Holiday Quiche Recipe — Caralyn Mirand Koch (2024)

FAQs

Do you have to Prebake crust for quiche? ›

You need a par-baked or fully baked crust if you're making quiche, no-bake pie, custard pie, cream pie, pudding pie, or simply want an extra-crisp pie crust. If you're making a pie that doesn't require a baked filling, you still need a baked crust.

Avoid Fillings That Are Too Wet

And if you're using an ingredient such as sautéed spinach, be sure to squeeze the liquid out before adding it to your quiche.

You want to cook your quiche low and slow to keep the light fluffy texture. Too high of heat will cause the egg to curdle.

Roll it out a tad bit thicker than you normally would for a standard pie if possible, and absolutely use it all. Confidently press any overhang or extra pieces into the walls of your pan. Add flour to your filling: Adding a bit of flour to your quiche filling helps absorb moisture and stabilize things in general.

Line with the parchment paper and fill with pie weights or dried beans, filling right to the bottom of the crimps. Place the pie tin on a baking sheet, and place in the oven. Bake for 15 to 18 minutes, or until the edges are slightly golden brown. Remove from the oven, remove the parchment paper and beans.

The Kitchn cautions that using too many eggs can make the consistency of the quiche rubbery and tough, while using too few eggs can prevent the custard filling from setting properly, giving you a runny, soggy quiche. The recommended proportion is one egg to one-half cup of cream or milk.

If your quiche appears watery it may just need to set for a little longer. The recipe may also contain too much dairy, so make sure that the recipe you are following has the ratio of 4 eggs to 1 cup dairy. The added ingredients could also contain too much moisture, so it is important to cook or drain additions.

Heavy Cream and Milk – For the best tasting quiche, use a combination of whole milk and heavy cream. (Or simply use half-and-half.) Using just heavy cream produces an overly thick filling. Whole milk is great, but a combo of heavy cream and milk is better.

Place quiche on baking sheet. Bake uncovered in hot oven until quiche reaches a minimum internal temperature of 165 degrees, 20-25 minutes.

How thick should quiche dough be? ›

Use a rolling pin or similar to roll the pastry out (on a slightly floured board) to approximately 3mm thick. Press the dough into a quiche, tart or pie tin.

Quiche Ratio: 1 large egg to 1/2 cup of dairy

You'll need to increase the amount of eggs and milk based on the size of your quiche, so knowing the basic ratio makes it really easy to scale up or down. For a standard 9-inch quiche: Use 3 large eggs (6 ounces) 1 1/2 cups of whole milk or cream (12 ounces)

When making quiche, I always use heavy cream over milk or half-and-half. Salt, cayenne pepper, ground nutmeg: These seasonings flavor of the quiche, with salt balancing the flavors, cayenne pepper adding a slight heat, and ground nutmeg providing a warm, nutty undertone.

Choose ingredients with lots of flavour and combine them with seasonal vegetables: onions, mushrooms, spinach and chard, leeks, candied or dried tomatoes... you have an infinite number of combinations that make quiche a pleasure that can be renewed without tiring.

So, you can without problem cook your quiche without first blind-baking the crust. The difference will be in the crispness of the crust: if you try to get it crispy, you should prebake, if you don't mind it being rather, well, “plain”, you don't.

Think of it this way: poor pie dough wouldn't stand a chance (aka be a soggy mess) with a custard filling if we don't give it a head start. Hence why we pre-bake, because custard pies are too delicious to have soggy bottoms.

"Blind baking" is the term for baking a piecrust before you add anything to the pie. If you don't blind bake the crust, the liquid from the filling will prevent the pastry from becoming flaky and crisp. You'll be left with a pie that has a soggy bottom. (It tastes just as bad as it sounds).

To avoid a soggy bottom, blind bake the crust before adding the filling and baking the quiche. But you can bake a quiche without blind baking the crust and the results will still be good (just less crisp and more prone to sogginess as it sits).