Culinary World Tour: Canada (Poutine) and the Insani-Which Revisited

Random snow days and even an unexpected tornado watch (!) have prevented us from doing as much grilling as we'd like lately, so this is a perfect time to return to our culinary "world tour," where we are challenging ourselves to make new and unfamiliar dishes from different cultures around the globe. We already made a spicy and beatiful posole soup for our Mexico stop, and next up is a culinary trek north of the border to Canada.

We both have a couple of friends on Facebook who reside in Canada, and when we asked their opinions on what dish is "quintessentially Canadian," everyone unanimously agreed on: Poutine! It's a funny name for a delicious dish frequently served at fast food restaurants.

Poutine isn't an involved or complicated dish that takes a lot of prep time, nor is it a ridiculous monstrosity of ever-growing flavor profiles, like many of the meals we showcase at Six-Seven-Eight. In fact, there's very little actual cooking involving, and rather just "assembling." Despite the ease of making the dish, we settled on poutine because we want to sample flavors and methods of cooking that are outside our normal purview. While Canada has plenty of high-end French inspired dishes, we'll save that sort of meal for when the world tour hits France.

The basic idea of poutine is to combine a variety of junk foods into one heavy and satisfying dish. To start off, a bed of crinkle fries are laid down in a bowl. We frequently make our own fries by slicing potatoes and adding seasoning, and generally bake them instead of frying them to avoid all the fat, but for poutine we wanted something that was more like a greasy fast-food meal. Here we're using Ore Ida extra crispy fries, which we fried in vegetable oil until perfectly crunchy.

The next layer of poutine is an ingredient we've never used before: cheese curds! After a bit of searching we could only find this at one grocery store and only in a much larger package than we expected, but the work was worth it, because these are delicious. Note that these are fresh cheese curds, not the fried variety that are typically sold by street vendors or at fairs. Now that we know the glory of the curd, which has a different flavor and texture than normal cheddar, we'll definitely be using them in other dishes, and we may even try making our own.

To finish off a perfect bowl of poutine, the fries and cheese curds are covered in a steaming layer of beef gravy. We usually only make our own gravy from the pan drippings of whole turkey, so this time we used a jarred, store-bought variety.

Although a pretty simple dish that doesn't take any skill to put together, poutine is absolutely delicious. It's a salty snack, although not overwhelmingly so, and combines several different savory and heavy flavors in a very satisfying way.  This isn't finger food - be sure to bring a fork to the table! The American equivalent of Poutine would probably be the diner favorite of cheese fries with bacon bits. The next time we try poutine I'd like to change it up by going with a thicker gravy.

Since poutine didn't have nearly as many steps as the Mexico stop of our culinary world tour, we'll also be covering another heavy and savory dish we recently constructed (although this one doesn't have a Canadian connection). For regular readers, you may remember when I made an absolutely insane chicken sandwich back in 2010, inspired by the show "Man Vs. Food." Now that we've got some new tools and methods of cooking under our belts, we revisited this monstrously messy concoction and dubbed it the "insani-which!"  Here's the basic ingredients: sesame buns, chicken thighs, macaroni and cheese (use the "thick and creamy" kind, not the regular kind), bacon, and breaded seafood. Last time we used popcorn shrimp, but for this go around I wanted to try breaded clams instead, which are longer and skinnier.

The chicken thighs are the base of the sandwich, and they need to be as flavorful as possible to compete with all the other ingredients. To make a perfect sandwich chicken thigh, I removed the skin and then covered the outer layer of the meat in a homemade rub consisting of garlic powder, onion powder, pepper, ghost pepper salt, sugar, and Mrs. Dash chipotle seasoning.

The whole thigh needs to be bursting with flavor though, so we went to the next level by injecting the meat with a mixture of buffalo sauce, liquid smoke, and melted butter. To see how we've been injecting meat, check out our previous blog on making a Hawaiian pineapple pork roast. The leftover buffalo mixture was then spooned over the meat, and the chicken was baked in the oven. Thighs are usually fairly tender, but to ensure it didn't get tough and remained flavorful, I pulled them out, flipped them over, and basted with extra sauce halfway through the cook time.

Here I'm assembling the sandwich, laying down a chicken thigh, the cooked macaroni and cheese, several clams, and two hearty strips of bacon. Between the macaroni and cheese and saucy chicken you don't strictly need a condiment on the bun, but if you want to add one, go with mayo, extra buffalo sauce, or horseradish by a spicier kick.

The end result is amazingly messy, but also amazingly tasty!  It's not a food to eat while watching your waistline, but if taste is your end goal, this sandwich can't be beat.

Now that we've sampled poutine, a Canadian dish we'd never normally get to eat at home, the culinary world tour will be marching on to it's next stop: Greenland.

That's all the cooking adventures we've got for you today, but check back in again soon as we continue trying new methods of grilling ribs, making savory restaurant favorites at home, turning cheap food into extraordinary meals worth raving about, and an upcoming look at several different ways to create out-of-this-world potato salad!