This Gordon Ramsay recipe appeared in Olive magazine many moons ago – mum and I stumbled across it one summer. But despite it being the most delicious quiche we’ve ever eaten, surprisingly it doesn’t to appear to have been documented anywhere online. Other than here, that is. Enjoy!

To make this veggie, just ditch the bacon!

Ingredients

Pastry

• 350g plain flour
• 200g chilled unsalted butter, diced
• 2 eggs, separated

Filling

• 200g unsmoked bacon lardons
• olive oil
• 2 onions, finely diced
• 2 cloves garlic
• 3 sprigs of thyme leaves
• 400g mixed mushrooms, sliced if large
• butter
• 100g fresh baby spinach
• 4 large eggs
• 150ml full-fat milk
• 200g goat’s curd (or 100g full-fat cream cheese + 100g ricotta)
• 200g crumbled blue cheese
• 3 tbsp parmesan

Method

Pastry

1. Blitz the flour and butter in a food processor until bread-crumby in consistency.
2. Add yokes from 2 eggs and pulse the mixer until the pastry starts to clump together in a ball. You may need to add a splash of cold water at this point if the pastry is too dry and not coming together.
3. Wrap in clingfilm and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes.
4. Heat oven to 190°C, and grease & line a 24cm/4cm deep round tart tin (a cake tin will work!).
5. Roll pastry out on a lightly floured surface, and carefully transfer to the tin. Make sure you roll it out large enough that there is a bit of an over-hang as the pastry will shrink slightly when cooked.
6. Line with baking paper and add baking beads. Blind bake for 15 minutes, then carefully remove the baking beads and paper, brush pastry all over with the egg whites left over from earlier and bake for a further 10 minutes.
7. Remove from oven and leave to cool. Turn oven down to 180°C.

Filling & assembly

1. Place lardons in a hot pan with approx. 1 tbsp olive oil and cook until brown and crispy. Drain on a double layer of kitchen roll on a plate.
2. Add the onions, garlic and thyme to the pan with another glug of oil and cook until soft and golden.
3. Add the mushrooms, increasing the heat a little, until all the mushroomy moisture has evaporated and they are brown and nutty.Season the shrooms and add a dollop of butter before adding the bacon back into the pan along with the spinach. Cook until the spinach has wilted.
4. Tip mixture onto a plate to cool while you make the custard.
5. Whisk together the eggs and milk in a medium-sized bowl, then add the cream cheese/ricotta (or goat’s curd if you’re lucky enough to find it!) and whisk until smooth.
6. Season with salt and pepper, then add the filling mixture and stir until fully combined.
7. Crumble half the blue cheese into the bottom of the pastry case, followed by half the filling mixture then repeat.
8. Sprinkle with parmesan cheese.
9. At this point, I like to jazz it up with asparagus decor, but this is totally optional.
10. Bake for 35-45 minutes until just set.
11. Carefully trim off excess pastry, and leave the quiche to sit for 20 minutes before serving. I like to eat this with a fresh green salad. Enjoy!

Story time…

Quiche, especially the shop-bought variety, has a tendency of being pastry-heavy, rather bland and a little mushy, but this Gordon Ramsay recipe I came across about five years ago takes quiche to a whole new level. I love rustic, hearty, home-cooked grub and this deep-dish quiche is exactly that. Packed full of delicious flavours, it’s an absolute winner and always goes down well with its recipients. My mum and I found this recipe in a copy of Olive magazine when we were staying at my Nan & Grandad’s in Somerset to escape the summer desert heat. We pulled it out of the magazine, but for some reason no one wrote it down or put the recipe in an easy-to-find location. So every time we make the quiche (including today’s escapade), it ends up taking at least double the time because it always involves a ridiculous recipe-hunt. In the digital world we all now live in, you’d expect to be able to just find it on the mighty inter-web. But no – of course not. Typical. Well the good news is that we have not only filed the recipe, but it will also now exist forever in my blog archives. Winner.

My shortcrust pastry skills are still a little sketchy, so the quiche turned out even more rustic than planned, but I think it just adds to it’s character. The steps to make the pastry are in the recipe, but feel free to use ready-made shortcrust, as it will work just as well (if not better). Probably a safer bet if your skills are at my current level. Also – in Gordon’s recipe, he uses goat’s curd. I couldn’t find this anywhere so substituted in cream cheese and ricotta.