How to cook quiche lorraine

Often copied, never bettered, this simple combination of eggs and bacon in a crisp, buttery base is what every fancy flan secretly wants to be when it grows up. Essentially a savoury custard tart, rich with eggs and wonderfully wobbly, a real quiche lorraine bears little resemblance to meanly filled commercial imitations – so, if you want it done well, do it yourself.

Prep 20 min
Chill 50 min
Cook 1 hr 10 min
Serves 4

For the rough puff pastry
225g plain flour, plus extra for dusting
Salt
225g very cold butter, plus extra for greasing

For the filling
200g dry cure smoked streaky bacon, chopped
300ml double cream
6 eggs

1 Rub the butter into the flour
Start with the pastry, which is best done by hand. Tip the flour on to a clean work surface and add a good pinch of salt. Cut the butter into roughly 1cm cubes, then gently squidge the two together with your fingertips: you’re aiming for a mixture of small pieces of butter coated with flour, rather than the usual fine crumbs.

2 Add water to make a dough
Measure out 100ml of ice-cold water, then sprinkle a little over the top of the flour mixture and stir in. Repeat until it all comes together into a smooth, but not sticky dough (you probably won’t need all the water, unless you live somewhere very dry). Shape the dough into a flat square, wrap in clingfilm and chill for at least 20 minutes.

3 Prepare the tart tin and roll out the pastry
Meanwhile, grease a deep, loose-bottomed, 20-22cm tart tin. When you’re ready to bake, sprinkle a little flour on a clean work surface and roll out the dough into a rectangle roughly three times its original length. Fold the top third back into the centre, then bring the bottom third up to meet it, so you have three layers, like a concertina.

4 Fold the pastry, and chill
Turn the dough 90 degrees, then roll again to three times its length and repeat the folding process, so you’re left with another three-layered square. Roll out again, then line the greased tin with the pastry, leaving a few centimetres overhanging to minimise any shrinkage while it rests. Chill the pastry again for at least 30 minutes.

5 Line the tart case and blind bake
Meanwhile, wrap any excess pastry in clingfilm, in case you need it for emergency repair work later, and heat the oven and a baking tray to 200C/390F/gas 6. Take the tart tin out of the fridge, prick the pastry all over with a fork and line it with foil, shiny-side down. Fill to the brim with baking beans or uncooked rice, and bake for 25 minutes.

6 Start on the filling
Meanwhile, cut the bacon into strips, fry these until they start to crisp up, then set aside. Remove the beans and foil from the pastry and patch up any holes, if necessary. Bake for another 10 minutes. Separate one of the eggs, brush the white all over the base of the pastry (the yolk will go into the filling), then put back in the oven for another five minutes.

7 Prepare the eggs
Carefully trim off any overhanging pastry and set the tart shell aside. Turn down the oven to 170C/335F/gas 3. Separate another egg and put the yolk and the reserved yolk into a large jug with the four whole eggs. Beat together, then pour in the cream and whisk with a pinch of salt, until just combined.

8 Fill the tart and bake
Scatter half the bacon over the base, then pull out the oven shelf with the tray on it, making sure it’s stable. Transfer the tart tin to the hot tray, quickly pour in the egg filling and top with the remaining bacon. Gently push the shelf back into the oven and bake for about 35 minutes, until the filling is just wobbly in the centre. Leave to cool before eating.

9 Variations on the theme
This recipe is easily tweaked: try replacing the bacon with 150g grated hard cheese and/or two large onions, finely sliced and gently fried until golden brown; or 200g baby spinach, blanched and thoroughly squeezed dry. (Vegetables often give off water during cooking, so the likes of sun-dried tomatoes in oil or roast peppers work better than the fresh versions.)

How to eat like a chef for less than £20 a week

Food sustainability isn’t just about protecting our environment, it’s about protecting us, the consumers, and supporting the farmers who make our food.

Affordability is a key element of what a sustainable diet looks like. I call my approach Root to Fruit eating. It is a philosophy that aims to make it easier for people to cook good food, blending a little chef’s knowhow with academic research, and making it applicable to home cooks and professionals alike. My shopping list comes in at just over £18 a week – cheaper than the average national weekly spend per person of £24. Over a year, that’s a saving of about £300 while still enjoying top-quality food (I buy everything from my local independent health-food shop or market, or organic items from the supermarket. Of course, if you need to bring the cost of your shopping down further, buy non-organic). I’m a vegetarian, so there is no meat on my shopping list, and eating less meat is certainly a good way of keeping costs down. However, if you are buying meat, opt for cheaper cuts of higher-welfare animals.

Every head chef works to a tight budget to make a profit. When we invent a dish, we cost and portion it gram for gram to calculate a gross profit of 70-75%. So a dish we sell for £5 must cost less than £1.25 to make, including any waste, which we are always looking to minimise.

That margin is there to cover the cost of rent, staff, utilities and, if you’re lucky, a profit. But chefs love good produce, so they devise other ways to keep their costs down, turning scraps that cost pennies into a fine meal for which patrons are happy to pay pounds. Noma, for example – one of the best restaurants in the world – serves cod’s head as a main course. Taking on board a chef’s thrift in the kitchen will help you save money while eating healthily and sustainably – as my guide and recipes show.

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Food deals are the forgotten bread and butter issues of Brexit

Rulers, wrote the Roman poet Juvenal, survive by providing the people with bread and circuses. His observation has acquired a twisted relevance in recent years. Brexit has become a political circus without the laughs while the duty to provide bread has become criminally neglected. These two aberrations are deeply connected.

Food policy has been a central concern of governments throughout history. As recently as 1957, article 39 of the treaty of Rome, the EU’s founding document, set out the aims of a planned common agricultural policy (CAP), which included ensuring “a fair standard of living for the agricultural community”, “the availability of supplies” and “that supplies reach consumers at reasonable prices”.

The eventual CAP that emerged fell well short of these ideals, but it is striking how clear it was to those who signed up that it was vitally important to have a food system, from producer to consumer, that was efficient and fair to all.

However, decades of seeming plenty, with supermarket aisles full of cheap, enticing products, moved food off the list of political priorities. cold war images of people queuing for bread in the Soviet Union reinforced the belief that government’s only role in feeding its people was to enable a free market. The fundamental principle of food policy was reduced to Adam Smith’s famous line: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

Two new reports published today suggest that with Brexit looming we need to put food back at the top of the political agenda. A policy briefing by the Soil Association shows how the rules of global food trade affect public health as well as economies. It suggests that if Britain entered into a trade deal with the US along the lines of the North American Free Trade Area (Nafta), we can expect rising obesity. This is exactly what happened in Canada and Mexico after they joined Nafta. As cheaper, ultra-processed, high-sugar foods became more widely imported from the US, people understandably ate more of them.

The same briefing cites a study from the Harvard School of Public Health which shows that increases in obesity in countries such as India and China are associated with trade liberalisation. Open trade is like an open mind: if it’s too open, everyone pours in their junk.

The briefing illustrates how when we think about combating obesity we often focus too much on public education and not enough on the design of food systems. The word “design” is deliberate. The “market” is not a natural entity. The nature of any market is shaped by the rules and regulations that govern it. The US market with its perverse subsidies delivers foods stuffed with high-fructose corn syrup. Almost all markets, by refusing to make producers pay for the negative environmental impacts of their farming methods, reward those who use the most rapacious methods and punish those whose careful stewardship costs more in the short term. The question is not whether governments fashion the food supply, but how they choose to do so.

One reason why governments have been reluctant to step up to the dinner plate is that food policy has not been the electorate’s priority. Gradually, however, people are waking up to the reality that it should be. The rise of demand for food banks has suddenly and shockingly made it obvious that food plays a central role in social inequality. This is true at every stage in the supply chain. Much of the food we bought this winter was imported from Morocco and Spain where a poorly paid, often mistreated, migrant workforce toils to provide us with fresh fruit and vegetables all year round.