Quiche Algorithm
Jan. 26th, 2010 12:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksI realized after dinner this evening that I have developed a set of rules that allow me to make a perfect vegetable quiche every time without thinking about it, no matter what vegetables we have in the house.
This is a meal-sized quiche. It can be dinner for four people, by itself, or breakfast for six to eight. Also, not low fat, not remotely. But very very good. Unless you've been eating quiche in France, this will be one of the best quiches you've had (assuming your piecrust is edible).
You need:
one nine-inch pie crust and pie pan-- I don't care how you get the pie crust, make it, buy it, whatever
three eggs
one cup heavy cream, some butter or oil
three cloves garlic, if desired
salt, pepper, other seasonings at your whim
two cups grated cheese-- literally any kind of cheese you like, it does not matter, you can use cheddar, feta, pepperjack, mozzarella, mixtures, as long as it is two cups grated/crumbled
Now here's the part where it becomes awesome: you need at least two out of three of the following categories of vegetables, not kinds. And as long as your vegetables fit into these categories, it doesn't matter what they are. It will still be delicious. I made a quiche a while ago filled with cabbage, turnip, and celeriac and people fell on it and caused it to vanish before I had time to tell them what was in it. Then they sat around going cabbage? turnip? what?
Category 1: Body. This is the major filling, the one you'll have the most of in every bite. Broccoli, potato, sweet potato, cauliflower, cabbage, onion, spinach, mushroom, eggplant, what have you, something that does not melt away to utter nothingness when cooked.
Category 2: Crunch. This needs to be crunchy. Carrot, celery, celeriac, string beans, cabbage, anything that is crunchy. It can be something you could use as the body, but don't use the same vegetable in the same quiche as both categories.
Category 3: Flashy. You have two goals here: one, it tastes really different from either of your first two, which is easy. Two, this is where you can use things that melt away in cooking. Tomato, parsley, roasted chili peppers, mushroom, roasted bell pepper, onion, avocado, apple. Go for the gusto.
As long as you have a vegetable, any vegetable, for two out of three categories, you have a quiche. Having all three is best.
Procedure:
Preheat oven to 350 F.
Chop your body vegetable to bite-size until you have about four cups of it. Layer it in a bowl with a large quantity of salt, several big handfuls. You should be pretty much burying it in salt. Let sit at least twenty minutes. (Potato and sweet potato are the only things I can think of where you should skip this step. Just lightly salt those and leave them alone.)
Chop your crunchy vegetable to fine dice until you have about three cups of it. Mince the garlic.
Chop your flashy vegetable roughly to bite-size or just under until you have two cups of it or less. If using tomato, seed it. If using chilis, just use as many as you'd want for the heat level. Honestly with the flashy vegetable you can get away with using ridiculously small quantities-- tonight's quiche had one seeded small tomato sliced and arranged in a sunburst on the top. It's an accent. Two cups is the upper limit.
Wash the salt off the body vegetable really, really thoroughly, squeezing out moisture with your hands. When you taste a piece it should be mildly salty but not overly so. You may have to wash it multiple times to achieve this.
Throw a fairly large quantity of butter or a couple tablespoons of oil into a saucepan and fry the garlic until it starts to smell. Add your crunchy vegetable and your body vegetable, sprinkle with black pepper, and saute until the crunchy vegetable is as done as you'd like, which should still be pretty crunchy. The body vegetable won't be done yet. Don't wait for it. Add the flashy vegetable and saute for thirty seconds max, just enough to wilt parsley or other greens and heat other things a little.
Pour vegetable mixture into pie shell.
In another bowl, mix cream, cheese, and two eggs until thoroughly combined. This is where you can put in other seasonings, if you feel like it-- a little cumin if you're having eggplant, a little lemon juice for the broccoli, just a dash of a spice you'd use in other dishes on your body vegetable. A little more pepper here goes well. If you're using a cheese that isn't very salty, you can add salt here if you think it needs it. Pour over the vegetables and smooth out any giant lumps of cheese with your hands.
Beat the third egg and pour it over the top. It doesn't have to cover the whole top, so don't worry if you can't get it to spread out very much.
Bake at 350 F for forty-five minutes. A knife inserted into the center should come out clean.
I have been throwing extremely random combinations of vegetables at this for some while now and am pretty certain it's unbreakable. I also use whatever cheese we have lying around. This is the only preparation in which Ruth likes eggplant, and one of the two in which I will eat cooked cabbage. Good cold the next day for lunch, too (there are three of us who eat dinner here, and I'm not kidding when I say this is dinner for four).
I've never tried meat, because I am always cooking for a vegetarian, but I think that with smaller things such as thin-sliced ham or chopped bacon I'd substitute them in as crunchy or flashy, and for larger chunks of chicken or tuna I'd put them in as the body. But I'd still parcook, as one of the major problems with many quiches I've had is that just baking the ingredients will not cook them through. If you try any meats, let me know how it comes out!
This is a meal-sized quiche. It can be dinner for four people, by itself, or breakfast for six to eight. Also, not low fat, not remotely. But very very good. Unless you've been eating quiche in France, this will be one of the best quiches you've had (assuming your piecrust is edible).
You need:
one nine-inch pie crust and pie pan-- I don't care how you get the pie crust, make it, buy it, whatever
three eggs
one cup heavy cream, some butter or oil
three cloves garlic, if desired
salt, pepper, other seasonings at your whim
two cups grated cheese-- literally any kind of cheese you like, it does not matter, you can use cheddar, feta, pepperjack, mozzarella, mixtures, as long as it is two cups grated/crumbled
Now here's the part where it becomes awesome: you need at least two out of three of the following categories of vegetables, not kinds. And as long as your vegetables fit into these categories, it doesn't matter what they are. It will still be delicious. I made a quiche a while ago filled with cabbage, turnip, and celeriac and people fell on it and caused it to vanish before I had time to tell them what was in it. Then they sat around going cabbage? turnip? what?
Category 1: Body. This is the major filling, the one you'll have the most of in every bite. Broccoli, potato, sweet potato, cauliflower, cabbage, onion, spinach, mushroom, eggplant, what have you, something that does not melt away to utter nothingness when cooked.
Category 2: Crunch. This needs to be crunchy. Carrot, celery, celeriac, string beans, cabbage, anything that is crunchy. It can be something you could use as the body, but don't use the same vegetable in the same quiche as both categories.
Category 3: Flashy. You have two goals here: one, it tastes really different from either of your first two, which is easy. Two, this is where you can use things that melt away in cooking. Tomato, parsley, roasted chili peppers, mushroom, roasted bell pepper, onion, avocado, apple. Go for the gusto.
As long as you have a vegetable, any vegetable, for two out of three categories, you have a quiche. Having all three is best.
Procedure:
Preheat oven to 350 F.
Chop your body vegetable to bite-size until you have about four cups of it. Layer it in a bowl with a large quantity of salt, several big handfuls. You should be pretty much burying it in salt. Let sit at least twenty minutes. (Potato and sweet potato are the only things I can think of where you should skip this step. Just lightly salt those and leave them alone.)
Chop your crunchy vegetable to fine dice until you have about three cups of it. Mince the garlic.
Chop your flashy vegetable roughly to bite-size or just under until you have two cups of it or less. If using tomato, seed it. If using chilis, just use as many as you'd want for the heat level. Honestly with the flashy vegetable you can get away with using ridiculously small quantities-- tonight's quiche had one seeded small tomato sliced and arranged in a sunburst on the top. It's an accent. Two cups is the upper limit.
Wash the salt off the body vegetable really, really thoroughly, squeezing out moisture with your hands. When you taste a piece it should be mildly salty but not overly so. You may have to wash it multiple times to achieve this.
Throw a fairly large quantity of butter or a couple tablespoons of oil into a saucepan and fry the garlic until it starts to smell. Add your crunchy vegetable and your body vegetable, sprinkle with black pepper, and saute until the crunchy vegetable is as done as you'd like, which should still be pretty crunchy. The body vegetable won't be done yet. Don't wait for it. Add the flashy vegetable and saute for thirty seconds max, just enough to wilt parsley or other greens and heat other things a little.
Pour vegetable mixture into pie shell.
In another bowl, mix cream, cheese, and two eggs until thoroughly combined. This is where you can put in other seasonings, if you feel like it-- a little cumin if you're having eggplant, a little lemon juice for the broccoli, just a dash of a spice you'd use in other dishes on your body vegetable. A little more pepper here goes well. If you're using a cheese that isn't very salty, you can add salt here if you think it needs it. Pour over the vegetables and smooth out any giant lumps of cheese with your hands.
Beat the third egg and pour it over the top. It doesn't have to cover the whole top, so don't worry if you can't get it to spread out very much.
Bake at 350 F for forty-five minutes. A knife inserted into the center should come out clean.
I have been throwing extremely random combinations of vegetables at this for some while now and am pretty certain it's unbreakable. I also use whatever cheese we have lying around. This is the only preparation in which Ruth likes eggplant, and one of the two in which I will eat cooked cabbage. Good cold the next day for lunch, too (there are three of us who eat dinner here, and I'm not kidding when I say this is dinner for four).
I've never tried meat, because I am always cooking for a vegetarian, but I think that with smaller things such as thin-sliced ham or chopped bacon I'd substitute them in as crunchy or flashy, and for larger chunks of chicken or tuna I'd put them in as the body. But I'd still parcook, as one of the major problems with many quiches I've had is that just baking the ingredients will not cook them through. If you try any meats, let me know how it comes out!
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no subject
Date: 2010-01-26 06:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-26 06:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-26 06:13 am (UTC)(well, not literally all, but a lot more of them.)
no subject
Date: 2010-01-26 06:10 pm (UTC)Granted, it's a non-specific recipe, but that's both not hard to come by nor hard to reinterpret existing specific recipes as.
My mom took an advanced-amateur cooking class and the notebook they gave her (at the end - until you completed the course you had to make do with your own notes and memory) were full of basic recipes with interchangeable ingredients (i.e. recipe for cream of [vegetable] soup, quiche, filled [fruit] pie, [spice] pesto, etc.
Love,
Herbert.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-26 06:37 pm (UTC)or, to put another way, this is a recipe/algorithm that reads like the recipes/algorithms in my head, where i know the basic principles and general proportions and grab whatever specific instantiations of the needed ingredient types are handy/seem appropriate. i think this is what the recipes/algorithms in most people's heads look like, but for whatever reason people write things down in this form far too rarely, even though that format is typically a lot more useful.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-26 06:20 am (UTC)...I have a total weakness for quiches. I've made a good Brazilian quiche (crustless), but I have got to try this sometime this week!!!
no subject
Date: 2010-01-26 06:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-26 07:36 am (UTC)What is happening here is that the salt breaks down the cell walls of the vegetable pieces, causing them to release liquid, which makes the vegetable softer. But salt also soaks up water, so that as it works deeper into the vegetables, the vegetables don't entirely lose their juices. Then you wash the salt off so you don't taste it too much, and squeeze and wash out as much liquid as will go so the breakdown process stops. The salt-treated vegetables cook more quickly and evenly, because the outside fibers don't hold off the heat the way they usually do when one cooks vegetables-- usually you're waiting for the heat to break those down. The result is that after baking the quiche you get something that has the mouthfeel of a thoroughly cooked vegetable, but still the taste and snap of a barely cooked one.
You can get similar results by blanching vegetables briefly in boiling water, but the blanching time differs for every vegetable, it's easy to overboil, the result still doesn't bake as evenly, and boiling does not also season.
I highly recommend doing this to eggplant every single time you do anything with it ever. I've also never met a turnip dish it didn't improve, except mashed turnips. And this process is the basis of Hungarian cucumber salad, which is one of the world's great foods.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-26 01:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-27 12:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-26 06:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-26 07:30 am (UTC)Awesome!
I've never tried meat, because I am always cooking for a vegetarian, but I think that with smaller things such as thin-sliced ham or chopped bacon I'd substitute them in as crunchy or flashy, and for larger chunks of chicken or tuna I'd put them in as the body.
My father has also been experimenting with quiche recently, and he has been very successful with different forms of ham. By your system, it's usually the crunch, spinach or potato generally serving as the body, with flash ranging from cilantro to onion to poblano and serrano peppers. (He likes capsaicin.) He also makes a straight ham-and-several-cheeses quiche that is quite good, and if you want, I can see if the recipe is one he can write down.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-26 08:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-27 02:39 am (UTC)And here are a couple of combinations I like, that don't seem well suited to quiche because I don't think they go with cheese. (Devoted cheese lovers may disagree, of course.) Pumpkin, green apple, candied ginger. Pear, cranberries, slivered almonds. Pear is also nice with candied ginger, but any frittata with candied ginger has to bury the ginger in the egg so it won't burn under the broiler.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-26 10:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-26 12:41 pm (UTC)I almost always make my aunt's onion and tarragon quiche. which contains more tarragon than you'd think. There is nothing crunchy in it, but nobody has complained yet.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-26 01:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-26 06:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-27 01:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-27 02:02 am (UTC)But... would you eat it?
no subject
Date: 2010-01-26 01:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-26 02:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-26 08:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-26 10:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-26 10:58 pm (UTC)I admit, I don't really see the novelty of the format, but this is possibly due to that I cook enough to process recipes themselves as "suggestion" algorithms rather than set rules, and any element that I understand how it works can be changed. Basically I just do this in my head. I think it would be a nifty exercise for me to try to do this for things I cook a lot (like stir-fries and stews and such), especially if I found a way to combine it with my recent habit of drawing cartoon-recipes.
Also, I assume you mean a deep-dish pie-pan? 6-9 cups of filling + 2 cups base seems a lot for a normal pie pan. (My pierex fails me here by not giving me a volume measurement, unlike the rest of my pyrex)
Also, also, having made meat-quiche, I think they basically have another category, similar to flashy. Because I generally make meat-quiche with some sort of melty meat - ham, serrano, etc. Chunky meat or fish is weird in quiche, but it doesn't negate the benefit of adding something flashy. e.g. ham and goat's cheese and onion quiche with tomatoes on top.
Anyway, I'll stop rambling now.
Love,
Herbert.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-27 02:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-27 02:55 am (UTC)Another one of the many creative things that Herbert does when she is not sick and not at Swarthmore is draw comics/picture books. Before I was at Swarthmore, they were mostly an alternative term paper form that I used for history and science. Also my Hebrew school texts were filled with stick-figure obstacle courses. I still draw those sometime.
Since I've been at Swat, I've drawn very few comics - I've done a few in the silent sentimental stick figure style.
They're not very well drawn - I have a poor hand and the style is simplistic, but I like drawing. I don't really have the time to work on them (or poetry or fiber arts) while I'm at Swat though.
I also like flow charts. I'm actually very very pro-diagram. Diagrams are awesome. I want to actually take a drawing class or graphic design at some point - one of my few missed opportunities at Swat (I decided to take Intro Music Theory & Piano instead on the rational that drawing classes are easier to come by in the Real World), but I can't really regret it. With my health problems, I'm ending up six classes short of the norm (made up with AP credit), so I can only do so much.
Anyway, I should stop rambling and get back to work.
Love,
Herbert.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-27 02:30 am (UTC)I used less than suggested amounts for body and crunch, and still end up wailing "my cream runneth over!" by the time I got it all in the (deep-dish) crust.
Still! A successful endeavour, but one I shall save for special occasions, due to prep time.
Om nom tasty quiche. ^_^
no subject
Date: 2010-01-28 05:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-13 03:53 pm (UTC)