Quiche is (for those of you who love cheese and eggs and are not lactose intolerant) one of the few staple delights of the cafe/bistro world. I love eggs. In any form, and am of the belief that my life is incomplete without cheese. Naturally, a dish that combines these two things and an assortment of other ingredients that can be customised to individual preference is a dish that can’t go wrong.
My last two semesters abroad, I was living with a couple of friends. We planned out our meals for the week and took turns cooking. Pretty basic stuff. One of the things we had every few weeks was quiche. I never realised how easy quiche was to make which was disappointing, since it’s one of my favourite foods. So since I’m back home in Singapore now, I’ve taken it upon myself to cook a couple of family dinners.
In Perth, the quiche I learned to make from my housemates was done with a puff pastry base. Easy and clean, because the puff pastry came in sheets you could buy and freeze. However, the puff pastry in our freezer wasn’t split into individual sheets and I couldn’t wait for it to thaw. I just looked up a simple shortcrust pastry recipe online, got out the food processor, and made some pastry from scratch!
Ingredients you’ll need:
-Shortcrust pastry (I used this recipe.)
-Eggs
-Cheese (cheddar is fine, though really cheese isn’t all that necessary)
-Onions
-Bacon*
-Milk, salt & pepper to taste
I made one quiche the first day, but didn’t like it because the crust was too thick and i’d put sweet potatoes in it (the purple kind – bad idea) which made it too starchy. So the next night I decided to make another with the leftover pastry. I rolled it out super thin, and lined my dish. It was quite a process involving lots of patchwork because the thin pastry was so fragile. I didn’t mind, and figured it wouldn’t affect the taste. Then I put the grated cheese in first and pressed it down so it wouldn’t move around the dish. I chose to put the cheese at the bottom this time because it floated to the top previously and I didn’t like that.
Next, I cooked a handful of sliced onions until they were soft(because I am just someone who is not a fan of raw onions in my food), and threw that on top of the cheese, followed by some bacon! Bacon is the best. You can put bacon in almost anything. It’s not great for your health, but it definitely makes the taste buds happy.
You can see in the above picture just how thinly I got the pastry spread out for the second quiche. It was a real pain in the ass to lay out but I would do it again all the same. All that’s left when you’ve got all your desired ingredients in is to crack a couple of eggs, season the mixture, add a little milk, and pour the mixture into the dish. I used 7 eggs for a quiche this size.
I stuck it in the oven on a lower rack for 15-20 minutes at about 170C (I suggest checking on it at the 15 minute mark and then staying close by). You’ll know it’s done when you can stick a fork in the top and you don’t see any liquid egg flowing.
Pretty proud of the end result! It was well-received too.
*Some variations, if you prefer, could be vegetables instead of bacon. We tried a mushroom vegetable quiche one week, which turned out pretty good. Another option you could try is a pumpkin and feta quiche. Pumpkin is good, sweet potato is not. You should cut the pumpkin small and definitely not skimp on the feta.
Hope this Quiche sort-of-recipe is helpful in some way!
whodoesthings 