My poutine.
I've been back in Australia for over a week now. I've been to the beach, eaten Oporto, heard the kookaburras and gotten seriously sunburnt. Now I'm missing Canada. And when I say I'm missing Canada, what I really mean is, I'm missing poutine.
This delicacy of hot chips, gravy and cheese curds was my favourite thing about Canada. I was desperate to bring it back to Australia with me. The chips aren't a problem. Hot chips, or 'fries' as they are known over there, are similar enough. The only difference would be that a lot of the fries used for poutine are double fried (genius right?). The gravy isn't so hard either. Most poutineries use powder for their gravy, so my last day in Canada was spent buying every type of powdered gravy I could find. The cheese curds are the problem.
I spent hours researching where to get cheese curds in Australia, but alas, none exist. I've read discussion after discussion, posted by poor Canadians who have found themselves out in the big, bad world, without poutine. The most responses recommend finding substitute cheeses, the most common being mozzarella. Although the texture of mozzarella is probably the closest, the flavour doesn't quite cut it, thus haloumi is often mentioned. A number of other curd like cheeses are said to be substitutes; cottage cheese, paneer, quark, queso blanco. Any self respecting poutine lover knows, none of these are going to cut it.
I found some places you can buy it online in America, but they don't ship internationally. I toyed with the idea of sending it to someone in the US and getting them to send it to me. However, it was going to work out about $80 for 100g of cheese curds. Not only that, but the chances of a) it surviving the trip and b) getting it through customs, seemed slim to none.
The other day I had a brainwave; what if I could make cheese curds. I would like to thank the Internet once again for knowing absolutely everything. I found an article entitled 'How to make cheese curds for poutine'.
My dear friend Lynne was up for the challenge. Although she had never tried poutine, she has been fascinated with the concept ever since I described it to her.
We spent 4 hours making cheese curds, researching dairy of laws of Canada vs. Australia and trying to figure out why on earth we can't get cheese curds here.
I think we got to the bottom of it. Australian agricultural laws are insanely strict. Raw (unpasteurized) milk and all raw milk dairy products are illegal in Australia. I'm talking people sell this stuff on the black market, it's so hard to come by. The only way I found to buy raw milk legitimately in Australia, was if it was being sold as a bath milk, and costs about $40 a litre. Not ideal. Raw milk is also illegal in Canada, so how come they get away with having these delicious cheeses? Well it turns out Canada permits the sale of raw milk cheeses that are aged over 60 days, and in 2009, the province of Quebec modified regulations to allow raw milk cheeses aged less than 60 days to be sold. This may or may not have anything to do with why we don't have cheese curds here. I just wanted to show y'all how much I learnt about dairy regulations.
So how did the home made cheese curds go? Surprisingly well actually. It had a nice flavour, and was wonderfully fresh. The texture was a bit too creamy, it didn't have that squeakiness that is so important. I think this was a combination of not letting the curd refrigerate for long enough and not using raw milk.
Next we made the gravy, pretty simple using the powder I'd bought from Canada. We put the hot gravy in a thermos, the cheese curds in a plastic bag and headed to the shops to hunt down some appropriate chips.
We ordered large chips from a fish and chip shop in the food court, and asked them to fry them a little longer than usual. They looked perfect. We carefully constructed our poutine, trying to ignore the strange looks from people walking by. The poutine was delicious. 5 hours well spent.
