A disaster...of the GF pastry kind

Tonight I made a quiche for dinner.  I was feeling like a yummy piece of piping hot roasted onion quiche this afternoon.  In hindsight, it was not such a great idea.  Tasted good, but not quite what I wanted.

I tend to use leftover roasted veg a few different ways but with onion or garlic I prefer to use them in a quiche.  I had some leftover from earlier in the week and they needed to be eaten.

I sometimes make quiche 'crust-less' i.e. no pastry for a quick and easy dinner however I had the time for pastry making and thought that I would make the real deal.

I have made GF pastry in the past to varying degrees of success.  As you would have gathered by my earlier remarks, it was not such a success this time round.  I use a food processor to make the pastry, much easier in my opinion to blitz the butter, flour, salt and sprinkle of cold water together.  The recipe I use is one from the book that came with my magi-mix:  250g flour, 125g of cold butter, a pinch of salt and 3 tablespoons of cold water.

In the past I have used a general all-purpose GF flour or a mix of brown rice flour, potato flour and arrowroot.  As many mixes I have used recently have had a lot of tapioca (arrowroot) starch in them I thought that it would be a good idea to use arrowroot as a good portion of the flour mixture.

The ingredients were as follows:

Gluten Free Pastry

200g all-purpose GF flour
50g arrowroot
125g cold unsalted butter cut into cubes
a pinch of salt
3 tablespoons of cold water

Blitz the flour, salt and butter together until it resembles fine breadcrumbs. Yes this did happen.

Add the cold water and keep mixing until it comes together in a ball.  Yes this happened as well but there was one large ball of pastry, but mostly a single ball - not very descriptive but it was mostly together in one lump.  I did not think that this would combine much more than this hence me stopping where I did.

I tipped the pastry out onto a lightly floured surface and kneaded it lighting to bring all of the bits together then wrapped it in cling film (plastic wrap) and put it into the fridge for about 20 minutes to let it cool a little.

When I pulled it out of the fridge to roll it out, I found that the pastry was very crumbly.  I soon abandoned the idea that the pastry would be beautifully rolled out and placed into the tin.  Instead I continued to roll the pastry out the carefully picked up bits of pastry, as it fell apart when trying to roll it up onto the rolling pin, and placed each piece into the tin pressing it together, like a jigsaw puzzle.

This cobbled together pastry case was baked blind and cooled a little before the quiche filling was added.

Roast Onion Quiche (filling)

1 cup of pouring cream
3 large eggs
1/2 cup of grated pecorino cheese
a pinch of nutmeg
a pinch of salt and pepper
1 onion cut into slivers (or eighths) roasted and cooled

Combine the cream, eggs, nutmeg, salt and pepper into a bowl and mix together, breaking the egg yolks up as you go.  Mix through the cheese until all is well combined.

Pour the egg and cream mixture into the pastry case.  Sit the roasted onion in the quiche filling arranging them as you please.  They will sink down into the mixture a little or not depending on their size.

Place into a moderate over (170 degrees fan-forced) for approximately 30 minutes and cook until the quiche is set and golden.  I do the wobble test, when I think it is cooked: the filling must be of a firm wobble not a liquid or jelly-like wobble - no jelly on a plate here!

Serve warm with salad or steamed veg for a quick, no fuss, nutritious meal.

The problem that I had with the pastry I think was down to the amount of arrowroot that I used and also not using any protein, which normally helps bind everything together.  The flavour was lovely and buttery but the texture was rather fine but incredibly crumbly, especially when warm.  It was a little more solid when cool but still not so good.

As with all experiments, I have learnt a lesson:  watch the amount of arrowroot used!  Practice makes perfect, so I will try and try again and let you know how I go.