Where does Quiche de légumes come from?

La Quiche de legumes, originally called Quiche de Lorraine, comes from the region of Lorena and is composed by a basement of other dishes, although it has become one of the traditional dishes of the traditional recipe book of France, and is usually served as starter.

La Quiche de Lorraine is known as the original recipe which the rest of variants of this salty pie come from. In the very origin, the fill was composed only with eggs and milk cream. But in the XIX century bacon strips were added. Today you can find a great number of variants of this plate that combines vegetables and meat. Start experimenting and tell us your favourite!

What is the origin of Quiche de légumes?

The word Quiche, comes from the word Küche of the Lorraine language, spoken in Lorraine’s area, which is located in the North of France, bordering with Germany. This word also comes from Kuchen (pie).

The word appears the first time in Nancy, Lorraine, in 1605, with the original filling of cream and eggs and, some years after, the variants started to turn out, the grated cheese, for instance, or the bacon or onion. These variants also gave the dish new names like Quiche Vosguienne, from Vosgos area, for the variant with grated cheese; or the Quiche Alsacienne, from Alsacia region, for the variant with onion.

Ingredients:

• 1 red pepper.
• 1 spring onion.
• 1 leek.
• 100 g of mushrooms.
• 1 zucchini.
• 12 cherry tomatoes.
• 1 laminate of freeze pastry.
• 200 ml of liquid cream.
• 2 eggs.
• 200 g of grated Emmental cheese.
• 100 g of bacon.
• Black pepper.
• Salt

Time of preparation: 1.5 hours.

How to cook Quiche de légumes:

First step: Ingredients preparation.

In first place, we are going to prepare de mould where we are going to bake the Quiche de legumes. For this, take the mould and cover the interior surface with some of the laminate pastry and preserve.

Now is time for the meat, take the bacon and dice it in big dices, preserve.

Take the eggs and whip them inside a bowl or a plate.

Finally, we should prepare de vegetables, for this we are going to chop them into pieces and preserve. The only exception will be the cherry tomatoes, we are going to cut them in half and preserve.

Top Tip: don’t cut the pieces of vegetables and bacon too small, if you do, you are not going to be able to notice their flavour properly.

Second step: Preparation of pastry basement.

Now that we have all our ingredients prepared, is time to continue with the preparation of the basement. For this we are going to warm the oven at 180 ºC for 5 or 10 minutes, in order to be sure that the temperature inside the oven is 180 ºC when we put the mould with the pastry inside.

After this time, as I said before, we should put the mould with the pastry inside and remove after 5 minutes.

Top Tip: to avoid burning the surface of the pastry you should put oven paper on the pastry before putting the whole thing inside the oven.

Top Tip: you can find another problem associated to this process: the growth of the pastry. To avoid it to grow too much, is advisable to put on the oven paper mentioned above, some raw legumes like chickpeas.

Third step: Fry the ingredients.

Add some drops of olive oil in a pan, wait until it is completely hot and put the dices of bacon inside.

The next step is to add the vegetables (except the cherry tomatoes) to the pan, but for this, we will have to wait until the bacon has sweat the fat.

When everything is completely fried, you should drain all the excess of fat from the bacon and vegetables.

Top Tip: is necessary to wait until the bacon has released all the fat to put the vegetables, because we will use this fat to cook the vegetables and provide more flavour to them.

Fourth step: Prepare the stuffing.

Take a big bowl, and add the vegetables, the liquid cream, the cheese and the whipped eggs, mix everything very well.

When the ingredients above are correctly mixed add the salt and the black pepper.

Final Step.

Put all the mixture prepared before inside the mould and spread the cherry tomatoes all around the surface of the stuffing.

Put the oven to warm at 180 ºC for 10 minutes and put the Quiche inside. Left it inside until the surface of the stuffing has a golden colour and remove from the oven. Your Quiche is ready to eat!

Top Tip: if you want to remove the Quiche from the oven is advisable to wait until it has lose some of the heat, to avoid breaking it in the process.