buttery, and together with the filling it tastes like maple butter sugar candy. It is sweet, but because it’s mostly maple syrup flavour, it’s delicious.
- Brodflour (butter tart $3.99): The standout from this tart is the crust. It’s a flaky shortcrust pastry made with prairie hard red, spelt, and einkorn – all freshly milled in store. The whole wheat gives a wonderful nuttiness and slightly rough texture. The filling is gooey and sweet but well balanced by the topped sea salt. It tastes like a blend of rich caramel and warm brown sugar. It’s also really well caramelized on the top.
- Epi Bakehouse (butter tart $3.95): This is a rich hearty butter tart. The crust is thick, firm and sweet. The filling is mostly firm like a custard texture, with the bottom slightly soft and liquidy. The filling is sweet and really rich. The taste of butter and eggs stands out. Eating the filling alone, it tasted like taking a bite of a rich, egg heavy custard with brown sugar. It’s also sticky on the top and outer edges of the crust, but it quickly melts on the tongue.
- Sweetie Pie (butter tart $3.25): This butter tart is sweet, cloyingly sweet that leaves a lingering sweetness in the throat. The filling tastes like a caramel sauce made out of brown sugar and corn syrup. Even the consistency isn’t gooey like the previous butter tarts. It’s more like a thick caramel sauce you drizzle on top of desserts. The crust was bland, maybe a tad more fatty than Bakerbots’s crust. At the $3.25 price point, it’s cheaper than most butter tarts, but it’s too sweet.
- Gerrard St. Bakery (butter tart $5): This butter tart is quite different from others in its appearance. It’s perfectly circular, thin and flat. The crust is very buttery with mild sweetness and thin layers. The filling is soft and slightly runny, almost like you could lick the filling. It has deep caramelized notes of brown butter and brown sugar, and it’s well balanced with salt so it doesn’t taste too sweet. If you look at the top of the tart, there’s a thin layer of hardened sugar that resembles shattered glass. This actually gives an interesting mouthfeel: when you bite into it, you first get the sweet soft filling, then the slightly coarse crystalline edges of the sugar, which creates a textural contrast as the sugar melts on your tongue.
- Mabel’s Bakery & Specialty Foods (toffee tart $2.49): Appearance wise, it looks like a dainty flower or clover. When I took a bite, to my surprise, the petals were completely hollow. And not only that, the crust was dry and tasteless, with no noticeable flavour of sugar, salt or butter. It’s definitely overbaked but also probably stale. In addition to the hollow shell, there was barely any filling. It’s odd because almost all butter tarts are overfilled with filling so you get the sweet sugar taste in every bite. But this one maybe had a small dollop in the middle. The filling was sweet, similar to a caramel with a minimal amount of milk. Disappointing, but I guess this is what you get at a price point under $3.
- Larry’s Place (butter tart $3.57): This is a crust forward butter tart. Not only is the crust very thick, but from the cross section, only half of the tart is filled, giving it the appearance of a little well. The tart is like a thick pie dough with layers, not sweet, and has a good balance of buttery flavour. The caramelized top is quite sticky, as it clung to my teeth multiple times and I had to roll my tongue to melt it off. The filling tastes like toffee caramel rather than the usual brown sugar taste.
- Tartistry (plain butter tart $4): Visually, this tart is very cute and dainty. The trim has a braided pattern and there’s a star shaped cookie placed on top. The crust is quite sweet and its texture is odd – pasty, dissolving in the mouth with a grainy finish. The filling is also too sweet, mostly brown sugar and caramel flavour. The filling is firm like a custard, even firmer than EPI Bakehouse’s butter tart. I could scoop it like eating a baked yam with a spoon. Also the crust and filling weren’t adhered together, and I was able to peel the crust right off the filling. I looked it up and all of their baked goods are gluten free, which explains the grainy and pasty texture of the crust. They also offer vegan and zero sugar options for butter tarts.
- The Pie Commission (plain butter tart $3.50): This is a great classic butter tart. The crust is flaky, buttery, well laminated – perfect for savoury pies. The filling’s ingredients (brown sugar, maple, butter and egg) were each discernible on their own, and together they created a well balanced sweet filling. The texture of the filling was gooey and soft set, just right. It was served cool but still very tasty. I bet it tastes amazing when warm.
- Bad Attitude Bread (nan’s butter tart $5): Similar to Larry’s Place, this is also a crust forward butter tart. Their crust is thick and crumbly. The rounded edges are crunchy, whereas the centre, where the filling sits is somewhat soft, which I assume comes from baking the tart and filling together. The filling to crust ratio is about 1:3, as if there’s a thin slab of brown sugar filling and the rest is all crust. Also similar to Gerrard St. Bakery, this tart has a hardened sugar layer on top, though thicker. The filling tastes like eating light brown sugar clumps by the spoonful - like how brown sugar stored too long forms little clusters as moisture evaporates. This tastes like that. There are also about five small raisins. Pretty good butter tart overall, I quite like the texture contrast of soft vs. crumbly.
- Bunner’s Bakeshop (butter tart $4.50): A vegan, gluten and nut-free bakery. This butter tart is a small dainty mini tart, served in a tiny aluminum foil tin. This is the very first runny butter tart I’ve had. Most places offer soft, semi-firm fillings, so this was a surprise. The tart shell is crumbly and light, very close to a decent vegan butter cookie. The filling is a runny syrup, mostly brown sugar flavour, but with light honey notes as well. Both the crust and filling leave a slightly dry, powdery aftertaste, which I guessed comes from tapioca starch, and from the ingredients listed on their website, both the tart shell and filling contain tapioca. The tart also had three small raisins. If I compare this one to Tartistry, this definitely has the better gluten free crust.
- Mattachioni (butter tart $3.50): Oh wow, this is a really well done butter tart. You know how some desserts don’t hit you with a single dominant flavour, but instead feel beautifully balanced in every component? This tart is like that. The crust is buttery, light and flaky. The filling isn’t too sweet, with notes of butter, light brown sugar and cane sugar. It’s soft and gooey, the perfect texture. It’s also sprinkled with coarse sea salt. Nicely caramelized on top but not overly sticky. Perfect size too, shaped like a cute dainty clover wrapped in parchment paper. I could definitely eat a couple of these in one sitting.
- UB Social Cafe & General Store (classic butter tart $3.63): The crust is bland, and rather than butter I mostly taste flour. I think it’s slightly underbaked, as the crust was quite soft and flimsy in the centre. The filling tastes mostly like toffee caramel, and it has the consistency of caramel drizzle syrup. It is quite sweet. Also, the tart was cool (their baked goods are either placed outside facing the customer window or kept in a cold glass display case), but I think butter tarts taste best when they’re lightly warmed.
- Sweet Trolley Bakery (butter tart $4): Their butter tart crust is quite thick and has the texture of a crumbly shortbread. The outer crust layer is nicely browned, and the inner layer is soft due to the liquid filling. The crust is quite oily; my fingertips became greasy just from holding the butter tart, and the parchment paper was drenched. The filling is basically raisins and brown sugar syrup. The bottom is covered with raisins, about 8-10 pieces. Since there were so many raisins, I couldn’t taste the filling as much. I would say this butter tart is more of an oily thick cookie with sweet raisins.
- Cassis Bake (mini maple butter tart $2.99): They offer maple butter tarts with or without currants, and they come in either mini or regular size. It says mini, but compared to previous places, it’s about the size of the $3 butter tarts I had before. Their regular size is quite large, similar to Circles and Squares butter tarts. The crust is very thin and crisp, like appetizer crackers. It’s buttery with a light saltiness. It tastes more like a base for savoury tarts. The filling is soft and gooey, almost custard like. The egg taste is prominent, and with the brown sugar and maple, I get notes of chestnut.
- Dough Bakeshop (butter tart $3.25): Another butter tart with more crust than filling. The crust has tall raised edges, and the filling covers only about half of it. The crust tastes strongly of flour, largely because the inner layer absorbed the liquid filling, becoming soft, translucent and unbrowned at the base. I think it could have baked a bit longer. Upon taking a whiff of the tart, I get a strong brown sugar smell. That carries through in the taste as well: the filling is mostly brown sugar and molasses, with a soft smooth caramel syrup consistency. Interestingly, the filling is both sweet and acidic. I wonder if there was either lemon juice or vinegar, which would help prevent crystallization and balance the sweetness. I’ve seen butter tart recipes that include a teaspoon of white vinegar per batch, but I was surprised the acidity was noticeable here.
- Rob’s Good Food (pecan butter tart $4): One of my personal favourites and also top five in overall. This butter tart is quite large, about 10 cm in diameter, like the ones used for savoury quiches or individual small pies. The crust is the perfect example of shortcrust pastry: buttery, soft, tender, yet firm enough to give a good bite. The filling is so delicious – perfectly smooth, soft and slightly runny. It tastes like not too sweet caramel milky candy. It reminds me of Werther’s Original candies: that sweet, creamy butterscotch candy that you never really buy yourself but is such a delight when someone hands you one.
- Eric’s Handcrafted Butter Tarts (classic butter tart $4.15): There is a coffee shop inside Chef’s Hall called Lost Coffee, and they sell Eric’s Handcrafted butter tarts. The butter tart was served cold, taken from a six pack case that was sitting in a fridge. Though cold, the butter tart is delicious. The crust is buttery, crumbly, tender with a light sweetness, similar to a shortbread cookie. The filling is great as well, it tastes like maple caramel jam with a touch of smokiness and burnt sugar. I really like how the maple and brown sugar unfold, it’s not too sweet and well balanced. The consistency is perfectly gooey and jammy. I do wish it were served warm and the crust a tad more crisp.
- Phipps Bakery & Dessert Shop (caramel butter tart $3.99): This butter tart has a generous dollop of their homemade caramel sauce in the middle, making it look like a puddle. I dipped my finger in and tasted the caramel on its own, and it’s pretty good. It tastes like light butterscotch candy with slight graininess. The tart crust was flimsy with not much structure. It’s quite crumbly with very mild butter flavour. The filling is gooey and soft, mostly caramel in flavour but leaning toward the mild, clean sweetness similar to corn syrup. Since the filling is not too sweet, it pairs nicely with the caramel sauce on top. Both the caramel sauce and the caramelized crust are quite sticky but melt quickly on the tongue.
- Future Bakery (butter tart $2.19): This butter tart has a conspicuous glaze on top that is alarmingly glossy. I take a whiff and smell faint artificial vanilla. I take a bite and, to my surprise, the top filling stretches, and it’s sticky and chewy like taffy candy. The crust is dry and sweet with a light crunch, like eating a cheap artificially flavoured vanilla cookie. I eat the rest of the filling and it’s really sweet. The filling is unlike the rest of the butter tarts, perhaps comparable to Mabel’s Bakery, in that it tastes only of sugar, and it’s not good. It’s as if you boil brown sugar and corn syrup for a very long time, resulting in a sugary sweetness with no nuance from ingredients like butter or egg. Disappointing, but this is the cheapest butter tart out of all the ones I tried, so my expectations weren’t high.
Here’s Google Maps list of all the above places: https://maps.app.goo.gl/a6LGrdbCTV51eR8d8. I also have my original blog post, written more like a journal, with extra notes and larger photos. I can share it if anyone’s interested.
My Top Picks:
- Best crust: Brodflour
- Best filling: Ba Noi, Gerrad St. Bakery, The Pie Commission
- Best maple flavour: Evelyn’s Wholegrain Bakery
- Best vegan: Bad Attitude Bread
- Best overall: Mattachioni, Rob’s Good Food, Eric’s Handcrafted Butter Tarts
Although I have this ranking, all the butter tarts I tried, except for the ones I gave a negative review, are genuinely worth trying. Each bakery has its own style, and trying them side by side really highlighted just how differently a butter tart can be made.
Let me know what you think! Did I miss anything? Are there more shops worth trying?
Photos in order of listed reviews:
