Vegan Vegetable Quiche

Quiche is a dish that I could eat all the time. The combination of crisp shortcrust pastry, tender vegetables, and a creamy filling that holds it all together is just perfect to me! Quiche is so versatile and, at the same time, so easy to prepare. Traditionally, the filling is made from milk for creaminess and quite a few eggs for stability. Since we obviously want to avoid both, I've found an excellent substitute: silken tofu! To give it an egg-like taste, we add some Kala Namak, a black sulfur salt that smells and tastes a lot like eggs. To make the filling even creamier and more stable, we add vegan curd and soy flour to the silken tofu to make the whole mixture even creamier and more stable and bind the mixture.

Silken tofu can be found in any Asian supermarket (where it's also cheaper) or in larger supermarkets or organic stores (where it's a bit more expensive). Kala Namak can also be found in many organic supermarkets, while soy flour and vegan curd can now even be found in many regular supermarkets.

We already have recipes for a vegan quiche lorraine and a vegan chanterelle and leek quiche on the blog – but you can never have enough quiche variations, right? So today, we have a delicious and, at the same time, beautiful recipe for you! Pick the vegetables according to your liking, seasonality, and regionality. The dough is probably the most challenging part of this recipe, or at least it was for me. I rarely bake with rye flour, so it took me a while to figure out the perfect ratio of flour, vegan butter, and water. First, the rye flour is kneaded with cold vegan butter and a pinch of salt to form a sort of pre-dough. Then, add as much icecold water as needed until the dough becomes smooth. It's essential to make sure that the dough doesn't get too warm and the vegan butter doesn't get too soft, so that when it's baked, it turns into a lovely crispy shortcrust pastry – so don't skip the step of refrigerating the dough before rolling it out. Another tip is also to blind bake the crust without the filling for approx. 10 minutes first.

For this recipe, we're supported by Bauckhof and use two of their flours: demeter rye flour- and toasted and gluten-free organic soy flour. With their own mill, Bauckhof produces its organic flour and thus saves about 180.000 transport kilometers per year. Bauckhof processes about 16.500 tons of grain per year. Soy flour is a great egg substitute in vegan cooking and provides the binding in our recipe. The wholemeal rye flour has a very mild flavor, and each bag ensures that at least 3.88 square meters of land are farmed biodynamically and saved from pesticides. What we also find remarkable is that Bauckhof as a company has become climate neutral in 2018. Now they're also on the verge of making all their products climate neutral.