Poutine

Method

Steps 1 to 8 are only for making your own cheese curds. If you have bought curds, start at step 9 and take the curds out of the fridge an hour before you eat.

1. Heat the milk to 32°C in your largest pot, stirring so the bottom does not scorch. Use a thermometer; guessing does not work here.
2. Stir in the buttermilk. Cover and hold at 30 to 32°C for one hour. A switched-off oven with the light on, or the pot wrapped in a towel, holds this easily.
3. Stir in the diluted calcium chloride. Then add the diluted rennet and stir it through with about twenty slow up and down strokes over one minute, so it reaches every part of the milk. Stop the milk moving with the back of the spoon and cover the pot.
4. Leave undisturbed at 30 to 32°C for 45 to 60 minutes. Test for a clean break: push a knife in at an angle and lift. It is ready when the curd splits along a straight clean line and clear yellow-green whey runs into the crack. If it tears raggedly or looks like yoghurt, wait another 15 minutes and test again.
5. Cut the curd into 1 cm cubes: straight down in one direction, straight down across it, then long angled cuts through the depth. Rest 5 minutes.
6. Raise the temperature to 39°C over 30 minutes, no faster than half a degree a minute, stirring gently every few minutes so the cubes do not mat together. Hold at 39°C for another 30 minutes, still stirring every 5 minutes. The cubes shrink to about half their size and go springy, like a firm pea. Going faster than this traps whey inside and the curds turn sour by evening.
7. Drain through a cloth lined colander, keeping the whey if you want it for bread. Gather the cloth, press the curd into a single slab, and let it drain 30 minutes somewhere around 35°C. Then cut the slab in three, stack the pieces, and flip the stack every 15 minutes for an hour. This is cheddaring, and it is what gives curds their layered chew instead of a crumbly texture.
8. Tear the slab into 2 to 3 cm lumps by hand. Scatter over half the salt, toss, wait 10 minutes, then add the rest and toss again. Leave them at room temperature and use them within three hours. They squeak loudest in the first hour and will have stopped squeaking by tomorrow.
9. Peel the potatoes and cut them into batons about 1 cm square. Keep them even; thin ones burn while thick ones are still raw inside. Soak in cold water for 30 minutes to wash off surface starch.
10. Drain and dry them properly, in a salad spinner and then on a tea towel. Wet potatoes spit violently in hot oil and steam themselves instead of frying.
11. First fry at 150°C, in three or four batches so the oil temperature does not crash. Six to eight minutes a batch: the chips should go floppy and pale, with no colour at all. Lift them onto a rack and let them cool for at least 30 minutes. This first fry cooks the inside; the cooling sets the surface so the second fry can crisp it. Skip the cooling and you get chips that are brown outside and hard in the middle.
12. Make the sauce while the chips cool. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat, stir in the flour, and cook it for 4 to 5 minutes, stirring, until it smells nutty and turns the colour of wet sand. This is a blond roux going on hazel. Stop before it goes dark; a dark roux thickens badly and tastes bitter under the cheese.
13. Add the garlic, stir for 20 seconds, then pour in both stocks in three additions, whisking each one smooth before the next. Bring to a boil, then simmer 5 minutes.
14. Whisk in the cornstarch slurry and simmer 2 to 3 minutes more. Stir in the vinegar and the ketchup, then the pepper, then taste for salt. The sauce should coat a spoon but still run off it in a stream, not sit on it in a blob. It thickens further off the heat, so leave it slightly loose. Keep it at a bare simmer, covered.
15. Bring the oil up to 190°C. Second fry the chips, again in batches, for 2 to 4 minutes, until they are deep gold and stiff enough to hold their shape when you pick one up. Drain briefly and salt them immediately, while they are still glossy with oil, so the salt sticks.
16. Assemble one bowl at a time and do it fast. Warm chips into a warm deep bowl, salt again if they need it, curds scattered over the top, then the hot sauce poured straight over. In that order.
17. Serve it now. Poutine has a working life of about five minutes.

Notes

• The cheese is the recipe, so here is the ranking, in order, with a commitment. Fresh curds are cheese that has been cut, cooked, cheddared, and salted but never pressed or aged. They squeak because the protein network is still intact and the calcium is still bound into it, which only holds while the cheese is young and low in acid. As the starter culture keeps eating lactose and making lactic acid, the calcium dissolves out and the proteins break down, and the squeak goes. That is why a curd is at its best within hours, not days, and it is why no aged cheese anywhere can imitate one.
• First choice: make them. Steps 1 to 8. Four litres of ordinary Frischmilch gives about 400 g of curds, which is a poutine for four with a handful left to eat standing at the counter. It costs about five euros of milk, needs a thermometer and one afternoon, and produces curds that are three hours old, which is fresher than anything you can buy anywhere in Europe. Liquid Naturlab is the only unusual purchase: order it from a German cheesemaking shop, or ask at an Apotheke, and it keeps for months in the fridge. Calcium chloride is worth buying at the same time, because German pasteurised milk sets softly without it.
• Second choice: buy German-made curds by post. They do exist, which surprises most people. Bauernkäserei Wolters in Uckerland in the Uckermark makes proper cheese curds for the German market, sold through Q-Regio at around 31 euros a kilo, and The Poutine Kitchen sells curds too. DHL takes two to six working days, so order to land the morning you cook and do not send them to a Packstation in July. They arrive several days old and most of the squeak is gone, which is why they sit below homemade rather than above.
• Third choice, and the one that actually works on a Tuesday: low moisture block mozzarella. Not the ball in brine. You want the firm rectangular block sold as Pizzamozzarella or Mozzarella am Stück, the kind meant for grating. It is young, low in acid, and low in moisture, which is exactly the profile that squeaks and melts correctly. Tear it into 2 to 3 cm lumps with your hands and never grate it. Grated cheese has too much surface area and dissolves into the sauce; torn lumps hold their shape, go soft and stretchy at the edges, and stay slightly firm in the middle, which is what a curd does. Use it cold from the fridge.
• What about the German cheeses everyone suggests. Honest verdicts. Junger Gouda, four weeks old, is the next best supermarket option after block mozzarella: it has a faint squeak and a good flavour, but it melts fully and quickly and releases fat, so you get an oil slick on the sauce. Acceptable. Butterkäse is a bad idea; it is bred to melt and it collapses into grease the moment the sauce hits it. Fresh mozzarella in brine, including buffalo, is a bad idea for the opposite reason: it is 60% water, it cools the chips, and it dilutes the sauce into pink soup. Halloumi squeaks louder than a real curd and is still the wrong answer, because it is designed never to melt and it is very salty, so you end up chewing hot rubber in gravy. Quark has no structure at all and simply disappears. Emmentaler goes stringy and rubbery and tastes too sweet.
• Bergkäse and the Käsespätzle question, since it always comes up in Baden-Württemberg. No. Alpine cheeses are matured for months and the whole point of that maturation is proteolysis, the breaking down of exactly the protein network that makes a curd squeak. Allgäuer Bergkäse, Emmentaler, Comté, and the usual Käsespätzle blend all melt into long strings and then into fat. Chips with Bergkäse and gravy is a perfectly good dish. It is Käsepommes, and it is not poutine, and calling it poutine will get you in trouble with any Québécois at the table. The one Alpine-tradition route that does work is asking a local Hofkäserei whether you can buy Bruch on a make day. Small dairies in the Schwäbisch Hall area cut curd every week and most will sell you a bag if you turn up at the right hour and ask nicely.
• The sauce is not beef gravy, and this is the part people get wrong outside Québec. A proper sauce brune is a hybrid: chicken stock for lightness and beef stock for depth, roughly split as this recipe does. Ricardo’s version, which is close to the standard, uses two parts beef to one part chicken with a butter roux plus a cornstarch finish, and the double thickener is deliberate: the roux gives body, the cornstarch gives the glossy, slightly slippery texture that lets the sauce run down between the chips instead of sitting on top. The vinegar and the ketchup are what make it taste Québécois rather than like a Sunday roast gravy. They are small amounts and they read as a background tang, not as vinegar. Plenty of households in Québec simply use a packet of St-Hubert mix, which contains vinegar for the same reason, and nobody thinks less of them. Do not skip the pepper: it should be noticeable.
• A note on stock in Germany. Fond in a jar from Rewe or Edeka, Rinderfond and Geflügelfond, works well and is what I use on a weeknight. Cubes are too salty and too flat; if cubes are all you have, make them at three quarters strength and add a teaspoon of soy sauce for depth. For a vegetarian sauce, use 400 ml of strong dried mushroom stock and 300 ml of vegetable stock, add a teaspoon of soy sauce and half a teaspoon of yeast extract, and keep the vinegar and ketchup exactly as written.
• Potatoes. German supermarkets do not sell Russets. What you want is mehligkochend, floury, and the good ones here are Agria, Adretta, Melody, and Bintje. Festkochende Kartoffeln, the salad potatoes, have too much moisture and not enough starch, and they fry into limp, glassy chips. Leaving the skin on is fine and traditional in plenty of Québec places. The double fry is not optional: 150°C then 190°C, with a proper cooling gap in between. You can do the first fry hours ahead, or the day before and refrigerate the chips, which is exactly how a casse-croûte handles a lunch rush.
• Why the order of assembly matters. Curds go onto hot chips so that the heat rising from the potatoes starts softening them from underneath, then hot sauce goes over the top and finishes the job from above. Both directions matter. Pour the sauce first and the chips go soggy in seconds while the curds sit on top and stay cold and squeaky in a bad way. Melt the curds separately and you have cheese chips. The curd is meant to be half melted: stretchy and warm on the outside, still holding its shape and its bite in the centre. That half-melted state lasts about five minutes, which is the real reason poutine is eaten standing up at a counter.
• Smoked meat poutine is a real thing, not a novelty. In Montréal, adding chopped Montreal smoked meat to a poutine is a standard order at La Banquise and everywhere else. If you have made Montreal smoked meat, chop 200 g into rough pieces, warm it in the steamer or a covered pan for a few minutes, and pile it on with the curds before the sauce. Sausage, bacon, ground beef, and the poutine galvaude with chicken and peas are all normal orders too. As a first course before tourtière it is heavy going, so serve one or the other, and finish with Nanaimo bars either way.
• The origin is disputed and will stay that way. Poutine turned up in the Centre-du-Québec in the late 1950s and several restaurants in Warwick and Drummondville claim it. Nobody has settled it. What people from that region do agree on is that a poutine that does not squeak is not a poutine, which is why the cheese takes up half of these notes.

Sources used

• Ricardo: Brown gravy sauce for poutine and hot chicken
• Seasons and Suppers: Authentic Canadian poutine
• The Endless Meal: Authentic Canadian poutine
• Chef Cuisto: Sauce à poutine maison
• Papilles et Pupilles: Poutine, comment faire la sauce à poutine maison
• Wikipedia: Poutine
• Cheese Science Toolkit: Squeak
• Culture, the word on cheese: How to make squeaky cheese curds at home
• Fermenting for Foodies: Homemade squeaky cheese curds
• Q-Regio: Cheese Curds from Bauernkäserei Wolters, Uckerland
• The Poutine Kitchen: Poutine cheese alternatives
• Käse selber machen: Der Grundkäse mit Lab