For country 21, we finally go to my home country of Canada and make a Canadian classic comfort food: Poutine. For anyone who doesn't know, poutine is essentially french fries with cheese curds (cheese created by curdling milk) and covered with a brown gravy. Since there only 3 components to this dish, I decided to make almost everything (not the cheese curds) completely from scratch. As you can see in the photo above, I also thought it would be fun to plate it in a takeout to really make the poutine look like how you get it from your local burger or donair shop!
I have never actually deep-fried french fries before, only baked or air-fried. After looking up a few recipes I found a common way of making them which is essentially double frying them. First you soak your russet potatoes in cold water for an hour and dry them thoroughly. This gets rid of some of the excess starch and helps them get crispy. You then bring your oil big pot of oil up to 300⁰F and put your fries in and cook for 6-7 minutes. You then remove the fries and heat the oil up to 375⁰F and put the fries back into the oil until they’re golden brown and crisp, just a couple minutes. Then pull them out again and dry them with paper towel and toss with salt.
For the gravy I made a roux by heat butter and flower until it darkens and added chicken and beef stock, salt and pepper to taste cornstarch and reduced until thick.
Finally you just assemble, fries, cheese curds on top and gravy on top of that.
This turned out amazing, super rich and a great comfort food. The cheese curds turn nice and gooey when warmed by the hot gravy/fries and it all tastes so good together. The fries are definitely the best fries I’ve made, but for the amount of work they are probably an every once in a while thing because air-fryer fries are 90% as good with much less work.
Thanks again for reading another post. Photos and the updated map below. I hope to see you for the next post.
Cheers,
Brandon
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