An ode to curds La Poutine Week ooey gooey good By: Eva Wasney Posted: 7:00 PM CST Thursday, Jan. 30, 2020

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This article was published 29/01/2020 (1794 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Every cheese begins life as a curd, but only select batches of cheese curds will end the journey sprinkled atop french fries and smothered in gravy.

La Poutine Week returns to Winnipeg on Saturday. Bothwell Cheese has been making extra cheese curds to prepare for the uptick in demand. More than a dozen of the 66 participating restaurants have listed Bothwell cheese curds as a key ingredient in their gooey creations.

“We do notice the increase in sales,” says Lynne Foy, brand manager for Bothwell Cheese. “We’ll alert our operation staff that it’s Poutine Week… we want to make sure we can do an extra production of cheese curds leading up to the festival.”

The production facility in New Bothwell has three vats of cheese going at a time. Milk is poured into the vats and stirred until it curdles. The resulting curds are either packaged into Bothwell’s cheddar cheese curd products or formed into a block and aged.

Fresh curds have become a delicacy for people who live near the town, located 45 kilometres southeast of Winnipeg,

“We’re a small town and everyone in the outskirts of New Bothwell will come to the cheese shop when they know it’s curd day and pick up some fresh cheese curds,” Foy says. “If you get them fresh, they’re still a little bit warm and you get the extra squeak.”

While restaurants tend to get creative during La Poutine Week, which runs Feb. 1 to 7, cheese curds are a traditional ingredient because they don’t melt when doused with hot gravy.

“Cheese curds hold their shape because they have a higher moisture level… because it doesn’t have time to age, which removes that moisture from the cheese naturally,” says Foy, adding she’s a poutine purist who enjoys her fries topped with beef gravy and extra curds.

The history of poutine dates back to rural Quebec in the 1950s, although there are several towns that lay claim to its invention. According to the Canadian Encyclopedia — a branch of Historica Canada — poutine originated when customers started adding cheese curds to their fries at either Café Ideal in Warwick, Que., or Le Roy Jucep in Drummondville, Que.

This is the third year Winnipeg restaurants have participated in La Poutine Week, which was created by the founders of Le Burger Week and debuted for the first time in Montreal in 2012.

Daniel Gurevich is La Poutine Week’s Winnipeg ambassador and says the food festival is gaining popularity.

“We’ve had more and more interest from the public and more people rallying around the event,” Gurevich says. “Restaurants have stated that they get busier every year, so that’s good.”

As new food festivals pop up nearly every year — Winnipeg’s second Fried Chicken Fest wrapped up last weekend, for example — Gurevich says there is a risk of oversaturating the market.

“Like any other event or product, I think people are going to try to take it to an extreme and then it’s naturally going to find its balance over the years,” he says. “I think that we’re big enough that we can sustain festivals like this, but we’re small enough that there’s still some camaraderie between restaurants and participants.”

Like Le Burger Week, the public is invited to cast a vote online for their favourite poutine at lapoutineweek.com. This year, $1 from every poutine sale will be donated to Agape Table, a charity that helps feed Winnipeg’s most vulnerable people.

eva.wasney@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @evawasney

Eva Wasney
Arts Reporter

Eva Wasney is a reporter for the Winnipeg Free Press.

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