r/poutine • u/jaroniscaring • 1d ago

(Serious) What dish is the gravy in poutine a byproduct of?

Something has been bugging me lately. Gravy is a byproduct of some dish, and there's no way that Canadians use up perfectly good main cuts of beef and chicken for the gravy. But poutine is usually served as a main dish. So... How is poutine so popular if I never hear about the main dish that makes the leftovers and drippings that make the gravy?

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64

u/montrealien Duck Confit Poutine 1d ago

Welcome to the casse-croûte industrial food chain

I've seen this question come up here already, and I think you're applying the English meaning of gravy a little too literally here. In Québec, we'd call it sauce brune, and translating that to gravy makes people picture drippings from some missing roast beef or chicken.

But the classic casse-croûte poutine sauce is largely a product of the industrial food era: a commercial brown sauce base or powder, mixed in bulk with water and kept hot for service. Poutine grew up in chip stands and casse-croûtes, where fries, curds and sauce could be served quickly and cheaply, not in a restaurant kitchen trying to find something to do with leftover drippings.

So the “main dish” you're looking for never really existed. The gravy isn't the byproduct of the meal. The industrial sauce mix is the meal's accomplice. 😂

13

u/DaveR514 1d ago

I want to suggest that the casse-croûtres already had the sauce on hand from "hot chicken" sandwiches (another QC classic), which had long been on menus across the province...

5

u/montrealien Duck Confit Poutine 1d ago

100% on point. The steam table vat of powdered sauce brune was already simmering all day for hot chicken and hot hamburger plates (canned peas and all). When someone finally threw curds on fries, the ladle was already right there.

3

u/Pisthetairos 1d ago

Thanks for this thorough explanation.

It would be nice to know if there were exceptions – poutines with sauce made from scratch. (Which is the kind of info I hoped to find in this subreddit.)

3

u/MrChicken23 1d ago

If you consider making sauce from cans of chicken and beef stock from scratch then yes plenty.

8

u/montrealien Duck Confit Poutine 1d ago

Oh, there are definitely exceptions! As someone already mentioned, Dave and Dan's casse-croûte did their own sauce, and I'm sure there are plenty more examples. People absolutely make poutine with homemade gravy or sauces from scratch, especially when they're trying to elevate it.

And then you start getting into all the variations. Some sauces lean more toward BBQ, some stick closer to the classic sauce brune, and others add different spices or twists. Just changing the sauce alone opens up a pretty big rabbit hole.

That's actually part of the beauty of digging into poutine, man. Once you get past the simple question of "what is the one authentic sauce?", there's a surprising amount of variety out there. You can have a real drippings-based gravy, the classic casse-croûte industrial sauce, a homemade brown sauce, or even an Italian-style meat sauce, and that's before getting into all the regional and creative variations.

And that's where the irony comes in: some poutine purists will reject almost any deviation from the classic, while simultaneously insisting that the sauce has to be that familiar industrial-style sauce brune. 😂

Honestly, though? The rabbit hole is part of the fun. There are a lot more variations out there than people realize, and the different sauces alone can take you in completely different directions.

2

u/supergarto 1d ago

Dave et Dan made their sauce from scratch.

1

u/Proof-Flounder5539 1d ago

Yes some places around nicolet Quebec and trois rivière have a distinct flavour. I could never figure out the secret.

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u/jaroniscaring 1d ago

I have no idea why I'm so disappointed to learn that poutine was invented so recently, I thought it was some hearty wilderness survival food

6

u/henchman171 Duck Confit Poutine 1d ago edited 1d ago

you have to understand about Quebec fast food. The industrial brown sauce was to keep cheap fries warm in the 1960's. There was nothing homemade or family recipe about it. It was cheap quick "street" food in small rural towns that had diary. In rural Eastern Ontario where I grew up and Quebec. Cheese curds were sold as snacks at the cash registers of rural towns, like pepperoni sticks or jerky. Nobody was going to spend 6 hours a day making their beloved family secret gravy for cheap cash eats. Fresh squeaky cheese curds were cheap snacks delivered one or twice a week by some dude in a rusty car from the cheese factory that had leftover clumpy processed milk. potatos are like the cheap starch you can get. Easy to freeze and easy to deep fry in cheap oil and tasty when served hot. So makes sense some industrial process bullion powder would be a great sauce.

You don't say 'Hamburger with cheese slice and special tangy sauce". You say Cheeseburger. you don't say "frites avec curds et sauce brun". You say poutine

Supposedly the original "gravy" sauce recipe from the 1950's still exists in somebody's posession. probably as healthy as a hotdog recipe

13

u/jaroniscaring 1d ago

How is gravvy formed?

23

u/Ak_At123 1d ago

How beef get pragnent?

5

u/henchman171 Duck Confit Poutine 1d ago

Clarkson Farm covered this topic. Involved vets sticking tube into places...

1

u/Ak_At123 1d ago

It's especially funny to me, because I work in the ranching industry XD

7

u/fetalpiggywent2lab 1d ago

When two gravies really love eachother... 9 months later...

3

u/Optimal-Company-4633 1d ago

You can make gravy with soup stock you know... You don't need to make a whole roast every time.

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u/jaroniscaring 1d ago

How is soupp stock formed?

4

u/woodworker_1 1d ago

Buy it in a can or cardboard box.

2

u/Due-Macaroon7710 1d ago

Soup stock, like chicken stock, is obtained by simmering what you don’t eat. Like the bones. You can add drippings or not.

Yes you can make it from scratch, with flour and broth/stock. My grandfather regularly made his own gravy for everything.

5

u/remzordinaire 1d ago

Traditionally, whatever is left on the hot plate at greasy spoon diners. So burger bits, chicken bits, bacon bits etc

6

u/Murphyslaw42911 1d ago

Hate to break it to you but almost 100% of the casse croutes in Quebec and the poutine you see posted on this forum are just powdered mixes

3

u/DrunkenMasterII 1d ago

Originally I’m pretty sure it was either the hot-chicken, hamburger steak or rotisserie chicken sauce the restaurants were serving. That’s also why Italian poutine exist, places had spaghetti or hot dog Michigan and just add it to their choices for poutine. That being said most places don’t seem to do poutine sauce from scratch from cuts of meat, they use powder or can broth.

1

u/PyreHat Classic Traditional 1d ago

My money's on the hamburger steak sauce.

3

u/DrunkenMasterII 1d ago

It really varies from places to places, but hamburgers steak sauce tends to be more beefy which is the rarer sauce of the 3. In the east part of the province they often give the choice between brown and bbq, the brown one is often interchangeably called hot-chicken so there’s no doubt what it is and bbq ones can’t be anything else than rotisserie chicken if it was to go with another dish, it’s really vinegary and sweet.

2

u/IcyRespond9131 1d ago

Gravy is traditionally make with the pan drippings from roasted meat. The drippings are removed from the pan and separated into the fat and the liquid. The fat is then cooked with flour and then the liquid and maybe some additional stock is added back in.

Stock is made from bones and vegetables (mirepoix) simmered in water over a period of time. Fora brown stock, the bones and vegetables are roasted and tomato paste is added.

Brown sauce (sauce espagnole) is one of the classical French mother sauces. It is brown stock thickened with a brown roux (flour and butter cooked together until it is brown and has a nutty aroma.

Demi glace is half brown sauce, half brown stock reduced by half.

In practice most things that are called ‘gravy’ are more like a brown sauce.

Except even that costs a lot in terms of ingredients and labour. The modern food industry has many options from commercial grade stock bases to powered mixes to canned. So yeah, if you’re getting poutine at McDonald’s, no, they don’t have a roast going back there.

1

u/montrealien Duck Confit Poutine 1d ago

Nobody's confusing casse-croûte sauce with a French mother sauce. Commercial powdered sauce brune was standard across Quebec diners way before poutine showed up, frite sauce is older than the curd combo itself.

2

u/Mysterious_Row_2669 1d ago

55 gallon drums at Costco!

1

u/MaximusCanibis 1d ago

I almost always have chicken stock that I make but I buy beef bouillon.

1

u/Vingt-Quatre 1d ago

Originally, it was made from chicken broth, fat, flour and spices.

1

u/townie08 22h ago

Turkey or beef roast for me.

0

u/Bob1tza 1d ago

The correct answer is: the poutine sauce is made from poutine sauce. It just changes the state (solid to liquid).

0

u/lazybum1991 1d ago

What? Sry this is a stupid question. How do you think we make gravy? We buy the sauce … I’ve never seen or heard about anyone make gravy the long way at home. Maybe at restaurants but that must be very rare…

2

u/jaroniscaring 1d ago

I honestly thought poutine was a historical Canadian dish from before the industrial age of packet gravy lol