We made the Coronation Quiche - a tasty dish but beware of recipe mis-measurements

First off, quiche can be a relatively inexpensive and surprisingly cost-efficient dish. It only requires a handful of ingredients and is extremely versatile if you want to make it a bit more elaborate.

However, this quiche is a “Royal Quiche”, so it needed to have a bit of royal magnificence to it.

It consists of a shortcrust pastry filled with milk, egg, cream, tarragon, cooked spinach and broad beans, all relatively inexpensive and extremely tasty in their own right. So with the recipe in mind, I hit the shops and jumped into the kitchen.

Now, if you opted to make your own shortcrust pastry, the full recipe would set you back around £20, which isn’t cheap in this economy, but it does say you can use the pre-rolled dough, which is actually more cost-efficient. With a spare pre-rolled pastry in hand (just in case), I got baking. I started on the dough and was pleasantly surprised at the mixture as it came together quite easily, all I needed to do was add a bit more milk than the suggested two tablespoons and we were golden.

I soon found that mis-measurements became a common occurrence in the professional recipe.

I lined the flan dish with pastry and put it in for the recommended 15-minute blind bake to get the flaky crust just right and got started on the main ingredients. This is where things started to get messy.

The recipe calls for cooked spinach to be used in the filling which automatically causes issues with wet pastry, I dried the spinach out as best I could and marched forward. The rest of the recipe actually came together quite well – the double cream, milk, egg and tarragon mixed easily enough and the beans were sitting waiting to be used.

The blind bake worked fantastically with my life-hack technique of using rice and a non-stick liner to keep the bottom at bay, with that in mind I threw in the ingredients and baked the extra 25 minutes they suggested.

I knew 25 minutes wouldn’t be enough time for the mixture to set (but who am I to argue) so I wasn’t surprised when it came out of the oven still wobbly. I baked it for an extra 10 minutes.

This seemed to be an issue with using conventional ovens and non-standard flan dishes, but it was easy enough to fix with an extra 10 minutes of baking time.

I got a little scared when I pulled out my quiche that looked more like a cupcake, but I knew from my school cooking classes that it will settle in no time – five minutes of settling and there we have it, a perfectly regal quiche... but how did it taste? In short, I was pleasantly surprised by the subtle but refreshing flavours of the dish. The ingredients are rustic and complement each other well, while tarragon is a fragrant herb, it was settled by the umami flavour of the cheese.

The mixture of spinach and beans gave the quiche a nice texture and the flavours they provided complimented the intensity of the strong cheddar.

So where does it go wrong?

The recipe as written seems to be mis-measured, I found myself constantly adding here and taking away there to perfect the mixture, the pastry needed more milk, the mixture needed slightly more tarragon, and more seriously, the cooking time seemed to be off by a whole 10 minutes

But I forgive them as the true defining characteristic of a quiche is adaptability. It’s an almost perfect dish for those on a budget. It can be relatively inexpensive, it can be fast, it can be stored and it can utilise almost anything that’s left over in the fridge.

But it can also be posh and fancy and extravagant, you can add truffle or blue cheese, pancetta or a whole array of mushrooms, it can be anything and it can be for anyone, and of course, it’s of German and French origin, which is why I think it is the perfect royal dish.

• We'd love to know if you've come up with a culinary Coronation creation of your own. Send your regal recipes to daniel.walton@mnamedia.co.uk

Coronation Quiche recipe

Ingredients:

- Pastry

125g plain flour

Pinch of salt

25g cold butter, diced

25g lard

2 tablespoons milk

Or 1 x 250g block of ready-made shortcrust pastry

- Filling

125ml milk

175ml double cream

2 medium eggs

1 tablespoon chopped fresh tarragon,

Salt and pepper

100g grated cheddar cheese,

180g cooked spinach, lightly chopped

60g cooked broad beans or soya beans