Bacon and Onion Pie

 Bacon and Onion Pie

    I've wanted to make a quiche for a long time, but never have.  This pie is pretty much a quiche; it's just not called a "quiche". I have a set of four book set of Favorite Recipes of America cookbooks from 1968 and this recipe comes from the "Vegetables" book, which also says "including fruits" on the cover.  This amuses me that it mentions it includes fruits. I started by pre-heating my oven to 375 degrees. I made my piecrust using a recipe from a 1978 The Family Circle Pies and Cakes Cookbook. This recipe was submitted by Mrs. Jack Roberts of Augusta, Georgia. I'm not good at rolling out pie crusts or making them look pretty in the pie pan and this time I was par for the course.  The crust was pretty horrid looking (I used a 9 inch pie pan and used a nine inch single crust recipe) as it had torn a bit. I poked  holes around the crust with a fork, after I'd done as best I could getting the crust into the pan and patching a few places. You do not pre-bake this crust. 

    Next, instead of cooking my bacon and then crumbling it, I cut it up befre cooking until crispy. When crispy, I removed the bacon to a paper towel covered tray. As the bacon had cooked (I stirred it around occasionally) I chopped up my onion.  The recipe calls for four large onions and after I'd chopped one onion, I knew that two were going to be plenty and it turns out I was right on that.  Two large onions were perfect for this. I cooked the onion in the bacon grease until clear & softened, returned the bacon to the pan, combining the onion and bacon before removing the pan from the burner to cool. I mixed sour cream and eggs until well incorporated and combined the sour cream and egg mixture with the bacon and onion mixture. Here is where it was helpful to have the onion and bacon mixture cooled. When mixing hot ingredients with eggs, you need to either cool the hot ingredients  before mixing or temper the egg with a little bit of the hot mixture, before combining the two.  If you don't it will not be smooth.  It will look more like the egg bits in fried rice.

    Once the egg/sour cream and the bacon/onion mixtures were well combined, I added a 1/4 teaspoon each of salt and pepper, as well as a 1/2 teaspoon of Italian seasoning and poured everything into my crust and placed it into my oven for about 37 minutes.  The recipe says to bake for 30 to 45 minutes and I set my timer for 37, because I could always cook the pie longer if necessary. As it was, at 37 minutes, there was no need to cook it longer. The pie was gorgeous, in my humble opinion and even my wonky pie crust looked fine around the edges. After cooling for about 15 minutes or so at least (I actually lost track, because I was anxious to cut into it), I served myself a good slice with a sprinkle of finely shredded Cheddar-Jack cheese. 

    The verdict?  I really liked this and I would definitely make this again. I thought the pie was visually appealing, the pie crust turned out really good, I liked both the finished texture and flavor. The recipe calls for caraway seed, which I didn't have and I was going to substitute dill seed, but at the last minute, decided to use the Italian seasoning instead and  I'm glad I did. Other options could be cajun seasoning, chili powder, garlic powder or try something different. As always, let me know if you try this.