My youngest daughter has discovered the existence of Poutine and wants me to make a batch. While I don’t have any problem with the concept, I’m going to have a problem with the execution. I’m not a very good cook and usually depend on canned/boxed/jarred help to cook dinner.
I have a large selection of grocery and specialty stores to buy the ingredients but need a simple ingredient list and recipe to actually construct the darn thing.
Just for the record, my deep fryer isn’t working, so I have to compensate for that.
The Wiki recipe you cited pretty much nails it. Medium thickness fries, crispy on the outside and soft in the middle. Squeaky, slightly tangy cheese curds. Chicken or chicken/beef gravy with a bit of salt and pepper.
Poutine is pretty simple - fries, cheese curds and gravy. No need to make it too complicated.
Why not start with frozen fries and oven-bake them, if your deep fryer is out of commission? When hot from the oven, add a handful of squeaky cheese (cheese curds) and top with gravy. Pretty sure you can get gravy in a can, so really it just comes down to putting everything together.
If you want to get into the soul of poutine, parboil the fries, then let them dry and cool before frying them. Start the gravy with a roux rather than a gravy mix. Milk the cow with your own hands, while singing to it dans le français québécois, etc. Just remember to have fun, for poutine is all about what tastes good to you, not any particular ingredient or process.
I would love to make my own poutine as much as the next poutine-lover, but the one thing stopping me is the inability to get my hands on fresh cheese curds. Unless you live near a dairy farm, I think it’s next to impossible.
Yep, this. That was my first thought when I read the OP. The only place I’ve seen really good cheese curds is in Wisconsin. Presumably you can also get them in Quebec, but I’ve not personally looked.
I can get things called “cheese curds” here in da UP (which is, essentially, Wisconsin North), but they’re not fresh. I guess they’d probably work for Poutine. But truly, for curds, freshness is key.
Not exactly. It’s more like crumbled Colby cheese, at least the stuff I bought “from Wisconsin!” was. But I once made poutine with rinsed large-curd cottage cheese and it was pretty good.
(But I’d rather have steak frites done in beef suet and dipped in homemade mayonnaise or malt vinegar!)
If you can’t find cheese curds you can substitute piles of mozzarella cheese and make a cheap truck stop poutine. Nowhere near as good but it was always good enough for a bunch of drunk students at 2am.
If you want really easy and don’t want to do your own fries, buy some really good ones take out, add cheese curds and chicken gravy. If you want to get fancy add a bit of parsley to the gravy.
If you want as authentic as possible make your fries with russet potatoes and deep fry them, twice if you can., buy some St.Hubert gravy, and find the freshest white cheese curds you can, they should “squeak” when you bite into them.
The poutine police won’t be busting down your door if you don’t make your own fries…or gravy…
A valid point. I ate it that way when I was a student in the early 90s. I was raised out west and didn’t know any better as I had not encountered poutine before moving back east. Until then fries with gravy was as fancy as I had had.
Now that even McDonald’s and Burger King use cheese curds I know better and would never stoop so low myself.
I ordered poutine at a diner here Nashville once and got fries with gravy and cold shredded mozzarella cheese on top. They didn’t quite grasp the concept.
The thing that annoys me about poutine here in Chicago is that whenever I see it on the menu, it’s never just standard poutine. It’s always something like pulled pork poutine, or duck breast poutine, or wild boar poutine or some weird shit like that. Now, poutine can come in all sorts of varieties, but I usually just want a simple classical poutine, like what is pictured on the homepage of La Banquise. (The most interesting poutine I had was from some curry house in Montreal --Chef Guru, after googling it-- where the gravy was replaced by a curry sauce and topped with chopped cilantro, in addition to the standard curds & fries.)
