The encyclopaedia of gravy
The largest serving of poutine weighed 3,034 kg and was made by Les Fromages de Warwick in Québec on 3 August 2019, using around 1,000 litres of brown gravy and more than 300 volunteers.
The largest serving of poutine weighed 3,034 kg (6,688.82 lb), created by Les Fromages de Warwick in Québec, Canada, on 3 August 2019. More than 300 volunteers helped assemble it.
Poutine is chips, fresh cheese curds and hot brown gravy, and reports from the event put the gravy used at around 1,000 litres — the largest quantity of gravy recorded in any world record on this site, and the informal benchmark for a record that does not appear to exist.
The logistical problem¶
The defining constraint of poutine is temperature. The gravy has to be hot enough to soften the cheese curds on contact, which is what produces the squeak-and-melt texture the dish is judged on — see poutine gravy.
At three tonnes, that is a genuinely hard engineering problem. The gravy at the bottom of a pile that size behaves very differently from the gravy at the top, and by the time the last of a thousand litres is poured, the first of it is cooling. It is the same difficulty a domestic cook faces keeping a jug hot through a long lunch, scaled up several thousand times — see keeping gravy warm.
Assembly order¶
Whatever the scale, the order does not change: chips, then curds, then gravy over the top. Gravy underneath does not melt the cheese.
Source¶
- Largest serving of poutine — Guinness World Records