I ask this in complete ignorance of the taste of “poutine” because I have never tried it. I have tried french fies which can be quite delicious if properly prepared.
To be honest I am generally not a huge gravy fan as the beef and chicken gravies I’ve had in the US at various restaurants are generally too salty, overly gooped up with thickeners, and taste pretty nasty. I’ve had a few delicious homemade gravies long, long ago when I was kid eating at relatives houses during holidays well south of the Mason Dixon line, but I don’t think I’ve tasted a decent restaurant gravy in decades.
Cottage cheese, though somewhat bland picks up and complements other flavors nicely and is perfectly pleasant on salads and on baked potatoes along with other garnishes, but it doesn’t really seem to be bringing anything interesting to the table as a french fry garnish.
I’m having trouble with the combo picture of tasty fries, and then a cottage cheese dollop, and then a gravy dump over it all. Is the poutine gravy wildly different than commercial US gravies? What is the cottage cheese actually doing in this scenario? Separate they’re OK (if you’re a gravy fan) but the combo sounds wretched.
What am I missing here? How does this become some heaven on earth dish otherwise sane people drool over?
Good thing it’s Canadian! (well, Quebecois). Don’t think it’s ever made with chicken gravy. Always dark brown and not too thick. Often homemade.
Re-read your link. It’s CURD cheese, not COTTAGE cheese! Waaay different. Like fresh, mild cheddar that ‘squeaks’ when you chew it (well, the little bits that haven’t been melted by the fresh, hot gravy). Mmmm. Obviously, I’m a big fan of poutine.
I don’t know who would want to use cottage cheese for poutine, or why. That does sound disgusting. It is properly made with mozzarella cheese curds. They get all melty and stringy from the heat of the fries and gravy. With good gravy, and salt & pepper, it is absolutely delicious.
However, you try to describe french fries with gravy to a lot of Americans and they scrunch up their faces and go “eeeeewwww.” I can’t get any restaurant to put gravy on fries. After the first time I asked and got it, I had to sent the whole mess back, because their idea of gravy was brown water that passed by an OXO cube once.
Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it! And please endeavour to try it!
It might sound gross, but trust everyone who’s had it (and I’ve only had the westernized, not pur laine version of it), the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. If you like salty, savoury, cheesy food, poutine might be for you.
And have you heard - they’re using cheese curds instead of cottage cheese now?
So… the blandish cheese curds of cottage cheese are not the “cheese curds” of poutine fame? Sorry for the mistake, but the curds of cottage cheese are the only cheese curds I’ve ever known. Is any other kind of curd cheese sold in US supermarkets?
We’ve got them in Alberta in special bags with the specialty cheeses, but who knows what you furriners have. And for the record, the dairy I’ve tried in parts of the US is gross compared to Canadian dairy products. Maybe you need to go to Quebec to try real poutine.
Poutine can be disgusting, but proper poutine is sublime.
Nice soft squeaky curds are important.
Good gravy is even more important.
KFC (or “PFK”) here offers a totally offensive spin on poutine. The curds are not fresh, and more like grated mozzarella - which is wrong - but most importantly, the gravy is that disgusting “we just cleaned the deep fryer” KFC gravy. Bleargh.
A&W offers poutine that’s even worse than KFC. Of course, fast food franchise poutine suffers from starting with aenemic fast-food fries - you can’t make a silk purse out of sow’s ear.
But when you have a really nice poutine - home fries, real gravy, and made-fresh-on-the-spot curds - then it all makes sense.
I’m a New Yorker but it’s goddamn delicious. We even make it at home after we went to Canada last year. We went to this little tiny place on the corner of one of the main streets in Montreal, and got served by this cute guy who almost only spoke French - and it was sooooooooooo yummy.
ETA: Canadians *are *Americans. I try to remember this and have changed my ost accordingly.
Cheese curds are really hard to find outside of Wisconsin and northeast Iowa. Even just a trip over the border into Illinois will throw you into a cheese curd wasteland – I know some people from Illinois who make cheese curd border runs in the same way high schoolers used to make beer runs when the drinking age in Wisconsin was 18.
You might be able to substitute fresh mozzarella, but that’s not quite the same in texture and consistency as a cheese curd.
I’ve never had poutine but every time in my life my french fries have found themselves within mixing distance with gravy, they’ve ended up married. The addition of cheese? Who doesn’t like cheese?
I used to go to Taco John’s for their heart-clogging chili cheese fries. Poutine just sounds blander, which I’d expect from our northern cousins.
Two Super Bowls I had a Poutine experiment. I wasn’t willing to actually deep-fry the fries (it was bad enough for us as it is!) so I convection-baked some Alexia fries. Picked up the cheese curds from a local cheesemonger, and the beef gravy from our local gourmet grocery store. I mixed a little bit of barbecue sauce in the gravy because a lot of recipes I read mentioned that the gravy has a bit of sweet smokiness to it.
It was phenomenal. I’d do it again, but that’s one of those things that one should never get too used to.
I’ve had it made with regular mozzarella, rather than curds, and it still tastes fine.
Make no mistake–poutine sounds disgusting. It even looks disgusting. And it’s roughly the equivalent of injecting pure lard into your bloodstream. But it really does taste quite good (most of the time. I’ve had some that was less that stellar–the type and amount of gravy can make a huge difference). And as a french canadian, I can just claim it’s part of my heritage if anyone disagrees with me
Sure. I buy them here in Utah all the time, and I found them at Trader Joe’s when I lived in CA. I don’t think there’s anything better cheese than “squeaky” cheese.
There are a lot of places in So Cal that’ll put thick gravy on fries, though if I was going to get anything on my fries, it’d be chili. It never occurred to me to combine the gravy and fries with the cheese curds, but man, that sounds delicious. Canadians are geniuses!
I try to remember this and have changed my ost accordingly.