Mini Quiche Are Maybe Worth It

For the recent David Berkeley house concert, I made mini quiche. During the baking process I basically decided there was no way I was going to post this recipe because they were sort of a hassle. But today one of my coworkers told me she "must have eaten a dozen of them." And, to my surprise, they were the most heavily consumed item at the event (this is particularly shocking since these were also available). So since they were pretty popular, and since I imagine they will be much less of a hassle now that the kinks are basically worked out, here is the path to mini-quiche heaven.

Before you try to repeat this at home, a few warnings are prudent. First, other than the crust, I made this up as I went along. Second, I had a number of debates with my sou chef (who has much more experience eating quiche than I but much less experience in the kitchen) regarding the proper way to make sure each mini had the proper mix of ingredients. Third, the sou also raised his eyebrows at my use of skim milk and at the fact that the cheese to spinach ratio was sort of low. He also forbade the use of pepper and salt, which ultimately I would have liked to have had. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, you need an obscene amount of PAM to get these buggers out of the pan.

What follows is mostly approximation, except for the crust, which I followed to the letter. I will also add that I only own one mini-cupcake pan. This process would have been much less painful with 2, just in case you're thinking of trying this at home.

Crust Ingredients
This is Julia Child’s all-purpose best quality French pastry dough, provided to me by EW. The quantities listed here are for a single recipe, which I actually doubled to accomodate the amount of filling I made. I left it as is (instead of doing the math for you) because I do not think you can double this recipe. You just have to make it twice. Your food processor will die otherwise. Plus, if you want to make a plain ole quiche (as opposed to mini ones), one portion of this is more than enough.

- 1 ¾ cups flour
- 1 tsp salt
- 1 ¼ sticks chilled butter
- 1/3 to ½ cups ice water

Crust Instructions
1. Place salt and flour into mixer and blend for a few seconds. Cut chilled butter into quarters and drop into mixer. Turn on for three seconds.

2. Add all but two tablespoons of the ice water and turn on the machine. In 2-3 seconds, the dough has just begun to mass on the blade and the pastry is done.

3. Take the dough out and put it on a lightly floured surface. Make yourself, 48 (or 96) little balls, being careful not to over handle the dough.

4. Make each ball into a disk and press it into the bottom of your mini-cupcake pan that you have HEAVILY sprayed with cooking spray (and not the kind with flour either).

5. Press the dough to form little cups. Do your best to get the dough all the way to the top of the pan (sou was right on about this).

6. Stab the bottom of each little quiche crust with a fork to get any air bubbles out.

7. Pre bake the crust at 350. You will see in the picture, I wasnt particularly precise about the baking time. I think 5 minutes is plenty, but I did forget about one batch and left it for closer to 10 and the result was not tragic.

Filling Ingredients
- 1 or 2 tablespoons of olive oil
- one box of fresh spinach. I think this is about a pound. It was one of those boxes that you would buy for a week's worth of salad before you ended up throwing half of it away because you cant eat spinach salad every day.
- 3 cloves of garlic
- 3 large yellow onions
- 1 cup milk
- 6 eggs
- 1/2 cup gruyere
- 1/2 cup fontina
- salt and pepper to taste

Filling Instructions
1. Saute the Spinach and garlic with just a little olive oil so that it doesnt stick to the pan. I did this in batches because the pan I started to use was too small for the quantity of spinach, no more than five minutes per batch. Take the spinach out of the pan and set aside.

2. Put the onions in a food processor. Chop them up. Put them in the pan them in the same pan you used for the spinach and saute them too, about 10 minutes. Mine were too liquidy to really brown properly, but they still tasted good.

3. While the onions are cooking, put the spinach in the food processor and grind it up.

4. Put the cooked spinach and onion in a large bowl. Add milk and eggs. The sou thought it looked too liquidy, and he may have been right, but in the end it worked out fine. If you would like it firmer, I saw recipes that did crazy things like add flour or use cream instead of skim milk. The biggest lesson I learned from this process is that it doesn't really matter as long as you think the filling will taste good.

5. Stir all these ingredients together. Add salt and pepper to taste. Sou would not allow this, and since he was being so kind and helpful, I went along. Next time, I will add probably 1/2 teaspoon each (at least) to this mix.

6. Grind up your mix of gruyere and fontina (hey, that food processor really has to earn its keep after I dragged it to New York and back). Keep the cheese separate from the spinach/onion mixture. Put them in the refrigerator until your crust is ready.

Assembly
1. Once you have pre-baked the crusts, fill each with the spinach mixture almost to the top. Then sprinkle a healthy portion of the cheese.

2. Bake at 350 for about 15-20 minutes.

3. Pry them out of the pan and serve them to your friends, who will be wildly impressed that they didn't come from Costco. (I found that a butter knife worked pretty well for the quiche removal process.)