Canada: Poutine, Nanaimo Bars and Tiger Tail Ice Cream

Tiger Tail icecream!

It’s so interesting how you can live so close to another country and still know next to nothing about their most popular foods! It was so fun researching Canadian foods and I was happily surprised to find so many fun, new (to me), dishes! There was A LOT to choose from, so I decided to make the national dish- poutine! I also hard a hard time deciding between all the delicious sounding desserts, so I decided to make two- I went with nanaimo bars because they sounded really good, and also tiger tail ice cream because I thought it sounded so interesting!

So let’s start with poutine!

Poutine: fries topped with cheese curds and gravy! And mushrooms and parsley!

*Warning: this is NOT a healthy meal, so don’t blame me for your high blood pressure if you make it lol!

Poutine is a delicious mix of fries, cheese curds and gravy. While the exact origins are unknown (multiple Canadian restaurants claim to be the creators of poutine), we at least know that it came from a rural area of Quebec sometime in the 1950s. Poutine is a québécois word for “mess,” which is appropriate since it is definitely a mess to eat. But totally worth it!

For this yummy, and heart stopping dish, I followed Queenslee Appetit's recipe, although I added mushrooms and onions to the gravy and then topped with freshly chopped parsley. It was soooo good and I loved the addition of ketchup and Worcestershire sauce to the gravy. I also loved that the fries were double fried (similar to the fries I made for Belgium)- the first fry cooks the inside perfectly and the second fry gives them a beautiful light brown crisp! Oh, and the Cream City Market cheese curds from St. Kilian's Cheese Shop were SO delicious as well!

I loved this dish so much that I actually made it again, 2 weeks later, when my brother was in town! He loved it too!

Now the desserts! I couldn’t decide between nanaimo bars and tiger tail ice cream, even after nanaimo bars won my instagram poll, so I figured the more desserts the better!

Nanaimo bars are a 3 layer dessert- the bottom layer is a graham cracker crumb, coconut, walnut and cocoa base. The middle layer is a delicious custard (which I added vanilla bean to because, why not?) and the top layer is a semisweet chocolate and butter coating. These were absolutely amazing! Ryan and I kept saying “THESE ARE SO GOOD!” over and over.

The 3 layers combined so well- biting through the smooth, firm chocolate into the creamy sweet custard, and then finishing with the chewy graham cracker and nut crust was perfection!

I was also able to get the opinion of 2 Canadians and 5 firefighters and it was a BIG thumbs up from everyone! Quote from my sweet Canadian friend, Paisley, “Oh my GOD. Those Nanaimo bars were PERFECT. They took me right back to being a kid on Thanksgiving.” Sooo I feel pretty good about them lol.

The only downside was that the custard powder was pretty hard to find locally, so I ended up ordering it off of Amazon for like $9 and now I have enough to make the recipe another 30 times or so haha! Nanaimo bars, anyone??

Lastly, Tiger Tail Ice Cream!! Y'all, Canada is WILD- this ice cream is orange flavored with LICORICE ribbons running through it! As weird as it sounds, I knew I had to try it. Plus, I had never made ice cream before , so I thought it would be fun to try!

I really enjoyed the ice cream making process and it was actually much easier than I expected! There’s a few different ways to make ice cream and, although it’s a little more difficult, I decided to make mine with eggs for extra creaminess.

For the orange flavoring, I used a 1/2 teaspoon of Wild Orange essential oil from Doterra, a teaspoon of Grand Marnier liqueur (the alcohol helps keep the ice cream from getting to hard- traditionally vanilla extract is used but I thought the orange liqueur would go well) and one vanilla bean!

For the orange color, I used Suncore Food's orange and carrot powder because I wanted to go as natural as possible. The orange color wasn’t quite as bright as I’d hoped but it still gave it a nice orangey hue, plus a little extra orange flavor and a barely noticeable hint of carrot!

The licorice part is where I really struggled. To get the licorice flavor, I made a syrup with sugar, water, star anise, vanilla and pieces of licorice. The black licorice color is really hard to get without food coloring, but I hoped that cooking down some of the licorice in the syrup would give me the color I wanted- unfortunately, it added very little color. I hadn’t bought any food coloring, so I searched my kitchen for something (anything!) to add to make my syrup darker. I ended up adding date syrup, which definitely made it darker and also toned down the licorice flavor a little, making it (in my opinion) more palatable.

All in all, this ice cream wasn’t terrible, but I don’t think I’d ever order it if I had the opportunity haha! I’ve always said I liked licorice because it brings back memories of my grandpa giving us licorice candy when we’d come over, but I’m realizing now that I like the memories a lot more than the candy.