Yesterday I found a new food blog Smitten Kitchen I am sure you have all been reading it for years… I then found it again when I did a search for “Leek Quiche” this morning. I am starting to branch out of my cooking and baking comfort zone and what better way to start than with a summer quiche!
I loved the look of this Leek and Mushroom Quiche and decided to give it a go.
I am not going to reproduce Smitten Kitchen’s recipe here, but I will list the few changes I did make.
- I used coconut oil throughout (using 3/4 the amount of butter). Even for the pastry shell! While it didn’t roll very well at all, I rolled it enough to get fairly large sections in at once. Then I used smaller pieces to fill the gaps. Once the shell was baked I immediately added the filling and cooked it for what turned out to be closer to 45 than 20 minutes. After cooking I took it out the tin and left to cool on a rack (again as suggested).
- As suggested I didn’t add the chopped butter to the top of my quiche before putting it in the oven.
- To top I only grated around 5gms of cheese on to the filling before putting into the oven, as always reduced cheese is to keep the other half happy 😉
- I didn’t feel that my filling needed as much milk as suggested so I cut it down to like 200mls, even still with this amount it overflowed my pastry case, but that didn’t seem to cause any major problems.
- I used a 9″ sandwich tin, if I had an 8″ tin, I would probably use that next time, as 9″ was just a bit too big for the amount of pastry I had.
To serve, we had Jersey Royal potatoes (with mayonnaise and Dijon Mustard) and Swiss Chard.
All in all it was a lovely meal. The pastry was a little bit on the crunchy side, but this could have been due to my inability to roll out the dough and have it remain in one sheet! This meant I had to press it together in the tin, which I imagine could account for the crunchiness rather than the flakiness I would have expected.
One note on the Coconut Oil, is that while it made a really good quiche, I did for the first time notice the lack of the buttery taste in the pastry. In the future if I was making this for a special occasion I might go ahead and use butter, but I think for a normal everyday quiche I’ll stick to the Coconut Oil!