Poutine!
Calvin Trillin's 2009 article in the New Yorker about the Quebecois comfort food, poutine, may have set off a poutine fad that reached as far as Texas.
As a punch line, poutine has a lot going for it. Many Canadians believe that it is also good to eat. Their fondness for it is, in fact, often the basis of the punch line, since an outlander who hears a description of poutine in its basic form—French fries with cheese curds and brown gravy—is likely to think that it sounds, well, disgusting. Jokes about poutine on that level are the equivalent of jokes about the Scots eating haggis or Scandinavians in the upper Midwest crowding into church basements to feast on lutefisk—an ethnic ritual that my first taste of lutefisk moved me to compare to teen-age circumcision. On a recent trip to Montreal, a city that is to poutine what Baltimore is to crab cakes, I asked a young woman I’d met there named Emily Birnbaum why poutine often struck people as funny. “Because it’s so gross,” she said. “After you finish a poutine, you say, ‘I can’t believe I ate that.’ ” It almost goes without saying that she was eating poutine as we spoke. So was I. ...Trillin,NewYorker
I'm sure you fall back on your own comfort food now and then, particularly this time of the year. Texans have their comfort food, too, but who knew they've gone looking for poutine?
The food website "Chowhound" documents the search.
Ginger, in the Dallas-FortWorth area, wonders "if anyone knew a place to get some good fries and gravy with cheese curds! mmmmmm....healthy! Some places in New England call it Disco fries. I'd love to try and find a good old school diner, open late that has good milkshakes too, milkshakes go great with poutine!"
I'd have figured that would be the beginning and end of that query. But no.
The problem is that an authentic poutine absolutely depends on fresh cheese curds. Up there, you eat cheese curds that were made the morning of. It's crazy how you can walk into a gas station / convenience store and buy a bag of freshly delivered cheese curds.
And then this:
The problem is that an authentic poutine absolutely depends on fresh cheese curds. Up there, you eat cheese curds that were made the morning of. It's crazy how you can walk into a gas station / convenience store and buy a bag of freshly delivered cheese curds.
As far as I know, there is no place to get cheese curds around here. If anyone has a source, speak up!
Now we're off and running. Just gotta find the right cheese curds.
I have never seen mozzarella curds at Central Market, only the cheddar curds. They're in a little plastic container like Gladware. The cheddar curds still make pretty good poutine, however, but the stuff I had in Canada was a white cheese that tasted like mozzarella. At Sprouts they have this mozzarella that is little balls in oil... I haven't tried it yet, but that might work. Not really curds, though.
Trouble is, real Canadian cheese curds are squeaky.
The squeak of a fresh cheese curd is as popular as it is elusive, it's gone after about a day after they're made. This makes obtaining squeaky cheese curds a matter of fortuitous timing. But with the help of an unstirred sous vide bath, such as one from SousVide Supreme, you don't have to delay gratifying your squeaky curd fix any longer.
Perfecting the squeak, however, requires more than just fresh curds. The secret is a technique called cheddaring that forms a curd held together with long, elastic proteins. Cheese scientists have discovered that it's these fresh, elongated protein strands rubbing against the enamel of your teeth that is the real source of a cheese curd's squeak.
Meanwhile, not far from Fort Worth is Denton. Next door is Krum, TX. Where you can find authentic poutine.
I just stopped at Vercelli's in Krum, TX (just NW of Denton) and sampled their poutine. The cheese curds and gravy both come straight from Quebec, and the assemblage was quite tasty. http://www.vercellis.com/
Vercelli's in Krum, TX, is out of business, apparently due to tax evasion.
The next step is to find out whether poutine is an Interstate 35 (Canada to Mexico) phenomenon. Is there poutine in Laredo? Can you get fries, gravy and squeaky curds in Mexico?
