French cuisine
Quiche lorraine
A shortcrust base with bacon and a cream and egg custard. No cheese and no onion — the classical recipe has neither.
- Prep
- 40 min
- Cook
- 60 min
- Total
- 100 min
- Difficulty
- Medium
Ingredients
- Plain flour250 g
- Butter — cold, in cubes130 g
- Egg for the pastry1
- Iced water2 tbsp
- Smoked bacon — in lardons250 g
- Eggs3
- Double cream200 ml
- Milk100 ml
- Nutmeg1 pinch
- Salt and pepperto taste
Salt and spices grow more slowly than the rest: doubling a dish does not double the pepper.
Weight converts to ounces and volume to cups. Grams of flour are not turned into cups, because that depends on how tightly it is packed.
Method
- 1
Cut the cold butter into the flour with a pinch of salt to a crumb, add the egg and iced water and bring the dough together without kneading. Chill it an hour.
70 min
- 2
Roll the pastry out, line the tin, prick it and chill it again for twenty minutes: that is what stops it shrinking.
25 min
- 3
Line it with paper and weights and blind-bake at 190 °C for fifteen minutes, then remove the weights and give it five minutes more, to a dry base.
22 min
- 4
Render the bacon until browned and drain it on paper: spare fat splits the custard.
8 min
- 5
Whisk the eggs with the cream and milk without foaming, and season with nutmeg and pepper. It barely needs salt: the bacon is salty.
5 min
- 6
Scatter the bacon over the base, pour the custard in and bake at 170 °C for thirty-five minutes. The centre should still wobble slightly when it comes out.
40 min
About the dish
A real quiche lorraine is four things: pastry, smoked bacon, eggs and cream. Cheese arrived later and in Lorraine is considered a different dish; so is onion.
The base is blind-baked before the filling goes in. Raw pastry under a wet custard never cooks, and the bottom stays pale and damp.
The custard ratio is one egg to every hundred millilitres of liquid. More eggs and it becomes an omelette; fewer and it never sets.
Worth knowing
- — Do not whisk the custard to a foam. The air bubbles expand in the oven and leave holes through the finished quiche.
- — The custard bakes cooler than the pastry: 170 °C against 190 °C. Any hotter and the eggs curdle into grains.
- — Quiche is eaten warm rather than hot. Fully cooled is good too; straight from the fridge is not.
Nutrition
Per serving at the base yield, calculated from the ingredients rather than measured in a lab.
- Calories
- 580 kcal
- Protein
- 20 g
- Fat
- 44 g
- Carbs
- 28 g
Useful for this recipe
More from France
- Ratatouille — A Provençal vegetable stew where each vegetable is cooked separately before they meet — otherwise it turns to mush.
- French onion soup — Soup from onions, stock and cheese-topped bread. All of the flavour comes from caramelisation, which takes forty minutes rather than twenty.
- Coq au vin — Chicken braised in red wine with bacon, mushrooms and small onions. Marinating the day before does half the work.