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.

Leek and Mushroom Quiche, straight from the oven

Leek and Mushroom Quiche, straight from the oven


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.
Leek and Mushroom Quiche, served with potatoes and red chard

Leek and Mushroom Quiche, served with potatoes and red chard

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!