Today I told my wife I wanted to do this thing here. And I asked her: „What country should we go with first? Germany maybe“ (as we live there) “ or maybe America? Something small? Bhutan? Or alphabetically? Afghanistan in that case.“.

Her answer was „Canada.“ I don’t know why she chose it, but that’s okay. She always was the spontaneous one in our relationship. So here we are. The first country. Canada it is. A bit of looking around quite quickly showed that the term “national dish” was more of a “list of dishes that people really like to eat”.
On a clear number one spot there was maple syrup. I honestly have to say that the thought of making maple syrup was not one that got me excited. Waiting around 15 years to have the Acer saccharum grow to a size to be harvested… that would have put me off this whole thing probably.
In the end I went with another dish that is quite popular: Poutine.
Poutine isn’t really a complicated dish when you first look at it. It’s fries with gravy and cheese curds in the classic version. So, I started looking for a recipe. I found many. Very many. In the end I decided to combine several classic recipes I had come along and make this dish my very own.
I soon realized that one of the ingredients was simply not easily obtainable in Germany: Cheese Curds are something that’s not known around here. I found exactly one company selling those, with a couple small shops around Berlin – but as that’s on the other side of the country I really did not feel like going there to grab some.
Making them on my own would require some equipment I did not have sadly, so I had to go with a replacement. Several sources stated that dry Mozzarella cheese would be at least somewhat okay to go with. So I went that way.
And now, without further ado, here is my recipe:

We start off with beef stock that we need for the gravy. This step is optional, and you could just as well use stock from the store. Which is not as tasty though. So, we don’t do that. For this stock I don’t use any spices or herbs – I prefer to put those in when I make a dish with the stock. You could add some though if you like.

Ingredients:
– 2 Pieces of beef shank
– 2 Marrowbones
– 150ml of red wine (cheap, cooking grade)
– 400g of fresh vegetables (I went with carrots, onions and escallions)
– 2L of water
Instructions:
1. Roast the beef shank and marrowbones. Put them in a pot on a griddle and get them in the oven at 200°C for around 30 minutes. After 15 minutes turn the meat around. After the 30 minutes take them out and put them on the stove. Be cautious, the pot is super hot at this point.
2. Add a bit of the red wine, just enough to cover the bottom of the pan. Scrape off all the browned parts of the beef shank and marrowbone from the bottom of the pan and mix it with the red wine. Let cook until most of the wine has vaporized. Add another layer of red wine and repeat the process. Do this until you used up all the wine.
3. Add the vegetables and the water, boil it all up and let it simmer without stirring it too much.
4. At this point the waiting game starts. You want the stock to cook for at least 3-4 hours but there is no real upper limit (well there is one when all the water is gone but getting there should take a good while…). I let the stock simmer for 3 hours. Go for as long as you have time.
5. Afterwards sieve the stock to remove solids and you have your fresh stock. We will use about 950ml of it directly, if you have more left you can let it cool and put it in the fridge for a couple days or freeze it for some months. When it has cooled down a layer of fat will build on top, you can remove that or keep it on there, that’s up to you.

With the beef stock done the next step is the gravy itself. It’s a very simple gravy without much additional seasoning other than the beef stock. One thing to notice: A good gravy has a share of both beef stock and chicken stock. As my wife does not eat chicken though I decided to go with beef stock only to keep the domestic peace.

Ingredients:
– 45g of starch
– 90g of butter
– 35g of flour type 405
– 950ml of beef stock
Instructions:
1. Mix the starch with some cold water until you have a thick paste. Set it aside.
2. Melt the butter, wait for it to start making bubbles. At this point turn down the heat and gently add the flour while stirring the whole time. Stir it for around 3-5 minutes, it should have a golden brown color at that point. Don’t burn it, if it smells terrible you better start over. It should have a creamy thick texture.
3. Stir in the beef stock and boil it up.
4. Finally add the starch and simmer it until the gravy starts to thicken. You can season at this point with salt and pepper.

That’s the gravy, not all too complicated in all honesty. Mine turned out to be quite bright, you normally would prefer a much browner colour. But that was because my beef stock was simply that bright, probably because I only let it simmer for 3 hours.
Finally, we need the fries. For this I went with 4 medium sized floury potatoes which should be around 1kg.

Ingredients:
– 1kg of floury potatoes
– sunflower oil for deep-frying
Instructions:
1. Slice the potatoes into thin slices of around 1-1.5cm thickness.
2. Place them in a bowl of cold water for 30+ minutes.
3. Put the sunflower oil in a pot and heat it up to 140°C
4. Put in the potato slices. Do not put in too many at once, I made 4 portions. This is so the oil does not lose too much temperature.
5. Fry them until they are bright and yellow. This should take 4-7 minutes. They will not turn brown at this point. Put them on kitchen paper so the remaining oil gets absorbed.
6. Heat the oil up to 180°C
7. Fry them once again. This time until they are nice, brown and crunchy.
8. Put them on kitchen paper again so the remaining oil once again gets absorbed.
9. Season gently with salt.

And with that all our ingredients are done and all we need to do is put them together. I found several techniques to do so, some suggested to mix the fries with the cheese and gravy, others asked for going fries -> cheese -> gravy. I went for a combination of both, tossed the fries with a bit of gravy until they were covered gently, then put the mozzarella cheese on top and topped it off with even more gravy.

And… that’s it. That was the dish. Both my wife and I really liked it. The crunchy fries with the half-melted cheese and the thick gravy were a great combination. I really think that should I do this dish again I would add some vegetables, maybe some escallions or onions. It’s not really poutine anymore at that point I guess but… in the end it’s my dish I guess.

So, that was the first trip of many that I made. To Canada and back again. Let’s hope every single one of them will be as enjoyable as this one was.