C’est la quiche

I’ve generally avoided making quiche.  Not because I've suspected it to be particularly difficult, but because the kitchen gods have decided to curse me with an inability to make a half-decent piecrust of any incarnation.  I recently decided to flip the proverbial bird to said deities and give it another go.

I wouldn’t say it’s persistence, more so spite, which is a faaaar stronger motivation than anything The Secret could hope to inspire.

Once again I turned to Madame Child to resolve my stand off with all things pastry.  Aaaand once again my refusal to follow a recipe to the ‘T’ lead me to combine a couple different ones for the filling.  The one I wanted to try didn’t include bacon, and, well… I wanted bacon!  Seriously, when given the choice of “to bacon or not to bacon” always choose to bacon.

I wasn’t stupid enough to try and deviate from the basic crust recipe, though.  If it were to fail it was going to fail under Julia Child’s instruction and therefore it would be HER fault (in absentia, of course).

Here’s how the quiche went down:

Crust:

·      2 cups flour

·      1 tsp salt

·      ¼ tsp sugar

·      1 ½ sticks (3/4 c) cold butter, cut into small pieces

·      4 tbsp cold vegetable shortening, cut into
small pieces

·      ½ cup iced water (I needed a bit more)

The first 5 ingredients get tossed into a bowl.  With your hands, rub the butter and shortening in the flour until or roughly resembles oats.  You could use a pastry blender rather than your hands, but you won’t get the same emulsification of the fats.  Happily emulsified fat = flakier crust.  Don’t overwork this step.

Add the water and (still with your hand) blend rapidly until all flour is able to be gathered in to a ball, adding more water drop by drop if necessary).  Pliable, but not sticky.  You want dough, not Britney Spears.

Transfer the dough to a lightly floured surface, and with the heel of your hand press small amounts of the dough away from you, in what is known as fraisage (They're speaking French, so you KNOW they're doing it right).  This will blend the remaining fat and flour.

Collect the dough into a ball, giving it a quick knead to smooth it out, wrap it, and pop into the fridge for at least an hour, preferably 2 hours or overnight.

La la la, roll roll roll, place in pie plate or flan ring, crimp edges, prick the pastry, and pre-bake at 400° for 10 to 12 minutes.   

The oven took a while to preheat, so I got fancy.

You’ll probably want to line the inside of the crust with foil and weigh it down with dried beans (at last, an use for the 1 kilo of black beans I’ve neglected to the point of mummification in the back of the cupboard).  After 8 or 9 minutes of the cooking time, remove the foil and beans and return the crust to the oven until it just starts to colour.

Filling:

·      3 eggs

·      1 ½ cups heavy cream

·      pinch nutmeg

·      ground black pepper (I like a lot, but adjust to taste)

·      ¼ cup grated Swiss cheese (I actually thought I had some sharp white cheddar on hand which I was going to use, but realized I was mistaken when it was far too late to do sod-all about it.  I omitted the cheese and it was still tasty)

·      1 finely minced shallot (about 2-3 Tbsp worth)

·      1 ¼ c frozen spinach

·      additional salt and pepper to taste

·      about 8-10 slices thick cut, good bacon cut into smallish pieces (the guy at the deli got distracted when he was slicing my order and only gave me 5 slices, which I didn’t notice until I got home and unwrapped the package.  Never EVER be chintzy with my bacon, you hear?!!)

·      butter

I assure you this was not the plethora of bacon I'd hoped for

Preheat oven to 375°

Beat the eggs, cream, nutmeg and pepper in a bowl and set aside.

Meanwhile, fry the bacon pieces until just cooked (or partially incinerated.  Your choice.  I won’t tell you how you like your bacon).  Remove bacon, drain on towels, and scatter across the bottom of partially cooked pie-shell.

Drain bacon fat from pan, and add shallots, giving them a quick stir, then add the spinach.  Cook this over medium heat to evaporate the water from the spinach, and as you stir make sure you’re getting all the bacon shrapnel off the pan, too.

When no more liquid remains in the pan, adjust seasonings.

Add the cooked spinach to the egg mixture.  Slowly.  You don’t want the heat of the spinach to pre-cook the eggs.

Pour into pie-shell.  This would be the point where you would chuck whatever cheese you were using over the top, but since we’re already aware of my lack of cheesy goodness at the time, we’ll just pretend I did.

Ooooooooo...

You can also dot the top of the quiche with pea-sized nubs of butter (about 1-2 Tbsp worth).

Pop into the preheated oven and let bake for 25-30 minutes.  Now, I had to let it be in there for about 35-40 minutes because I lost patience with evaporating the water from the spinach, and there was too much moisture still trapped in there.  In any case, the top should be puffed up and golden when done.

I managed to be able to slide the quiche out of the pie plate onto a serving platter.  Okay, it was just another dinner plate, but the fact that I managed to extract this sucker from one vessel onto another struck me as nothing short of a miracle akin to the healing of a leper.  

Look, Ma!  No pans!

As with all things, there’s always room to trash it up a bit.  My particular sacrilege took the form of a liberal hosing of ketchup alongside the quiche.  When in Rome do as the Romans do.  When in your home, in your jammies, eating quiche in front of the tv, do whatever you damn well want.