A Good Quiche Crust Recipe and A Recipe Disaster: Tofu Quiche

I’ve had tons of recipe disasters in my kitchen. Admittedly though, I don’t have as many now as I use to. In college, it seemed like every other new dish I tried was a disaster. But with time and patience, I learned how to read recipes and alter them to our tastes, but I still have mishaps.

To end our allergy free week at Babble, I thought I would try a vegan version of a classically very egg and dairy dish, quiche. The basis for quiche is alot of eggs, heavy cream, and cheese. I’ve read in a few blogs about a tofu version. I was pretty skeptical, but after reading a few wonderful blog posts, I thought I’d give it a try. I used one block of tofu, a small bag of Italian blend shredded soy cheese, 1 small onion, a salad sized bag of spinach, a 10 oz package of mushrooms and 2 cloves of garlic. I chopped up all the veggies pretty small and then sauteed them with olive oil and kosher salt.  I then added dried Italian herbs. Then I processed the tofu until it was fine in the food processor and added it to a large bowl. I tossed everything in the bowl and mixed it well and added it to a pre-baked quiche crust. I baked it for about an hour until it was set. After baking it, it came out to a perfect consistency.

It looked and smelled great, except my husband and I hated it, because it tastes like tofu, and we both really hate tofu. I thought that this recipe wouldn’t taste like tofu so much because it had so many other ingredients, but it did. I can honestly say though, to my knowledge, that’s the only ingredient that we each despise. And now we know, there’s yet another tofu variation that we don’t like.

I think his vegan father traumatized us when we were younger. My husband has memories of his mother being at work, and his Dad just frying up tofu strips for dinner. That was it, tofu fried in vegetable oil. On occasions when I came over to his house, and his mom wasn’t there, I was also was offered the same fried tofu strips, and they were bad, real bad.  But it was either that or go hungry.

On another note though, we offered it to our son, and waited for his reaction, and to our surprise, he loved it. He ate a huge piece of it while we both went for a sandwich for dinner. He even asked for another piece, and ate a few bites off of it. My son even tried the airplane trick to get me to eat more of the tofu quiche, but it didn’t work. I’ve made my mind up, I won’t be eating tofu again.

There was an upside to the tofu trauma though, the crust that I made for this quiche was almost perfect, and I can’t wait to give it a whirl on a good old fashioned egg and cream quiche filling. For the crust, I modified a recipe I had seen on 101 cookbooks. Here’s what I used: