Bake 52 Rewind Week 1: Quiche

I thought it would be fun to go back and make all the recipes from the first of the year for the Bake 52 group.  Some of the recipes look really good and it will be a fun way to expand my baking skills. 

The first week's selection was Quiche.  You can find the recipe here.  I love quiche.  It's so versatile!  you can literally add any cooked veggie, meat, anything to it.  I've even added beans and rice when I wanted a complete protein but wanted to keep it vegetarian.  For this one I followed the Broccoli Quiche recipe but I added sliced chicken sausage.  I enjoyed making my own pie crust but I don't think it tastes noticably different if you just use a store bought crust. 

I used the traditional single-crust pie dough recipe from the book because I didn't have any cream cheese.  It has butter and shortening, which is chilled first.

Then I used my food processor to blend the dry ingredients and then added the shortening and mix.  Then finally the butter and pulse.  The recipe then tells you to transfer this mixture to another bowl, sprinkle 4 tbls of ice water over it and used a stiff spatula to mix it together until forms a ball.  I thought, "why get another bowl dirty.  I'll just dump it on to my pastry cloth, sprinkle the water on and mix it with my hands.

I thought I could make a little well in the middle but the water just ran over the edges and across the mat.  I had to do some chasing after the water to get it all worked in but after a bit of time and effort I got it all to come together the way it was supposed to.

I have to say my scraper was a huge help in that effort.  If you don't have one I'd recommend it if you are going to do much with dough. 

After letting the dough chill for an hour I pulled it out of the refrigerator and let it warm-up a bit (for 10 minutes) before rolling it out. 

It's always a bit suprising to me to see those big chunks of butter in the dough after all the mixing I do.  It's even more surprising to see once the dough it rolled out.

Then it's another 30 minutes (in the freezer this time) before it's ready to go in the oven.  While the I blind baked the crust I got the ingredients for the filling together.

I sliced up some chicken sausage I had on hand.  I bought it a long time ago for something else but never used it.  Then I cut up the broccoli that I had bought and steamed it according to the directions. Then spread it on some paper towels to dry.

Look at how bright and green it is!  Imagine how good it really looked, since I take all my pictures with my iPhone in artificial light.  :-) 

The recipe says to place the broccoli in the bottom of the pie crust and then poor the egg mixture over it.  So I put in a layer of the sausage and then topped it with the broccoli. 

The egg mixture is heavy on cream - 2 cups! I only had about 1 and quarter on hand so I just supplmented with 1% milk.  With adding the sausage I wasn't able to pour all the egg mixture in.  But I tried to get the bulk of the cheese in.  Seemed wasteful to dump that down the sink.  Although if I'd had a lot left I could have just made it into scrambled eggs.  That would have been yummy.

I filled it fuller than recommended... I was supposed to leave a half inch from the top of the crust.

Oops...  You can see why you are supposed to leave a half inch...  After about 45 minutes it was down and beautiful!

It was late by the time I finished so I just left it out to cool and then cut myself a piece the next morning for breakfast...

It was so yummy!  I had some for either breakfast or lunch or dinner until it was gone.  The filling was soft and buttery like perfectly cooked scrambled eggs.  I'm sure I'll be making Quiche again at some point in the future.  It's a great way to add some veggies to my breakfast.