I always tell brides who ask me to do their food that I refuse to include those horrible little pre-made quiches from Costco. This recipe is my own homemade version of the horrible store-bought stuff.
Debi's Mini Quiches
These are a labor-intensive but fully-worth-it homemade version of those quiches you buy at a wholesale club.
Ingredients
Cream Cheese Pastry:
- 1 stick butter
- 4 oz. cream cheese so half of a regular 8-oz. pkg.
- 1 1/4 cups flour
Meat and Cheese:
- 1/2 cup chopped ham or crisply-cooked bacon
- 1/2 cup grated cheese, Swiss or Cheddar, or your preference
Custard:
- 1 whole egg
- 1/4 cup milk
- 1/8 tsp. salt
- 1/8 tsp. pepper
- few gratings of nutmeg
Instructions
For pastry shells:
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Mix in stand mixer or food processor, thoroughly combining the butter and cream cheese before adding the flour and scraping down the sides of the bowl several times. Try not to overmix, but do get everything evenly combined. (A stand mixer is probably best for this.) Divide into 1/2-oz. balls, putting each ball into a mini-muffin tin. I use a small “disher” to portion out the dough, and I do (sigh) weigh each ball on my digital kitchen scale. You should have 24 shells. Refrigerate briefly—maybe half an hour—just so the dough is workable. Squish dough out into shells, with a bit sticking up over the top. I’m afraid there’s no alternative to just using your thumbs—even Martha Stewart does it that way. (I do have a pastry tamper, and for the last few batches I used that first and then went back around with my thumbs, but I’m not sure I saved any time that way. I may try to refine my technique a bit the next time.) Prick bottoms of shells with a fork. Bake at 350 for 15 minutes. The shells will puff up a bit, but that’s okay. You could drive yourself crazy with little squares of parchment in each one with a few pie weights . . . but I refused to do that and the shells worked fine.
For filling:
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Use a food processor to mix custard ingredients. (If you’re just making one batch you can use a mini-processor or the small bowl of your regular processor, or just whisk it in a bowl.) Put a small amount of cheese and ham in each muffin crust. Put a tiny bit—probably a teaspoon—of the milk/egg mixture on top of each, trying not to let any of the mixture drip down the sides. You may need more custard; if so, just mix up another batch. Better to have too little than too much and have to figure out what to do with the extra. Bake for an additional 10 minutes, until cheese is melted and custard is set. Use an instant-read thermometer to test a quiche in the middle of the pan and the center of the quiche, making sure that temp is at least 160 degrees.
Recipe Notes
This recipe can be multiplied exponentially. I made 12x for the wedding, filling up my six 24-cup mini-muffin pans twice, and I could have/should have made at least 96 more, filling up four of the pans for a third time. After pre-baking the shells for the first batch, I let them cool, popped them out using the point of a knife and lined them up on a large paper-towel-lined baking sheet, covered them with plastic wrap and froze them. When I was ready to bake them I used the muffin pans to bake all of them, baking six pans at a time, taking them out after they cooled briefly, then putting a new batch of shells back in the pans and doing them. In theory you could just bake the removed ones on the baking sheets, but I felt that the quiches would cook more evenly in the muffin pans. These were a huge hit; it’s just about impossible to make too many.
These can be served at room temp, although they shouldn’t be left out of the oven too long. They do have eggs, meat and cheese in them, after all. I did put layers of them in chafing dish pans, just so they were at least somewhat warm.
