Canada

Menu: Poutine | Recipe Source: seasonsandsuppers.ca

When I first started looking at poutine recipes, I was more than slightly disturbed by the sheer amount of butter, oil, and curds that they called for. I spent 10 hopeful minutes scrolling through Google in search of a different option to cook for Canada, but the evidence was damning. Poutine, it turns out, is inarguably our northern sibling’s most famous food, and after phoning a Canadian friend who confirmed my suspicions, I decided I had no choice but to forge ahead and hope that pairing the fries with a salad would be enough to soften the cardiovascular blow.

This was my first time ever having poutine, and while I cannot in good conscience say that I’ll ever make it again due to dietary scruples, it was unbelievably delicious. It tasted like a crispy riff on mashed potatoes and gravy, and I can’t imagine how hard it hits at 1AM after a night out. The mixture of beef and chicken broth was absolutely perfect- chicken broth alone would have been far too thin, and exclusively using beef broth would have made the gravy way too rich- and my all time favorite French fry recipe from SeriousEats was a homerun once more.

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Poutine: (link): I made a handful of changes to this recipe but they were all procedural- no changes to the ingredients!

• For the fries, instead of following the link above, I used my all-time favorite French fry recipe from SeriousEats that I first stumbled across earlier this year when I made fish and chips for England. It uses the exact same number of potatoes and rounds of frying as the Seasons & Suppers recipe does, but it calls for the addition of white vinegar and two trips to the freezer (both of which make the fries soft on the inside but extra crackly on the outside, almost as if they’ve been battered).
• Whenever a recipe calls for deep-frying in oil, I fry with lard instead. Lard sounds fairly disgusting both conceptually and phonetically, but it’s my favorite junk food upgrade. It’s slightly more expensive than vegetable oil but the trade-off is that unlike canola, lard 1) doesn’t stink up your kitchen 2) doesn’t give you a stomachache 3) adds a delicious depth of flavor to whatever you’re making and 4) maintains its structural integrity at really high heats (unlike vegetable oils, which break down and release chemicals when they hit a certain temperature).
• My American brain couldn’t stop noticing the parallels between poutine and Thanksgiving gravy, and as a result, I legitimately could not stop myself from adding some allium and herbs to the gravy mixture. I doubled the recipe (too much is always better than not enough when it comes to sauces) and added 3 scallions + 1 bay leaf during the simmering step. I pulled the aromatics before I added the corn starch so that they wouldn’t form an insidious glue ball,