For an elegant brunch or lunch, few foods compare to a perfect breakfast quiche. With its rich custard peppered with savory meats, creamy cheeses and vegetables of your choosing, quiche recipes are your one-way ticket to a crowd-pleasing meal. Once you get the basics down, quiche is one of those adaptable entrees you’ll reach for time and again.
If this is your first time making a quiche, don’t be intimidated. This easy breakfast quiche recipe is perfect for beginners, and it’s endlessly versatile for confident cooks who want to get creative with their own choice of fillings.
Does pie crust need to be prebaked for quiche?
Whether a savory quiche Lorraine or a sweetly filled pie, any pie with a heavy or wet filling should have the crust prebaked using a technique called blind baking. Blind baking partially cooks the crust before adding the filling. It ensures the pie (or quiche, in this instance) does not have a soggy bottom after it’s baked.
For more information and tips on this, check out our guide on how to blind bake a pie crust.
Breakfast Quiche Ingredients
- Flour: To make a perfect pie crust, it’s important to measure your flour accurately (yet another good reason why you need a kitchen scale) and not overwork the flour when mixing. Mixing a pie dough too much can cause the gluten in the flour to overdevelop, leading to a tough or chewy crust.
- Butter: Whether you choose to make a butter pie crust or a vegan pie crust with shortening, make sure that the fat is cold. If using butter, you want to see flecks of solid butter throughout the dough. These pieces of butter will melt and release steam in the oven as the crust bakes, creating vital air pockets that will make the crust light and flaky. Here are our Test Kitchen’s picks for best butter brands.
- Ice water: Use just enough to hydrate the flour and bring together the ingredients into a soft, smooth dough. Cold water is also ideal here, as it will help keep the butter nice and cold while preparing the dough.
- Eggs: Fresh eggs provide the filling with richness and structure for any quiche. Getting the egg-to-milk ratio just right is the trick to a perfectly set and silky breakfast quiche. Here’s how to tell if an egg is bad.
- Cream: When considering heavy cream vs. whipping cream for your recipe, they’re relatively interchangeable. If you don’t have either, you can use milk or half-and-half; just know that it will be less rich, and the texture will be slightly different. We recommend using whole milk instead of low-fat or skim if you go that route.
- Cheese: This easy breakfast quiche uses two kinds of cheese. Monterey Jack melts like a dream (like these other melting cheeses), and cheddar adds a lovely sharp flavor.
- Bacon: You want cooked, crisp, crumbled bacon for your quiche. Uncooked bacon would become rubbery in a quiche and turn the whole thing into a big, greasy mess. Here’s our tried-and-true guide to how to cook bacon.
Directions
Step 1: Make the crust
In a large mixing bowl, combine the flour and salt. Next, using a fork or pastry blender, cut in butter until crumbly and resembles small peas.
Begin to gradually add the ice water, mixing gently with a fork until the dough just begins to hold when pressed together with your fingers (the dough should still be rather loose and crumbly).
Turn out the mixture onto a large piece of plastic. Shape it into a flattened disk, and wrap it tightly. Refrigerate for one hour.
Editor’s Tip: When learning how to make pie crust from scratch, a number one rule: Don’t skip the chill. Pie crust needs to rest in the refrigerator before it is rolled out and shaped so the flour property hydrates and the ingredients meld together into a smooth, pliable dough. Dough that has not been chilled will not be easy to work with and will not bake properly in the oven.
Step 2: Roll and shape
Preheat the oven to 450°F. Remove the pie dough from the refrigerator, and place it on a lightly floured surface. Roll the dough into a circle that’s about 1/8-inch thick, then transfer to a 9-inch pie plate. Trim the crust to 1/2 inch beyond the rim of the pie plate, then flute or crimp the pie edges as desired.
Editor’s tip: If you have leftover pie dough, try to make decorative crusts designs for some added flair.
Step 3: Blind bake the crust
Line the unpricked crust with a double thickness of heavy-duty foil, and bake for five minutes. Remove the foil, and bake for another five minutes. Remove the crust from the oven, and cool on a wire rack. Reduce the oven’s heat to 375°.
Editor’s Tip: To safeguard your crust from sagging in the oven during blind baking, you can add pie weights (an essential pie-baking tool) on top of the foil lining.
Step 4: Add your filling
To the prebaked crust, sprinkle in the cooked bacon, cheeses and onion.
In a bowl, beat the eggs, whipping cream, salt, sugar and cayenne. Pour the mixture over the top.
Editor’s Tip: For a boost of flavor, caramelize your onions in a small skillet prior to adding them in.
Step 5: Bake and enjoy
Bake until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean, 30 to 35 minutes. Let stand for 10 minutes before cutting.
Editor’s Tip: We like to bake our quiche in the lower third of the oven. This helps ensure the crust fully bakes and is crisp and golden on the bottom.
Breakfast Quiche Variations
- Change the cheese: Try experimenting with different types of cheeses such as Havarti, Gouda, Swiss, mozzarella, ricotta, feta, goat or blue cheese, to name just a few.
- Crust options galore: You can use a store-bought pie crust to save time, or try a crispy potato crust quiche made from hash browns.
- Make a crustless quiche: Quiches typically have a single crust on the sides and bottom, but you can also make a crustless quiche. Just pour the wet ingredients into a pie dish or ovenproof skillet, and bake until the edges are set and the center is just a little jiggly.
- Mix up your meat choices: Ham and sausage also work great instead of bacon.
- Load up on veggies: As for veggies, feel free to use just about anything from the garden or your farmers market haul, including asparagus, tomatoes, bell peppers, mushrooms, zucchini, peas, leeks, broccoli, artichokes and more. Let this garden vegetable quiche serve as inspiration.
- Flavor with herbs and spices: Garlic powder, onion powder, paprika and mustard powder are great spices that pair well with breakfast quiche. Additionally, fresh herbs such as dill, chives, parsley, basil and thyme can also amp up the flavor. Here’s a helpful guide for fresh to dried herb conversion.
How to Store Breakfast Quiche
Baked quiche may be stored in the refrigerator for two to three days. Let it cool to room temperature after baking, then cover or wrap tightly in plastic wrap before transferring it to the fridge. Leftovers may be warmed in the oven or gently in the microwave until heated through.
Can you freeze breakfast quiche?
Yes, you can freeze a quiche (and you can freeze eggs!). Once baked, this easy breakfast quiche may be tightly wrapped in plastic wrap and foil and frozen for up to one month.
Breakfast Quiche Tips
How can you tell breakfast quiche is fully baked?
Time estimates in a breakfast quiche recipe should not be the only measure used to tell if your quiche is fully baked. To test a quiche for doneness, give it a gentle jiggle towards the end of its cooking time. A perfectly cooked quiche should have fully set edges with a slightly jiggly center. This visual test will help ensure you have a silky, creamy filling that is neither tough nor rubbery. A second test you can conduct is a knife test. Upon removing the breakfast quiche from the oven, a knife, when inserted into the center of the quiche, should come out clean.
How do you prevent watery quiche?
If your quiche filling is watery, look no further than your choice of filling. Vegetables with high water content like spinach, zucchini (try this cheesy zucchini quiche), peppers and mushrooms, should all be sauteed (and drained, if necessary) to release as much of their water content before adding them to your breakfast quiche recipe.
Adding extra milk or a lot of vegetables to a quiche will impact the cook time, so bake with care, and follow the jiggle and knife test noted above (rather than relying on the baking time estimates in a recipe alone) to ensure your quiche is baked to perfection.
How do you prevent soggy crust for quiche?
A soggy bottom on a quiche can be caused by a few common mistakes. Among the most common quiche-making mistakes is not properly blind baking the crust. If you do not prebake the crust long enough, the wet custard filling will soak into the crust, causing it to be soggy rather than golden and crisp. For more, check out this guide on how to prevent a soggy pie crust.
What goes well with quiche for breakfast?
You can serve lots of fresh fruit, rolls, toast and more with quiche for breakfast. If you’re going all out, add some hazelnut chocolate chip scones or this gorgeous maple twist coffee cake to your spread.
