quiche

This pie dough is treated as a puff pastry, but it doesn't have to be. The process shown here can be skipped. For an ordinary dough, rapidly rub in the fat, then add just enough liquid to bring the dough together. You can add an egg yolk if you wish but that is not necessary either. What is necessary is allowing the dough to rest, to autolyse during that period, which also gives time for water molecules to migrate evenly throughout the dough without developing the gluten molecules by kneading. The fat chills back to fully solid state. These patient steps help reduce shrinking after the dough is rolled whether or not it is layered as puff. 

But in this case, an egg yolk is used (a partial egg yolk because the dough ball is smaller than normal). This dough is layered, spread with room-temperature butter, then returned to the refrigerator to chill. The aim is to get the butter between the layers without it actually becoming mixed within the dough itself, that is, to maintain separate discrete layers of butter and dough (which already has its own internal butter particles coated with flour). This is the two attack flake system. 

The dough is rolled out one final time, and chilled again. After being chilled, it is tucked into a pie pan, without stretching, trimmed, and returned to chill one last time. 

Before being placed in the oven the dough is fitted with a parchment paper disc cut to fit, and lightly weighted with beans to counteract the dough's tendency to bubble and rise. This dough is not docked because eventually it will contain a liquid center.  The pie crust is baked at high heat for 10 minutes. 

The pie crust is painted with egg white to waterproof its surface and baked at moderate heat for another eight minutes or so, just long enough to bake the egg-washed surface. Now waterproofed, the pie crust is filled, first with solid ingredients including chunks of cheese, and then with an egg yolk/cream combination to fill in the spaces. 

The filling can be anything  and so can the cheese. A typical quiche Lorraine will have a filling of bacon with specifically Gruyere Swiss cheese and a liquid portion rich with egg yolks, up to a dozen for a nine-inch pan, but it is not required that the filling be that rich. Whole eggs can be used along with whole milk rather than cream. 

This pie is Black Forest sandwich ham cut thickly, asparagus, mushrooms and onion, along with a broad assortment of various cheeses all with different melting properties, (not really recommended because it is overly complex and a bit confusing, but I like that), and six jumbo egg yolks mixed with condensed milk, for a  seven-inch pie. Quite a lot going on there for a tiny pie. There was excess liquid filler. 

There was also excess dough. None of it was discarded. The surplus dough was cut into pieces, painted with the same egg white used to waterproof the pie crust, then dusted with refined sugar. 

The dough contains salt and pepper and sage because it is  dough for a savory pie, but none of that interfered with these portions that are more like cookies. In fact, this dough as it is does make excellent cookies. They could be further enhanced with more sugar between layers, cinnamon, fruit preserves, and the like, but I enjoyed these pieces a lot with just a tiny amount of sprinkled sugar baked onto the egg white wash. They are light and airy and delicate.