3-B Quiche

Please do not be shocked, but I made quiche for the first time ever in my life the other night.

These are the ingredients you’ll need:

• Crust:
  • Flour.
  • Salt.
  • Unsalted Butter.
  • Ice Water.
• Filling:
  • Eggs
  • Heavy Cream
  • Salt
  • Pepper
  • Paprika
• Bacon chunks
• Broccoli
• Brie cheese
• Onions
• Garlic

For your crust, this is my go-to butter based crust recipe. You cannot go wrong with King Arthur Flour recipes. For my quiche filling, this is my go-to base recipe, but I always have to go rogue on the fillings.

(Because here in Paris, a small can of Crisco is now a luxury ingredient that I use extremely sparingly. If anyone knows where I can find Crisco butter sticks in Paris, hit me up! I will need them come Christmas time.)

This recipe makes 2 crusts; I only needed one, so below are the quantity of ingredients for 1 crust.

• 1 1/4 cup all-purpose flour.
• 1/2 teaspoon salt.
• 8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, cold.
• 1/8 to 1/4 cup water, cold.

Mix together the salt and the flour in your mixing bowl. Take your butter and cut into chunks into the flour. If you’d like to use a food processor for this step, be my guest. I usually use my hands to cut up the butter into smaller pea-sized bits. Drizzle in the water and mix together in the bowl. Once the dough looks like it is coming together, grab a handful and squeeze together with your hand. If the dough becomes a bigger dough ball, you’re in a good spot. If it seems still crumbly, add a bit more water. I tend to make my dough a little on the stickier side because I know that when I’m going to roll out the dough I will be adding flour to the surface so it doesn’t stick. I don’t want my dough cracking before I am able to put it in the pan.

Once you’ve got your dough at the consistency that you want, wrap the dough ball in plastic wrap and let it chill in the fridge for roughly 30 minutes. This helps the gluten relax as well as keep the butter in those pea-sized chunks you created when mixing the dough. The chunks of butter creates that flaky texture when you’re baking the dough. The chunkier the better.

I highly recommend while your dough is chilling in the fridge to cook your fillings of bacon, broccoli, onion, and garlic. I simply steamed the broccoli almost to the point of being cooked. A little undercooked was fine with me because I knew the crowns were going to be partially sticking out of the filling. I sautéed the onions and garlic in a little bit of butter and oil. I also add, bit by bit, chicken stock to really cook to onions and garlic to clear. The hubby doesn’t like the consistency of onions so I try to cook them down as much as possible so he doesn’t know they’re there. I add the bacon chunks (here I can buy pre-cut bacon type bits called lardons and I buy the smoked flavor)to the onion and garlic mixture and cook them till they’re nice a crispy.

Once I’ve got all my ingredients cooked, I roll out the dough. I like to use a 9-inch pie mold for everything pie-like related. I like to put some parchment paper into my pie pan because it’s Teflon coated and has a few nicks. I am able to easily pull out the whole quiche when it’s done baking. I blind bake my crust for 20 minutes. I had to improvise here because I don’t have pie weights. I put some parchment paper in the pie dish over the dough and on top of that I placed a smaller pie pan with some metal measuring cups so it would weigh it down a bit. My go to is the spare change jar, but we don’t have one so I improvised.

Once my crust was blind-baked, I took the weights and parchment paper out. I laid down the bacon, onion, and garlic concoction onto the bottom of the quiche, then I layered the broccoli crowns around on top of the bacon. Finally, I mixed the eggs, heavy cream, salt, pepper, and smoke paprika to a frothy texture and slowly poured that over the filling insides. I did this slowly as I did not want anything to move around. Once all the liquid is in the crust, I sliced the leftover Brie cheese into slivers and laid that around circularly on top of everything. I popped the quiche back in the oven for another 45 to 50 minutes. Et voilà! Gorgeous smelling quiche.

I always forget to take the step-by-step pictures during the making of a dish! I’m as much of a visual person as I am a text person. Especially when it comes to recipes and knitting patterns. I feel like there are only so many way you can describe a process where sometimes an image or video may better get the point across. I’ll do better next time.

Have fun, be spontaneous and adventurous! You can add whatever fits your fancy as ingredients for your quiche. That’s the beauty of a quiche, it’s so versatile.