CSA week six - Return to the quiche-quest

Longtime readers (Hi Mom!) might remember that back in 2008, I experimented in an attempt to create a more perfect quiche crust. Your standards crusts tend to be soggy on the bottom, dried out on top and contain a heck of a lot of butter to no notable benefit. Also, it's kind of a pain to make. I had the idea that a savory crumb crust might make a workable substitute and worked through a few variations. I was fairly happy with a cracker-crumb crust, but since I was making a quiche today to use up a bunch of scallions, I thought I'd try a new tweak on the formula.

This time around I processed a couple handfuls of homemade breadcrumbs with around an equal amount of Kalvi Crispy Thin crackers until they were fairly finely ground. To that I added a big pile of finely grated Parmesan (which I'm rather surprised I haven't tried before), a bit of salt and a couple Tablespoons of melted butter--just enough to give the mixture a little structure so it would stay up on the sides of the pan. Once I got the crumbs laid out nicely I blind baked the crust for 10 minutes at 350 degrees.

It didn't quite fuse into a solid piece, but there's a bit of structure there. Enough that I didn't have to be too gentle when putting in the fillings--three scallions and a tomato cooked-down, a half cup of diced green pepper browned, a little Serano ham frizzled and three more scallions cut larger and just wilted--plus a third cup of crumbled capricho de cabra, a soft flavorful but not too tangy goat cheese. Over that went four eggs beaten with 1/2 cup milk and 3/4 cup cream. The fillings stuck to the bottom so I had to gently mix things up a bit to distribute the vegetables.

I baked for 35 minutes at 375 degrees until a knife inserted in the middle came out clean, rested it for a bit and cut out a piece.

The quiche itself is nothing remarkable, but take a look at the bottom. Now that's a proper crust; I've got no idea how the crumbs transformed into that. It's a separate layer enough density and integrity to it that it broke along its own weakpoints instead of where I tried to cut it. It's flavorful from both the crackers and the cheese and even crisp up on the sides and, as you can see, a gorgeous golden brown. Very nice indeed.

CSA week 18 - Quinoa-crusted quiche

It's been a while since I've made a quiche. I spent some time last Fall experimenting with crumb crusts trying to come up with something with a good texture that didn't require most of a stick of butter to make. I finally settled on using cracker crumbs mixed with finely grated cheese and blind baked like a pie crust.

So when I finished making beet-top, spring-onion, grape-tomato pizza last night with plenty of each left over (not to mention half a ball of fresh mozzarella), and thought of quiche as a way to use up some more, I wanted to do something a bit different with the crust.

Frequent commenter Kat has made polenta crusts that she's talked about on her blog so I thought I'd try quinoa to see how that might work.

I started by cooking up a half cup of quinoa, mixing it with a quarter cup of panko bread crumbs, salt and a spice blend and letting it cool. Once it was workable, I pressed it into a 9-inch pie pan. It was a little crumblier than I wanted, although it was sticking together, so I decided to pre-bake it. I grated a good layer of pecorino toscano over top before putting it into a 350 degree oven for 10 minutes. The results were interesting. The cheese melted to form a sort of shellac over the quinoa. I think mixing it in would have worked well, but this protective coating should keep the crust intact.

Meanwhile, for the filling, I fried up a couple thick slices of bacon until crisp, set those aside and sautéed a handful each of beet- and spring onion-tops along with a good bit of parsley. Once those were just about done I added a handful of grape tomatoes to cook just a little bit. I just quartered the tomatoes instead of slicing them as I wanted to have them be distinct chunks in the quiche and not just a general tomatoey flavor thinning out the custard. And finally, I chopped up a thick slice of mozzarella into half-inch cubes, crumbled the bacon and mixed it all together for the final filling.

I decided to experiment with the custard a bit too as I had half a cup of leftover Greek yogurt I wanted to use. I mixed that with a cup of milk, a quarter cup or so of grated cheddar cheese and four eggs for the custard. That turned out to be just a little too much so I wasn't able to get the pan into the oven without spillage, but I didn't lose a whole lot.

I baked it at 375 degrees for 45 minutes and then ate leftover pizza while it cooled because the whole thing took a lot longer than I expected and was getting really hungry.

After 15 minutes of cooking, here it is.



Near the center, quiche and quinoa stayed separate and the quinoa stayed crumbly so it's not much of a crust there. But closer to the edges, and particularly up on the sides, the custard soaked down. It's delicate, but it holds together and I think it'll be firmer once it's cold. The flavors blend nicely too. The soaking in means there's less custard on top so the filling ratio is higher than I was hoping for and it's hard to judge whether the yogurt has any real influence on the flavor. So I'm inconclusive on that part of the experiment. I was worried about the random mix of cheeses, but they're all mild. The bacon smooths over any faults and the quinoa matches well with the eggs and smokiness so, even if there are faults in some specific areas, I'm going to call this overall a success.

In search of a better quiche crust - part five

Once more into the laboratory. My last attempt at a crumb crust was bread crumbs mixed with cheese and blinded. This time I'm trying cracker crumbs instead. I've tried crackers previously with butter but the results weren't great and it added a lot of fat with no real benefit.

This time I'm trying a different, more appropriate I'm hoping, type of cracker, mixing it with just one Tablespoon of butter along with a half cup of grated cheese to see how that goes.

The particular crackers I choose are Finn crisps. Mild in flavor, not covered with any sort of flavoring dust, crisp and not too fibrous. I ran some through my spice grinder but they turned to dust so I ground the rest with a mortar and pestle to get some texture.

For the cheese, I used a cream havarti: a good melter without an overwhelming character so it should match well with whatever vegetables I dig out of the refrigerator. One problem I had last time was distributing the long strands of grated cheese. This time I made certain to always keep the shortest dimension of the piece of cheese perpendicular to the direction I was grating in. It's a pain in the butt and against every instinct, but I was rewarded with inch long fine shreds that mixed easily and uniformly with the cracker crumbs.

After 10 minutes at 350 degrees it's difficult to see much difference but a close inspection reveals areas where the cheese melted into the crumbs and bubbled up. The bubbles are coated with cracker dust so they're well camouflaged. It looks promising, but then so did the breadcrumb crust and that turned out rather oddly. I grated a bit of Parmesan over the crust as extra waterproofing before filling the crust.

For the filling, I sautéed some broccolini along with onions and peppers. Getting them good and browned as that really brings out broccolini's flavor. When they were ready I added a handful of chopped tomato, some ham and deglazed the pan with an Argentinean torrontés, whatever the heck that is. It has a tart flavor that I think goes well with the broccolini.

I decided to wing it on the custard as I think I've made enough to have the hang of them. I used four eggs, a cup of milk and a half cup of sour cream. Should be interesting.

Then into the over for 22 minutes at 350 degrees before I realized that it was supposed to be at 375. I checked it after a half hour and a knife in the center comes out clean so I guess it's done despite that. Well, a little on the underdone side as it turns out, but since I'm going to be freezing and reheating most of it, that's for the best.

Here's the bottom. You can see that this time the crust remained a separate layer. It isn't crisp, but it holds together and is firm to the bite. The flavor of the crackers comes through, though, distinct from the quiche proper, and a lovely counterpoint to the other flavors. I think I can call this a success; this is a proper crust. Not difficult at all and relatively low fat with the addition of only one Tablespoon of butter and a quarter cup of extra cheese that wasn't going to go into the quiche anyway.

The quiche itself itself is quite good: smooth, creamy and flavorful. the sour cream was fresh so there's not a whole lot of sour going on, but I think it helped out the texture nicely. There are the occasional pockets where the sour cream wasn't mixed in entirely that add another element of flavor to the dish. The chewiness of the ham is a nice contrast to the other textures and its smokey flavor goes particularly well with the lightly charred broccolini. Overall, it's one darn fine quiche.

In search of a better quiche crust - part four

In previous installments of this series (I didn't think of giving it a title until now so just click on 'quiche' in the tag list if you want to know more) I first disparaged the idea of a crust on a quiche as it's always soggy on the bottom and dried out on the edges and while my crustless quiche was tasty, something was missing; then I took up Sara Moulton's idea of a savory cracker-crumb crust but didn't care for the aggressive flavor of the crackers or the enormous amounts of butter required; next I lined the bottom of the pan with bread crumbs. They melded into the bottom of the quiche instead of forming a proper crust, but they showed potential.

In considering my next attempt, I gave the standard quiche recipe some thought. Most recipes layer the bottom of the crust with shredded cheese before adding the rest of the fillings. I suppose the idea is to form a fatty layer insulating the pastry crust from soaking up the liquid in the quiche, but I've never seen it actually work. For my crumb crust, what would happen if I mixed the cheese in and then blind baked it?

Only one way to find out. I used generous amounts of bread crumbs--a mixture of panko and homemade-- added just one tablespoon of melted butter and mixed in the 3/4 cup of Emmentaler Swiss cheese I was going to use in the quiche anyway.

After 10 minutes at 350 degrees, the crust looked like this:

Pretty promising, although I should have broken up the long strands of cheese to get more even distribution. But the proof is whether it will retain its integrity after the quiche is cooked.

My recipe this time was four eggs mixed with 1/2 cup cream and 3/4 cup milk along with another quarter cup of liquid from my fillings.

Those fillings are a couple handfuls of large shrimp, quickly blanched to just barely cook through (since they'll be spending another half hour in the oven); a bunch of chives from my garden, a giganto clove of garlic, one large scallion and maybe two cups of baby spinach. All the vegetables got a sauté in olive oil and butter and a bit of a wilt with a splash of sauvignon blanc (he says as if he has more than one bottle of white wine in the house at any particular time).




The fillings go on top of the cooled crust and are topped with a grating of Parmigiano Reggiano,








then the egg mixture, and in to the over for 30 minutes at 375 degrees.






Resulting in this:








After letting it cool off for ten minutes, I cut a piece. Here's the bottom:


Looks pretty good. As for the texture...let's take a bite...well, I wasn't expecting that. Somehow I've managed to turn the breadcrumbs back into bread. It's like the quiche is sitting on a light fluffy slice of white bread. Weird. There are some chewy bits where there was an unusual concentration of cheese, too. I can't say that it's bad, but it's not what I was aiming at.

As for the quiche itself, I went a bit light on the salt, but it has a nice light texture, a tasty blend of herbal flavors and a good balance of flavors with the shrimp. Not too shabby.

I'll have to give the crust some more thought, though.

If you'd like another interesting crust option take a look at Kat's polenta crust here.

Semi-crustless quiche

A while back I tried out a recipe for a savory crumb crust to use with quiche. It worked out well enough that I was planning to try it again using different crackers, but I took a look at the four Tablespoons of butter it adds to an already pretty fatty dish (and an increasingly fatty me) and decided against it.

Instead, I just laid a layer of breadcrumbs on the bottom of the pie pan to see how it would turn out. It required a bit of delicacy in placing the fillings (bacon, caramelized onions and spinach) and in pouring the egg mixture (three eggs, a quarter cup heavy cream, three quarters cup milk, three quarters cup semi-soft cheese, a quarter cup hard cheese, salt, pepper and a sprinkling of nutmeg), but you shouldn't be throwing that stuff around, anyway. I used Bittman's crustless quiche recipe from his Minimalist column in the New York Times. It called for mixing the cheese into the egg mixture instead of into the fillings which was an interesting difference from other recipes I've used.



Here's the result (after 20 minutes at 325 degrees).



And here's the bottom. Not much to see there, but it does give a bit of firmness to a rather loose and creamy quiche. Since the center was firm I thought I had left it in the oven too long, but really it could have used another five minutes. There was no browning, though, which was a bit of a disappointment. So it's not quite a success but I think there's promise.

For the last crumb crust I had laid down a layer of cheese just on top which I think melted through, insulating it from the main filling and holding it together. I'll try that with the bread crumbs next time.

Late Summer Vegetable Quiche

I've changed my mind since the last time I wrote about quiche. I spent a couple paragraphs back in January disparaging the idea of crusts. But when I actually ate that crustless quiche, tasty as it was, I missed the extra texture and flavor elements a crust contributes. On the other hand, a proper crust is still a pain in the butt and still likely to end up mushy on the bottom and dried out around the top so I wasn't entirely sold.

But I saw an interesting alternative on an episode of Sara Moulton's new show: Weeknight Meals or something like that. She made a savory version of a graham cracker crumb crust by leaving out the sugar and using a plain cracker. It looked like she used a Trisket or something akin but annoyingly she never showed the actual recipe on-screen and I can't find it anywhere on her website. I think I'm supposed to buy the cookbook. So, failing that I used the whole-wheat flatbread I had on hand--made a cup of crumbs, added four Tablespoons of melted butter and blind baked it for ten minutes at 350 degrees. When I've done this with graham crackers or nilla wafers the crusts held together after baking and cooling, but this one stayed a bit crumbly so I had to move it around carefully. I think the added sugar melted, spread out and held bits together in the sweet crusts. In this case I spread cheese around inside the crust before adding the quiche fillings in the hope that it would melt into the crumbs and serve the same purpose.

Those aforementioned quiche fillings were the last of the CSA squash and eggplant (surprisingly well shredded by my food processor) which I salted, let sit for a half hour and gave a squeeze to get out some moisture and then quickly browned to add a bit more flavor, a bit of ham, some sliced cremini mushrooms and a bit more cheese on top. The quiche itself was five eggs mixed with a cup and a quarter of half-and-half (more or less. It was my leftover milk and cream from my last ice cream.) and I topped it all with slices of tomato.

Here's the result after thirty minutes at 375 degrees and one minute too long under the broiler.


And here's a look at the crust. There's a notable note of the cracker's flavor and few crunchy bits along the sides (as there was no exposed crust during baking). Mainly the crust adds structural integrity which was notably lacking in the crustless quiche I made. My advice at this point is that a savory crumb crust is well worth making but you need to choose your crackers and cheese carefully to match the vegetables. The Lincolnshire Poacher cheese and whole grain crackers I used, although they went nicely together, didn't work particularly well with the eggplant and squash. Probably something in a Swiss would have been a better choice. Still it was palatable enough even if it missed the harmonious synergy I stumbled into last time.

CSA week seven - crab, scallion and tomato quiche

I have just discovered that every quiche I've had before now was overcooked. I suppose I should have figured that out considering how rubbery and dry they all were. But an counter-example does wonders where logic falters.

As I mentioned in the last post, quiche is one of the few applications for a whole bunch of scallions. I pieced together the recipe I used from a half dozen or so I found on-line plus a little actual thought on my part. The most valuable information I found on the web was this generalized recipe for a generic crustless quiche. I knew I wasn't about to make a crust; for one thing it's a pain in the butt. And for another, I'm skeptical of the whole idea of a crust on a quiche. They always turn out dried out on the edges and gummy on the bottom. If you really need some starch, have a slice of bread. Anyway, when I went shopping for the rest of the ingredients the only ready-made crust available was Pilsbury and while that, somewhat surprisingly, had the lard required for a tender crumb, it also had sugar as it was intended for pies and I didn't think that would work out so well. But crustless isn't a problem. I didn't have the deep dish 9" pie pan the recipe called for so I used my paella pan. It's eight inches at the bottom and ten at the top, so close enough.

The recipe calls for around a cup and a half of solid ingredients. I had 6 oz. of crab meat (The real stuff, but not the good stuff. There are too many other ingredients to make the really good stuff necessary. I do wish I could have used local crab instead of a can imported from Thailand, though.), three small tomatoes, peeled, seeded and chopped (I didn't use the grape tomatoes we got in this week's share. I happened to purchase a box of tomatoes and a bunch of scallions not long before the share arrived so I've got more than plenty of both. Given the choice I passed on trying to peel grape tomatoes and used the slightly larger tomatoes I had picked up at the market.) and a bunch of scallions wilted in a fair bit of butter. That added up to a bit more than 1 1/2 cups but the crab didn't pack very tightly so I figured I was good.

I added to that 1/2 cup or so of Gruyere cheese, which is a nice match with crab, a good bit of pepper, a judicious application of salt and a couple teaspoons of Parisien Bonnes Herbes, an herb mix from Spice House that contains tarragon, chervil, basil, dill, chives and white pepper. It has a sweet flavor that goes nicely with shellfish, onions and eggs so I was pretty confident it would work here (which it, in fact, did). With the pricey Gruyere and the crab, this may be the most expensive recipe I've come up with for the cheapest subscription ingredient. But given the lovely results, I can't really argue.

The recipe calls for 1 to 1 1/2 cups of liquid mixed with four eggs. I used a half cup of heavy cream that I had leftover and about 3/4 cups of whole milk. I suspect most quiches I've had before now have skimped on the fat to the detriment of the texture. You could use skim milk and egg substitute if you really wanted to. I'm not going to recommend it, though.

It only took 30 minutes at 375 degrees to finish cooking the quiche which is substantially less time than most recipes call for. The slightly larger pan made for a slightly shallower quiche which may have contributed to the short cooking time, but I suspect most published recipes have a cooking time bumped up by ten minutes due to salmonella concerns. Since you're only using four eggs that shouldn't really be an issue, particularly if they're organic (as I presume most CSA subscribers are buying).

Serve with a salad, crusty bread and a white wine (something fairly dry to counter the sweetness of the crab and herbs. I'm having a Louis Latour 2006 Chardonnay Bourgogne. Since I'm only willing to pay $15 for a bottle I prefer to get a low end bottle from a high end vineyard than than the top of the line from a low end vineyard. It's a philosophy that has worked well for both wine and home electronics.). I am very happy with the results; this may be the most successful of the CSA recipes I've made so far. It's buttery, sweet, light and tender. And despite all the other flavors going on, the scallions make a major contribution so it's worth calling a CSA dish.