The Florida Food Truck Serving Up Canada's Most Iconic Dish

It's no secret that Canadians love Florida. For years it has held strong as the No. 1 destination for snowbirds looking to escape harsh winters further north, and so it's not surprising that Canadian culture has started to seep into the sunshine state. One of the most recent examples of this are food trucks offering up Canada's most famous dish: poutine. The Florida Poutine Company has been serving up authentic Canadian poutine and customers are raving about the perfectly crispy fries, homemade gravy, and signature squeaky cheese curd.

Poutine originated in the French-speaking province of Quebec and the word translates from Quebecois slang to "mess" in English. It is indeed a messy meal and Canadians wouldn't have it any other way. It's a particularly popular way to finish off a messy night, indulging in the stick-to-your-ribs meal as a pretext for soaking up some alcohol and hopefully warding off a hangover. Though there is no scientific evidence to point towards poutine mitigating the effects of too much revelry, Canadians the world over can provide strong anecdotal evidence to the curative power of a proper poutine. 

The Florida Poutine Company gets the most important things right with its poutine, and top of the list is using beef tallow to make perfect french fries. Beef tallow creates golden crispy fries that hold up well under the weight of gravy and cheese curds, while also adding a depth of meaty flavor to your potatoes that's harder to achieve with processed oils. 

The second thing that sets this food truck poutine a cut above the rest is the fact that the food truck makes its own cheese, ensuring super fresh and squeaky curds. Cheese curds are salty chunks of cheddar cheese that haven't been aged yet, and their ancient origins date back thousands of years. The signature squeak in cheese curds comes from the proteins that are bound together with calcium. When you bite into a cheese curd, the protein and calcium combination comes into contact with the enamel on your teeth and the result is the squeaking sound. It only happens when the cheese is fresh (up to a few days old), so if you get the squeak, you know those curds are fresh. If you don't get the squeak, it doesn't mean the curds are spoiling, it simply means they are becoming closer to an aged cheese. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but for poutine, the fresher the cheese curds are, the better.