Quiche Lorraine

It's winter. What a nice time to have a warming quiche.

Quiche Lorraine

(from Heston Blumenthal at Home)

Quiches are quite popular in our house, given a general love of eggs and bacon. Add cream and cheese and it isn't hard to see why this dish is a classic for many a home. So, can Heston improve on a great dish? 

So the recipe has the following steps:

1. Make your pastry in a mixer. 
2. Chill
3. Cook onions
4. Cook the bacon
5. Prep your pastry base
6. Make the filling
7. Bake the filling in the prepared case

Superficially, apart from the making your own pastry from scratch, this seems like the quiche I'm commonly known to make. But... it's Heston, so no. Not the same except at a superficial level.

Make your pastry in the mixer

This is one of my new favourite ways of making shortcrust pastry. Flour, salty and butter go into a mixer.

Then get processed until they look like breadcrumbs.

Then, switching to a dough hook, gets added some cold water and some egg.

Yup, dough. Very short shortcrust. Feel amazing at how easier that was than using your hands. How old-school you once were.

The lump like this one below (nicely shaped into a flat disc) goes into the fridge to rest, giving the gluten a chance to chill out. (sorry... couldn't help myself).

Cook some onions

Time to get started on the filling. Slice up a lot of onion. Realise you used some of your brown onions on stir-fry earlier in the week and substitute in some red onions.

Into the nice heavy cast iron fry pan with oil...

Now, you should sauté them until soft and golden. Hmmm.. nope, still pale pastel insipid white-yellow.

 

But here's the thing. Onions, especially slow cooked ones are sneaky sods. The minute, nay the instant you turn your back to finish dicing bacon they will immediately go from  pale pastel insipid yellow to dark golden caramel. Sneaky. You are appropriately forewarned.

Cook the bacon

Take your lovely, from-the-butcher chunk of bacon. Do not buy the rubbish vacuum sealed stuff, you want good quality and thick. About a centimetre, or just under.

This makes for nice chunks. Sorry, I mean lardons.

Cook them in a your frying pan. Smelled so delicious.

Put them aside while you do the next bit of pastry wrangling.

Prep your pasty base

Roll it out to nice and thin.

Line a tart tin with the pastry. Put in some baking paper, and then fill with beans. Or barley, if that is what your pantry seems to have more than you need of.

After cooking for 20 minutes, it looks pretty good.

Unfortunately, then I had to trim off the excess pastry. Doing this does not tend to end well for me.This time was not exception. As for previous attempts, it cracked pretty badly when I did this. It was also not very deep. I am now wondering if extra deep pie tins are a thing for quiche, and perhaps my tart tin is on the shallow end of the tart tin gene pool.

I did fix this with Heston's neat 'liquid pastry' trick. It's kind of pastry spakfilla. Mix an egg and some raw pastry with a stab blender. Use this the cement any cracks, bits back together and so on. It works pretty well. Worth saving a chunk of excess pasty for at any rate.

Make the filling

This is the bit that is really quite different to other quiches I've made, and I strongly suspect ever eaten. You cook the filling on the stove before baking it in the case.

Eggs and cream...

Add the bacon, onion and some Emmental and Gruyere cheeses, plus salt, pepper and nutmeg.

This gets warmed up until it hits 63 degrees.

Yes, it's a savoury, very rich custard. With not as much egg as I would have expected from a quiche.(Only 3 eggs!)

Bake in the prepared case 

You might notice there are two dishes in there. As for my lemon tart, there was twice as much mixture as filled my tart tin. The tin is the correct size, it's got to be a depth problem. Or, perhaps, that Heston-over-zealous-quantities problem again.

  

Forty minutes later, or more like thirty something, once the inter filling hits 70 degrees, they're done. Here they are cooling off slightly.

And now it's ready to... put in the fridge for 24 hours.  This is apparently to ensure the filling sets properly.

Serve

Here it is, nicely golden. Okay not quite that golden, I was having photo issues again. I invited over a friend, warmed up the quiche and we were good to go.

 

Thoughts

I'm truly left wondering if I've been eating bacon and egg pie all these years, and not quiche at all, because flavours aside, this is quite a different beast. It was very, very rich - something that doesn't always agree with me. I liked the flavours overall but the texture was too squishy for me - I would have preferred it more eggy and solid. Also, super rich foods don't agree with me terribly well and this definitely qualified. I thought was richer than the Chicken in cream and sherry.. which says a lot really.

Guest verdict

Dinner guest was polite and said it was tasty. Husband is more familiar with this analyse-the-dish game and had a somewhat more specific and critical opinion. Namely:

• There's too much onion. It tastes more like onion than just about anything else. 
• He liked the bacon but thought the pieces were too big. 
• He didn't like the custard texture at all - "if I wanted custard, I'd be eating custard. And it would be sweet. And not have onions in it."
• And finally... "I like your normal one better."

Not exactly a resounding success, was it? Too rich, too much onion...

On the good points, I liked the pastry and would do that again. I'd certainly consider adjusting my usual egg/bacon/milk recipe by adding some cream. And a little onion. But I think I'll stick with cheddar. Very boorish of me, I know.

Next: I'm not sure... but I have Historic Heston now... so... ?

(French) Onion Soup: the easier way

So I had a bundle full of gentlemen coming over to hang out, play games and be of good cheer. I was asked if I could make them lunch. Thankfully, I was also after a new Heston Blumenthal dish to try - one that scaled well, and didn't take too much trouble for an easy weekend. French Onion soup it is.

Onion Soup

Heston Blumenthal at Home

This recipe makes good use of one of Heston's often mentioned star anise in onion. Which makes sense, because onion soup is largely onion and stock. In a good way. A delicious, caramelised brown bowl of tastiness.

Caramelise onion

To start, take some oil...

 a lot of onion...

 and some star anise.

 Start cooking and stirring...

 Keep going until it is lightly caramelised

Bake

Add some butter and cold water.

Then put it in the oven for seven hours at 90 degrees. It will then look a bit like this. Don't worry, it's not as crusty and unpleasant as it looks. 

 

Remove the star anise

This may take some hunting.

Then de-glaze with some white wine, then cook to reduce the wine away.

 

Add the liquids

Add the beef stock and simmer.

For 20 minutes.

Then add some Madeira, and let it simmer for another 20 minutes.

Add some more Madeira (I skipped this, feeling it was boozy enough) and salt and pepper.

Time to make the toast!

Pan fry some sourdough in butter.

Smear them with Dijon mustard, cover them in Gruyere cheese and grill.

Serve soup, with cheesy toast floating/wallowing in the thick soup, scattered with artistic chives. Regular chives would also be acceptable.

Lessons learned

• Recipe, as is often the case for Heston, makes way more than you need. For example, you only need one slice of bread per person. I had all strapping young gents and even they found it plenty.

That's it really. It went pretty well to plan.

Verdict

Another good, easy recipe that need elapsed time but not a huge amount of active time. Of course, caramelising the onions took longer than the 15 minutes Heston claims, but I've found recipes always underestimate that time. A note to those not familiar with this dish - it is more filling than you'd expect.

Guest verdict

The gentlemen gathered at lunch all enjoyed the soup very much.
My favourite comment was from a guest who'd never had a from-scratch onion soup before. "So this is what French onion soup actually tastes like! I feel like I've been lied to my whole life."

Braised pork belly with crackling: Bring on the meat!

This dish was a surprise. 

I had put doing it off, despite being greatly interested in the eating of it, after being scared off by the 18 hours cooking time. “Eighteen hours!” I thought, “How would you manage that!”

The big surprise came in two things… one… it was one of the easier Heston dishes. And, in terms of actual cook-doing-cooking time… it didn’t take much actual time, but near enough to 42 hours elapsed time. It’s kind of a ‘hurry up and wait’ dish.

And, because I am feeling terribly kind, I’m going include in this dish WHEN I did everything, so all the timing is laid out for you.You're welcome.

Is all this long-time ahead prep worth it? Well.. sorry to give away the best line, but.. one guest called it “the best pork I’ve ever eaten.”

Prep Ahead dinner party:

We had: (Heston dishes marked with a *)

• Prawn cocktails*, with from scratch Mayonnaise* and Soy-marinated roe*
• Braised pork belly with cracking*, pommes puree* (mk2), braised lettuce* and steamed carrots.
• Coffee creme brulee*

Braised Pork Belly with Crackling

Heston Blumenthal at Home

Process:

1. Prepare the spiced brine

2. Brine the pork belly

3. Braise pork belly

4. Cook crackling

5. Cool pork belly, strain off veg

6. Prep sauce

7. Warm pork belly to serve

It might look like a lot, but most of those steps take less than 15 minutes of actual chef time. The down side though? The elapsed time of many of those steps is measured in hours….

Let’s see how it is done, shall we?  

The times I am working on assumes you want to serve this for Saturday night. I’ll indicate when I did them in italics like this.

Prepare the spiced brine

(Thursday evening)

So if you’ve made brine before you’d be aware, it is just very salty water. Soaking meat in brine makes it more tender when you cook it. (Just remember to wash the brine off before cooking, or its really salty). In order to add flavour to this dish, Heston also adds spices to this mix. A salty tea to soak in. Like its own day spa.

Before putting them in the water, you roast them. This is not difficult. Look.

Put spices in dish.

Roast them in oven.

Whizz them up a bit.

 

Add them into a tea bag muslin with the rosemary, thyme and zests.

 

Warm your water,  add a large chunk of salt and the muslin bag until it boils.  

 

Put the whole lot in a bowl and let it cool. Overnight.

 

Brine the pork belly

First you need to remove the skin from the pork belly, and put it aside for later. (Thursday night while the brine was warming up).

 

6.30am Friday morning. Put pork belly in a dish it will fit (A lasagne tray worked nicely) 

and fill the dish with the spiced brine, discarding the muslin bag. (Or rather discarding the contents, so you can rewash and reuse the muslin). This goes into the fridge (covered with cling film) for 12 hours – i.e. after you get home from work.

6.30-7.30pm Friday evening. 

Drain off the spiced brine, and refill the dish with fresh cold water. Replace the cold water every 15 minutes.

 

Braise the pork

While the pork is rinsing, get the rest of your braising ingredients together. 

Put on the oven to warm now. My oven doesn’t have a 70 degree temp, but some testing with a thermometer found that the “Keep Warm” setting is 70 degrees on my oven.

Slice up the carrot, onion and leek. Defrost your chicken stock. I used Heston’s brown chicken stock recipe, and froze the extra. (Method as per this post).

Realise that you large-ish piece of pork belly does not fit nicely into your casserole.

 

Adapt.

 

7.30pm Put the pork into your casserole dish (it needs a lid) add the sliced vegetables and chicken stock. 

 

Pop it in the oven. You may want to put a post it note on the oven warning fellow housepeople not to touch the oven, as it may look like it has been left on inadvertently.  Go make dinner. You know, the one you will actually eat tonight.

 

 

Cook the crackling (part one)

8.30am Saturday morning. Put the pork skin into the oven on a wire rack. Go about your morning.

1.30pm. Take your pork out of the oven and leave to cool in the liquid. 

Take out the pork skin, which has been cooking for 5 hours, and disappointingly doesn't look like much. Feel a bit sorry for it, but don't say anything in case you hurt its feelings. Put the oven temp up to 240 degrees.

 

 

Cook the crackling (part two)

1.45pm Put the pork skin back in the oven for 15 minutes and be amazed at how much it puffs up and looks amazing. (Clearly a late bloomer).

 

Cool pork belly, strain off veg

4.30pm.  Take the pork out of the cooled liquid and set aside. It looked a bit... wet. And sad.

Strain the liquid.

Set some aside.

 

Prep sauce

Reduce the remainder by 2/3s. Trick I figured out – check the depth using a chopstick before you start, then you know when you’ve reduced it enough.

Warm pork belly to serve

20 minutes before you want to eat, heat the reserved stock liquid in a pan and pop in your pork.

2 minutes before carving. Dry it off on some paper, putting any leftover liquid in with the reduced liquid from before. Then quickly brown the top in a frypan in a little oil. (I just cleaned out the pan I had used to heat it up in).

Carve it into thick slices and serve it with the pommes puree and buttered lettuce. Bask in the adulation.

 

 

Things I learned:

• Not everything good needs be painful.
• Spiced brine definitely added some nice flavour there.

 

Guest verdicts:

• “This is the best pork I’ve ever had.”
• “Gee, that pork is good, isn’t it.” (From my laconic father in law. Gold, I tell you, gold.)
• (The pork crackle was happily devoured by the two guests who like it with much pleasure, who felt that the rest of us not eating it was only a good thing).

Verdict:

• The pork was very, very tender, with excellent flavour and no fattiness (like I’ve occasionally experienced in some restaurants). It wasn’t a “sticky” style pork belly, just very tender and great pork flavour. Sauce was nice, again just adding flavour without any fuss.
• Pork crackle was the best I’ve ever done (I have a bad history with pork crackle). I was surprised at it not needing any salt – I had always thought it didn’t put enough salt on – just that combo of long time at low plus short time at very high and it was very light, airy and zero oiliness.
• This was an excellent and relatively painless dish. You could prepare it a reasonable distance ahead (day before you wanted it) too. As a guest noted, it would be excellent for something like Christmas, where you wanted the oven during the day.
• I am seriously considering including this as staple main course for those dinner parties where I wanted to do something complicated for dessert – the ultimate set and forget mains.

Next : Heston’s Coffee Brulee!