If you don’t have too many eggs, you might not have enough chickens. If you do have too many eggs, perhaps you should be making more quiche.
Quiche is okay. It’s not great. It’s not apple pie. It’s certainly not chocolate, or lobster, or even sausages. But it’s good enough, as food goes, and pretty easy and cheap. Quiche effectively complements other foods that similarly rate just “okay,” such as salad or soup, and they all wind up more interesting as a result of each other’s company. A slice of quiche goes nicely in a lunchbox. Importantly, quiche is a great way to use up random ingredients. That neglected half red pepper? An odd cold cut? A hunk of stinky cheese you’re tired of looking at? My wife calls these “endangered species.” Cut them up and put them in a quiche.
You’ll find enumerable quiche recipes published. To me, that means you can ignore all of them and just do it your own way.
So here’s the basic idea.
Quiche includes four elements, not including the crust (which is optional).
- eggs (whole, or just whites, or whites with a few extra yolks, or [some say] Egg Beaters)
- white liquid (milk, cream, half and half, evaporated milk)
- cheese (any kind, shredded or cut up into tiny bits)
- whatever else (bacon, onions, peppers, leeks, ham, broccoli, spinach, herbs—really, any mixture of any edible solids)
If you like, you can think hard about matching these to your vision of what the quiche should be. Or not.
These four elements should be in approximately equal volumes. The amount you make depends on your vessel. A nine-inch pie plate holds six cups, so figuring that the crust takes up one cup, and figuring that you don’t want to make a mess, you want a total of about 4½ cups of stuff. That would mean:
- 1 cup eggs (about 5 whole eggs)
- 1 cup white liquid
- 1 cup cheese
- 1 cup whatever
And then another half cup of something, if you like, usually more whatever, as whatever seldom exists in exact one-cup portions. You can actually fit up to about two cups of whatever into the quiche, if you back off the total amount of eggs and white liquid. Or, you can add a bit less whatever. It doesn’t matter. Whatever works.
Use any savory crust technique you like, or no crust at all. It’s better if you prebake the crust (with pie weights), and then collapse any bubbles. Bake the quiche at your favorite temperature (I’ve seen 325‘ to 425’ published….) until it looks like quiche. About half an hour usually does it.
Some closing thoughts:
Spice up the crust with some mustard powder or other herbs/spices.
Make little quiches in cupcake pans. I always ruin these, for some reason, but all the recipes say it’s easy. (I’m a pretty bad cook, myself, so you might have better luck.)
Experiment with the liquid parts by substituting plain yogurt or mayonnaise for part of it. Note that I haven’t tried this myself, but it sounds like a potentially good way to get rid of unwanted yogurt or mayonnaise.
If your kids hate vegetables, run it all through a blender first and they’ll never know.
Try duck or goose eggs. If you don’t have a source, you probably need to get your own ducks or geese.
Fresh eggs raised from birds who wander the world, digging up bugs and eating table scraps, taste infinitely better than factory-farmed birds, who sit in tiny cages, eating boring food, and taking drugs all day. You want a living quiche, created by birds who lead rich lives.
If you are unfortunate enough not to currently have laying poultry pecking around your backyard, find a neighbor who does, and offer to pay them anything for their eggs. That’s the real secret of making a gourmet quiche.