No pastry? Try potatoes, rice ...

May 23
6 min read

"Very Easy and very cheesy" Erin Jeanne McDowell/Food 52

Today's Happy Foodie newsletter featured a whole lot of quiche recipes, which was sort of coincidental because of yesterday's galette. So I checked them out - there were ten of them and two of them were unusual in the sense that their pastry enclosure was - well I guess you would say - 'not normal'. I was intrigued and started rambling the net to find other ways of making a case for your quiche - or your tart.

Now I know we all know that we can use crushed biscuits for a casing for a cheesecake - indeed it's almost mandatory - but a tortilla for a quiche - as shown here in Mary Berry's (of all people) Fast quiche? I think I might nominate that as the quickest way of making a case for quiche. If you have tortillas - big ones - to hand of course. I didn't look but I'm guessing you could do the same thing with other thin flat breads - well do they even have to be thin? You don't have to do the blind baking thing either.

As a postscript to that one, I just did a quick check in Google Images, and found that, it's probably not a Mary Berry invention - it's actual a 'viral' thing, so she probably picked it up from somewhere. Which just goes to show that not all celebrity cooks invent stuff, even if they do it better than others. And incidentally the only other bread I saw mentioned on that page of pictures of flatbread quiches was a naan version, although I think probably anything thinnish would do. The rest were tortillas.

But whilst we are on bread - you can of course make pastry from bread. After all, bread is flour isn't it? There are two main ways of using bread to make a pie crust.

The first way is to soak your bread in milk - or melted butter or oil, or anything else you fancy I guess. Of course you can add herbs, spices, cheese, seeds ... to this - and to any kind of 'pastry' crust that you make of course - but you need to add an egg to bind it all together, and you also need to bake it a bit when you have pushed it into place, or else your filling will also soak into it and everything will be soggy. So cook it until it looks firm - like this one Bread pie crust from Marvellina/What to Cook Today. If you are making a sweet tart then add some sugar - salt for savoury. Actually I was a bit disturbed to see some American recipes adding sugar to their savoury pastries. Why would you do that?

The other way is to make breadcrumbs from your bread and then toast them - and here it is best to use stale bread I suspect. And any bread will do, or a mixture of bread, which also applies to the soaked method of course. My example here - a sweet one is from Tatiana Bautista/King Arthur Baking Co. - Buttered toast press-in pie crust - as you can tell from the title - you add butter to bind the breadcrumbs together.

Of course the 'bread' could also be things like rolls and buns, maybe even croissants, that I'm sure I saw somewhere had been sliced, spread on the bottom of the tin with the rest stood around the sides. I certainly saw this for a sweet dish that used cinnamon scrolls.

The same technique applies, of course to biscuits - of the savoury kind. Flavourings to taste, add melted butter to your crumbed biscuits, and cook for a short time to crisp it up, or alternatively put it in the fridge whilst you are cooking it. The version shown here is from From My Kitchen and is used for her Instant Savoury Tart

A quick aside here. It might have been my inappropriate search questions but almost all of the examples I found of these alternative pastry crusts were mostly from home cooks with the other half from the social media sites. Not many well-known cooks had versions. Which I suspect is just because I couldn't find them. Or else they are slower than Mary Berry to catch on.

Then you can also make a bread surround for your quiche with sliced bread - three ways. The first and the most professional is from Nagi Maehashi who makes Quiche toast cups - tartlets rather than tarts because they are made with one slice of ordinary sliced white bread, rolled out and put into muffin tins as your base. Not particularly original this I think. They have been around for some time. Pretty easy though.

The other two are somewhat more amateur - but that just might be down to the photography - the first just takes Nagi's technique to a larger scale, by lining a tin with bread slices - which I suspect the writer of this blog, did not roll out, so that the result is a more like a pizza than a quiche really in that the bread base is deeper than the top - Cheese, tomato and spring onion quiche with a bread crust - Crazy Kitchen. The second takes a whole baguette kind of loaf, hollows it out and fills with a quiche mixture. Bread crust quiche - Cooking-ez. Again more bread than filling - but inventive.

Potatoes - so many ways with potatoes. Number one - basically mashed - or smashed as some prefer to say, pressed into your tin, baked in the oven to crisp over somewhat, and filling poured in - Ham and leek quiche with mashed potato crust - Lucy Nunes/delicious. or Smashed potato crust - Celia Funderburk/Yahoo Style originally from Caillin Bursill/TikTok. Now I love potatoes, but these look a bit stodgy to me, but then perhaps they just made the case too thick.

Number two is the rôsti/hash brown version for which your shredded potatoes are mixed with butter - or oil, pressed into the tin raw, or fried beforehand, then baked. Nagi has a version of this too - Hash brown crust quiche Lorraine, and Nadiya Hussain - another well-known cook - also has a version - Potato rösti quiche and from the world of social media Rösti quiche Lennardy/Instagram

What else can you do with potatoes - or, I'm guessing, all of these potato options could equally apply to other root vegetables, maybe even pumpkin? Well you can slice them, cover your base, and stand the other slices up around the sides Potato crusted quiche with asparagus and mushrooms - Vodka and Biscuits or you can even use just the skins. This one might be a bit of a stretch because it's similar to stuffed jacket potatoes really, although if you use small potatoes they look a little bit like tarts - or pizza as Nagi calls them - Mini pizza potato skins

Then there's grains Erin Jeanne McDowell of Food 52 demonstrates How to turn practically any grain into pie crust - well grains make flour don't they? So I guess that you could just grind your grains - oats for example into flour and make pastry, but she was really talking about cooked grains - everything from rice to couscous - even pasta. It's rice in the picture.

In her other post 6 non-traditional pie crusts she demonstrates how to make one with rice - which seems to be the most popular grain for pie crusts. Cooked rice that is. The recipe she chooses to demonstrate the finished product is Tomato-kale quiche in cheesy rice crust but there are lots more recipes out there. And since she mentioned leftover pasta I went looking and found Leftover spaghetti pie from Aimée Broussard, but I'm sure that I've seen something similar in the Ottolenghi world.

All of these carbohydrates made me think of beans - well legumes but I didn't find much here - unless we are talking about the flour made from them. I did find one - Healthy pie crust from beans - Instructables, but I have to say it didn't look that tempting.

Last but not least however, well not quite - is cauliflower. Not quite in the sense that there are heaps of recipes for cauliflower bases for pizza - like the one below from The Guardian - Pizza with a cauliflower crust, but hardly any for quiche - this is really all I found - Cauliflower crust for quiche - Of the Hearth

It's an inventive world out there. And of course, non-traditionally you can also use filo, puff pastry or supermarket ready-made pastry cases, pastry or dough. Like I said yesterday quiche is easy and delicious.

Speaking of which I promised photos of yesterday's experimental galette. Well here it is - not very good photos of course. I should maybe have cooked the broccolini stalks a little bit longer. The crunchy topping was deliciously crunchy and the whole thing tasted pretty good really - if not quite amazing.