Cooking with Neocate - Quiche revisited...

I've posted about our efforts with Quiche before both here and here. I've used two pie crust pastry recipes over the years, but we are now gluten free so I stick to the Juvela Harvest White mix recipe on the back of the boxes. It works well for us - BUT it isn't egg free.

Eggs serve to enrich a dough because of their fats. So anything with a certain amount of fat would work like condensed milk or extra butter or oil. However, keep in mind that though eggs are liquid when you add them to a recipe they change into a solid when they are heated. So if you are adding an ingredient such as milk or oil that does not solidify on heating, you must remember to add a little more flour to your recipe to act as a binder.

The other reason egg is used in pastry is to make it more malleable, you can use milk or water to replace egg but your pastry will not be as delicate as milk and water release the starch out of the flour and make it stretchy. So it will be perfectly edible but not as delicate.

It IS a dilemma, but given that THIS post is about quiche - or EGG PIE as we have to call it in this house - and given that quiche needs egg I'm going to gloss over this. Sorry. However, I do feel this a bit lame, and have tried backing an eggless quiche once. The Vegg can be used to make the filling and an eggless crust IS possible, just not as easy to work with. There is a list of egg substitutes here.

I would LOVE to see some of your egg free success stories, (especially the savoury ones) and will test and feature any I'm sent on the Recipe Resource.

Now for the Neocate part....

Update on the VEGG

OK, I've (finally) been experimenting. I have finally completed a full range of recipe tests with the VEGG and here are my results:-

As an egg replacer in a cake recipe - makes for a soggier mixture. I mixed up the VEGG mixture and added the equivalent weight to the mixture. A regular sponge cake would expect 4oz of sugar, 4oz of flour and 4oz or 2 whole eggs. (The weight equivalent was something I was rather slow to realise!!)

I think 3oz of VEGG mixture would have done. It rose well, tasted fine but was a little dense and wet.

As a quiche filling - Epic fail. Sorry VEGG makers but it looks awful, didn't set until 24 hrs later in the fridge and even I - who can quite happily try almost anything - struggled to taste it. Not good. Now I suspect if I wasn't making a plain quiche it might be considerably better, but my fussy kids won't entertain anything in the mixture so it probably wasn't an entirely fair test. All went in the bin though...

As "Eggy Bread" - very successful, I do recommend this one. Soak bread in the VEGG mixture and then fry. Worked a treat.

As scrambled egg - Hmmmm not convinced. It  goes a little "seaweed like" in texture/appearance. Can't explain it but the appearance put us off. Try it an see!

More info and advice from the VEGG peeps themselves here. I think you might see what I mean about the "seaweed" in the picture on their site!