Quiche is one of those amazing foods where as long as you have a fridge full of dairy (eggs, cheese, milk), you can probably put it together using absolutely any perishable food you may have lying around. I guess how difficult it becomes is dependent on your ingredients, but usually it is fairly easy if not quick to do.
My most recent attempt at quiche was a victim of poor time management, however you don’t really need to go making up a base from scratch like I was hell bent on doing. If you’ve got a few sheets of short crust pastry in the fridge, awesome. If you don’t, plan a few hours ahead and make some because it really isn’t that difficult. If forethought isn’t your forte, ditch the pastry all together and make a fritatta.
To make the short crust pastry:
1 2/3 cups plain flour
125g unsalted butter, chilled, finely chopped
1 egg, chilled
(I bastardized taste.com.au’s recipe for this)
You’ll need some kind of mixer/food processor for this. If you have one, you can just cut the rubbing out all together, chuck your flour and butter in and process! Then add the egg until it comes together in a dough! But I didn’t so, I started off with the good old “Rubbing it in” method. I learnt this in Home Economics and I remember it making the joints of my thumbs hurt, but it works. So, start of with rubbing the butter into the flour between your thumbs and fingers.
Then, when the mixture looks yellow and NOT like coarse breadcrumbs (Man I always thought this description was a crock of shit). You’ll know it’s done when it gets solid if you compress it.
Then, attach your bowl to a mixer and add the egg. Mix ’til it all comes together. Then knead for a bit. Then roll it into a ball, wrap it in glad wrap and stick it in the fridge for at least two hours.
Now is the fun part! There was bacon and sweet potato and a bunch of cheese and some onion in this quiche. I beat up about 6 eggs with a little bit of milk. I chopped up the sweet potato into cubes and boiled them for five minutes then let them sit until I needed them. I fried up the bacon and onion and garlic until it was all crispy (but not the garlic, no one likes burnt garlic).
The pastry is completely unworkable when it is cold, so it needs to get back to room temperature in order for you to roll it out. Roll it out to about 1cm thick. Press it into a springform cake tin, make sure there aren’t any cracks for holes with the pastry that falls over the sides.
Then tip all of your cooked ingredients onto the pastry and spread them out evenly and pour the egg over the top. It should take about 45 minutes to an hour to cook at 180 degrees.
Enjoy! Even at 11pm!
