Deep Dish Savory Quiche

Who doesn’t love eggs and bacon for breakfast? Now add in a soft, flaky pie crust and that combination becomes irresistible. For our Easter Brunch menu, Steve and I chose to serve a deep dish quiche containing some of our favorite ingredients. Quiche is great for a brunch, because it can be fully made ahead of time and reheated just before guests arrive. This frees you up to enjoy your morning while keeping your kitchen clean as all the dishes were done well before anyone comes over. For non-morning people like myself, this also gives you a few extra minutes to hit your snooze button.

This recipe can be adapted very easily and you can add or subtract different ingredients depending on what you love. Steve and I have made different variations of this before, but seem to always fall back on the bacon, goat cheese, artichoke, caramelized onion combination that we have here. For our spring brunch we made two quiches, one with bacon and one without for a vegetarian option. Both were delicious and it was a tough call to decide which was tastier.

To start, fry up your bacon in a large pan or skillet. While the bacon is cooking, slice up your onions nice and thin with your sharpest knife. Once your bacon is done, remove it from the pan and allow to cool. Don’t clean the bacon pan at all as you’ll add the sliced onions into the bacon fat to cook. This is where I warn you that this is not a necessarily healthy or low calorie choice for breakfast, but it is delicious!

I like to make quiche in a deep dish pan, because it gives a good ratio of filling to crust. Pans like this can be found at Williams-Sonoma, or super stores like Target will usually have them too.

While your filling is cooling, it’s time to roll out the quiche crust and line the pan with the pastry. Now, usually I take a strong stance in the all-butter pie crust camp (as something inside of me screams at the thought of shortening), but Crisco is simply needed for this particular recipe. My all-butter pie dough just doesn’t work for this quiche, and I’ve come to accept it. The pastry recipe makes a very soft and flaky crust that just works much better than other recipes I’ve shared.

This recipe is much softer than butter crusts, and it rolls out much quicker too, so beware. It can be frustrating to have the entire dough crumble and fall apart at the touch of the rolling pin. That happened to me during this shoot. If that happens to you, just take your dough and squish it all back together again and roll it out one more time. It usually helps to add a bit more flour to it, too.

If your crust does fall apart or tears (like mine did), the pan is very forgiving and you can add scrap pieces to any holes in the dough like patchwork. Once it bakes, you won’t be able to see the parts that you had to ‘mend’.

After you’ve lined the quiche pan with the crust, place in the refrigerator or freezer to chill while you finish up the filling. Here’s when it all comes together: combine your eggs, cream, cheese and onion filling all together in a large bowl and mix it up well. Once all is combined, pour into your chilled shell and use a spatula to dunk the filling underneath the egg mixture so the top stays relatively smooth. This will also keep anything from browning too much on the top.

Lastly, loosely cover the pan with foil and pop it in the 400-degree oven for an hour. This will give you plenty of time now to clean up your kitchen and take in the yummy smells as it bakes. If after an hour it looks undercooked, remove the foil and allow to bake 5-10 minutes longer. When the quiche is done, it should still be jiggly in the middle, and more firm around the outside perimeter.

Give your quiche plenty of time to cool, then push it out of the pan from the bottom and voilà! It should easily slide out and showcase your beautiful crust’s fluted edges. The quiche is bound to be a big hit and makes for great leftovers, too. Enjoy!