Latke poutine — new fusion cuisine?
Canadian cooking show offers up some decidedly unkosher Hanukkah grub
Renee Ghert-Zand is the health reporter and a feature writer for The Times of Israel.
Tired of applesauce and sour cream on your latkes? Try topping them with some cheese curds, gravy and bacon. Yes, you read that right. Bacon.
In a new video, some dude in Montreal makes a pretty colorful, though not necessarily tasteful, pitch for giving poutine potato pancakes a try this Hanukkah.
For those unaccustomed to Quebecois food, poutine is a traditional dish of French Canada. It is ubiquitous throughout the province of Quebec, and it is customarily composed of French fries, cheese curds and gravy. Many poutine joints offer a variety of additional toppings, including — you guessed it — bacon.
The video is from Handle It, a spinoff of Epic Meal Time, a Canadian YouTube cooking program. Latkes are not the healthiest fare to begin with, so you know that when Epic Meal Time — with its emphasis on high-calorie food featuring meat (bacon again) and alcohol — fries up some Hanukkah treats, they’re going to be real artery cloggers.
The video’s cooking instructor can’t utter a sentence without a gratuitous expletive, but he’s really just a bubbe’s boy who’s got his rabbi on speed dial.
This may be latke poutine, but the most important step is the same here as when making regular latkes. Regular latkes? You know, the ones without rendered bacon mixed into the batter.
After grating the potatoes, the instructor puts them down on some paper towel to drain excess water.
“Water is normally your friend. Water keeps you alive. But in this case, water will get into the deep fry. The potatoes will be watery. You’ll burn your house down. You won’t have a house for the holidays. You’ll be homeless. Can’t watch Handle It. It’ll be a mess,” he warns.
Your Jewish grandmother couldn’t have said it better.
For those who haven’t caught on by halfway through the video, the instructor explains that in this recipe, the latkes replace the French fries in the poutine. When it comes down to it, one potato cooked in oil is as good as the next.
Poutine is an acquired taste to begin with, so latke poutine is probably a cultural mashup that not everyone is going to be able to stomach, even without the pork products.
Perhaps Chaimie and Leizer, Jamie Elman and Eli Batalion’s characters from YidLife Crisis should do a taste test. After all, it was they who were chowing down in the first episode of the web series’s first season on big plates of poutine on none other than Yom Kippur.
But at least Leizer’s poutine was kosher. Not only did it not have bacon in it, but the pedantic Yiddish speaker also insisted on having the meat-based gravy served on the side.
