Quiche Questions

New pie weights about to be used

 After years and years of using dry beans or rice to weight a pie shell, I finally bought myself some ceramic pie weights. Wheee!

My culinary reading group is about to discuss The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat: Craig Claiborne and the American Food Renaissance by Thomas McNamee so I decided to use the pie weights to prebake a pie shell for a quiche Lorraine according to Claiborne's New York Times Cookbook. There's quite a bit of information and admiration for this book in the biography I just read, in fact.

So I sort of followed what Claiborne says to do. His NYT cookbook recipe differs in a couple of ways from the Julia Child recipe, particularly as she says there should be only bacon, not cheese, in quiche Lorraine. Further, Claiborne calls for onion cooked in a small bit of the bacon fat -- she doesn't even mention onion. I think I have always in the past made it her way.

Quiche after baking for almost an hour instead of 25 minutes

After the amount of time specified in the recipe (which I later verified is the same as Child's baking time), the filling was still absolutely liquid. I ended up baking the quiche for at least twice as long as the recipe says. The oven temperatures were definitely correct.

Question 1: Does substituting skim milk for milk + cream make the filling take longer to set? The last time I made quiche, I did the same substitution so I'm not sure. I don't know how long I baked it.

Question 2: Am I totally out of my mind if I made this with skim milk instead of cream? It seems to have worked before. What's the problem?

Anyway, it wasn't terrible. It definitely wasn't burned or over cooked, either. Next time I'll use cream or make something else.