In Montreal Quebec there are four main daily markets that are open to the public.
These are the Jean Talon, Atwater, Masonneuve and Lachine markets.
These are each historic sites in their own right and have been in operation since as early on as 1845.
During a trip to the area I attempted to and failed to visit all four of these markets.
My first stop was the biggest and most popular of the four; the Jean Talon market.
In operation since 1933, this place is bustling all year round and can have as many as 300 vendors.
Well everybody, so I'm in Montreal right now at the Jean Talon, I'm saying this very poorly, market.
I took French back in high school, and it's been a while.
I am balancing my camera right now on a little packet of cucumbers.
So yeah... my tripod is no longer a tripod.
I tried setting this up and it just like snapped, so yeah, production values.
Can't always win, but I do have a few things here that were very interesting.
The majority of people are selling tomatoes and apples and bananas and stuff,
but if you go on the outskirts of the outdoor market you'll find these fruit vendors who have brick-and-mortar shops,
but feels like a high-end fruit market for people who do a lot of cooking and chefs.
I was talking to the one market, I think it was the Louis market.
I'll put the name here in case you're in Montreal and want to check it out.
Not a sponsor or anything, but like the market is really good. He had like a lot of crazy stuff in there,
he had a cacao fruit of all things and a bunch of things from like
other countries that I have never seen in the US before.
He said that his son goes out to different countries and will bring fruit back like import fruit for the market.
So they get some very very special things there.
I'm gonna start with this one because it's the most perishable.
This is a fig, it's a Tunisian fig though. So this one is special.
I saw it a few different markets there. It looks very different than the ones that we get in the US.
It's like much rounder and more plump,
and honestly, I don't like figs.
That's why people keep asking me to review figs and I haven't done them yet,
because I'm honestly not a big fan of them. This one is a specialty. He said that this is a really really good one.
Special variety and everything so I'm gonna give it a try. You can tell it's a good fig when it just kind of like
separates like that
And there's the inside. The thing about figs I don't like is the texture.
Because they're just like so soft and they have like these little like fish egg type seeds on the inside.
So not a big fan of that. Maybe this will be so good that I don't mind so much about the texture.
That's really good.
Oh man, I think I've been missing out.
Maybe all figs are good, but this one is like it's nice and fresh tasting. It doesn't taste like dried out or anything.
I think that was the experience I had in the past.
I don't mind the textures quite so much. It reminds me of eating like a croissant with like butter and jam on it.
There's like a slight wheaty-ness to it, but a nice berry flavor to it,
and like a really sugary sweet like malty, molassesy, honey kind of flavor.
A taste like, yeah, that's like the sort of thing people write poems about.
It's not sour at all, like hardly at all, maybe like a 1 out of 10.
It's very sweet though. It's not as sweet as like a date, that would be like a 9,
this is more like an 8. Maybe I need to try some more figs.
I think I've had like one dried fig a long time ago and it just kind of like made a bad impression on me.
But if all figs taste like that, then I'm all about figs.
So I'm gonna try I think some more of them in the future maybe do like a comparison or something,
because it's like a whole untapped world for me. Because honestly I thought I didn't like them.
But shows what I know, that is actually really really good.
There's going to be a preview at the end of this video, so don't click out.
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