Quiche Lorraine

I wanted to make something new for dinner, and since we actually had eggs, butter, and (2%!) milk in our fridge, I decided on a quiche.  We also had some bacon and a LOT of onion, for some reason.  In short, we had almost everything we needed to make a quiche, and I'll take any opportunity to use my mini Cuisinart food processor.

I used my now-standard pie crust recipe, scaled for a 9" pie plate:

• 1¼ c. flour
• ½ c. butter [cubed and tossed in the freezer for as long as possible]
• ½ tsp. salt
• 3-4 Tbsp. ice water [I tend to use a couple more Tbsp. than recipes call for, but maybe that's just me being a pie crust beginner.]
• ½ tsp. sugar [omitted for the quiche]

The crust came together fairly quickly, and I chilled it for maybe 10 minutes before rolling it out into the pie plate.  This worked better than letting the dough chill for a couple hours, then taking it back out and letting it come up to room temperature for several minutes before rolling.  Most likely a product of the local climate on average being much warmer than most places where American cookbooks are written.

The crust needed to be baked before filling.  I have a handy tool to weight pie crust while baking, which worked very well, but the crust recipe said to bake 20 minutes with weights, then to remove the weights, poke holes in the bottom of the crust, and bake for about 10 minutes longer.  For whatever reason, the crust still puffed up quite a bit during the last 10 minutes of baking, even though I took especial care to actually poke the crust all the way through to the plate.  Next time I have to pre-bake a crust like this I might try baking the entire 30 minutes with the pie weight on.  This might also help bake the crust more thoroughly than the process of baking, then cooling slightly, then baking some more.

Joy of Cooking's quiche recipe calls for 2 cups of milk and 3 eggs.  Perhaps we should have used whole milk instead of 2% that we had, but the custard turned out to be quite soft and I had to bake the quiche for 50 minutes altogether, rather than the "35 to 40 minutes" that the cookbook said.  Even at 40 minutes, the quiche was nowhere near a solid.  Looking at my other recent posts, maybe I should get an oven thermometer to see how accurate our oven is, because there seems to be a theme of "had to bake for way longer than called for" in some of the other writeups.  Perhaps a correct oven temperature would have helped set the custard; or perhaps we should have used an additional egg or two.

Not bad, not great, and sadly not worth several hours' prep time.

The verdict on this one, though, was that I would NOT make a quiche again, or if I did, I would not do my own pie crust.  I spent an entire afternoon in our windowless kitchen making and baking a pie crust, then slicing and cooking onions and bacon, and finally preparing the filling (admittedly the easiest part of it all).  The finished product was not astounding, and the worst part was, it was not even a satisfying dinner: I could have used another slice or two but held off since I knew exactly how much butter and bacon had gone into that quiche.  So, unfortunately, this is probably not going to be a repeat recipe.

Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 108-109