The Quiche Situation
The ongoing story of a bet about a custard.
I have essentially no credibility when I try to recommend that people should cook a thing. Because of my eponymous unreasonableness, everybody assumes that anything I cook is going to require a centrifuge and a fermentation chamber and fifty rare chemicals and so on, and so ignores my recommendations. But not everything I do is like that! Just most things!
That doesn’t stop me from trying, though. So, on that point, everybody should make a quiche. I guess you probably heard it here first.
In November, Gen and Addie and I were in New York for Thanksgiving, and we went to Pastis, which is a sort of forbiddingly traditional French bistro. The high-cheekboned hostess and waitress, in a classically French flavor of poor customer service, were thoroughly unimpressed and unenthusiastic about the idea of getting Addie a high chair. Their unfriendly vibe, along with the extremely French decor and menu, gave me the confidence to order a quiche.
You see, I had been indoctrinated by Thomas Keller many years ago via the Bouchon cookbook that American quiches in general are unconscionably bad because they’re cooked in pie shells, which are too shallow; he says you should either do like a real French bistro and use a 2 inch high ring mold or get out of town and not make a quiche. (Only slightly paraphrasing. As you may know, Keller is, depending on your point of view, either a pernicious enabler or a patron saint of OCD cooks everywhere. He whispers in our ears, “Not only should you not listen when people tell you that your persnicketiness is antisocial, you should double or triple down! Look, I made a whole career out of it!” )
Gen thought I was an idiot for ordering a quiche. She thought, quite reasonably, having only had standard American quiches, that quiches are always miserable hateful thin hard dealios. Nobody, she thought, should make them or eat them under any circumstances; they should just sit forever, uneaten and stale, in pastry cases in coffee shops, sadly passed up day after day in favor of delicious kouign amanns and morning buns and ham and cheese croissants and what have you.
Then the quiche arrived, and upon taking a bite she immediately demanded to trade her bacon and eggs and toast for it, because it was obviously a religious experience. It was gigantic, probably three inches high, six inches long, with a beautiful crumbly buttery crust maybe a quarter to half an inch thick. The side crust was vertical, suggesting it had indeed hewed to the aforementioned ring mold doctrine. Beautifully cooked spinach was somehow distributed very evenly throughly the custard; the custard was light and creamy and everything you want in life.1 It was a bit deathly because the butter dosage was maybe a touch high, but that was the only complaint either of us could come up with about it.
I mentioned that I’d always wanted to make a quiche but didn’t have the ABSOLUTELY REQUIRED ring mold, and maybe she’d let me order a ring mold now. So she said yes, but she also bet that I couldn’t replicate it in six attempts.2
I naturally figured I would do the spinach quiche from the Bouchon book, from whence I originally became indoctrinated.
I made this first attempt, above, about a month ago. It is actually very straightforward once you have the ring mold; the crust dough is just some (normal) flour and butter and water and salt, chill, roll, put it in the mold, chill, blind-bake, and then you have your crust. Then you just blend some eggs and milk and cream and salt and pepper, saute some spinach with shallots and butter, grate some cheese, and plop them all into the crust and bake it for 90 minutes. People would totally do it at home all the time if it weren’t for the ring mold thing! And really, the ring mold is cheaper than like 3 quiches of ingredients or something, which is why I recommended it above. Oh and then you chill it for 1-3 days and slice and reheat, so you can have it for breakfast or lunch or dinner and it’s delicious.
Of that first attempt, she said the crust was spot-on, but the custard was a bit less airy than the Pastis version, and the spinach obviously had floated to the top, whereas theirs was beautifully evenly distributed. She also liked that it was a less deathly than Pastis’s, which could be just from the slices being smaller.
Before actually modifying the recipe, I figured I’d try again and do some of the things harder; in particular, I figured I’d squeeze moisture out of the spinach more violently, and blend the custard filling more thoroughly and more immediately before pouring it in, and see if that had any effect. Also this time I’d remember to scald the #*&$ing milk and cream before adding it to the custard.
It looked reasonably bubbly going in, but then coming out, not only did none of that help, the spinach actually floated more than before, so that wasn’t the thing. And the airiness was not any airier.
So the quest will have to continue for another future quiche; I think next I’ll try Quinn from Cooking Issues’s suggestion to beat some of the egg whites to soft peaks and then fold them into the custard. I will have to accept that I will end up with less mass of custard, but maybe that’s net better.
Tune in next time for more of your regularly scheduled fiasco programming! Speaking of which, if you would like to avoid missing such an installment, you might consider a handy dandy button
if you are so inclined. I do intend to keep to about one a week, but there might be a slight hiccup soon because there’s a baby due around here any day now.
Conan the Barbarian, upon having this quiche, might change his tune about what was best in life.
I hope the stakes of the bet are written down somewhere because, despite being on a mission from God to win this bet, I have no idea what they were.