Читать книгу Fresh and Wild Cookbook: A Real Food Adventure - Ysanne Spevack - Страница 33

Ready-made pastry falls into a similar category as ready-grated Cheddar cheese or ready-chopped broccoli florets. We can’t quite quantify how such things make our lives better, yet many of us still seem to buy these time-saving, money-spending options.

Personally, I’d rather save money by avoiding such ‘convenient’ products and instead pay out the extra cash on better ingredients. Spending a few minutes on pastry making, cheese grating and broccoli ‘floret-ing’ makes me feel nice after a long day working. And if you really want to save time, simply make your pastry in a food processor.

The exception to the convenience rule is puff pastry, which takes forever and generally tastes pretty good out of the freezer – so long as it’s organic. Non-organic puff pastry is full of hydrogenated fats, which are particularly artery clogging and heart-attack-inducing. This stuff is also often added to non-organic biscuits and the like. It looks for all the world like little white plastic ball-bearings, and if you were to hold it in your hand all day, it wouldn’t melt. It’s much too hard for that. Much harder than any fat in nature, in fact, as it’s had an extra hydrogen molecule added precisely to achieve this kind of strength.

It’s added not through evilness, but practicality – dunk a biscuit containing hydrogenated fats and the soggy bottom half will stay intact all the way to your mouth. The only trouble is, once you’ve eaten the biscuit, the hydrogenated fat is rejected by your body as an alien substance and, unless your kidneys and liver are feeling particularly zealous, the fat is laid out into a micro-thin coating inside your arteries. To my mind, I’d prefer to lessen the time between the dunk and the mouth dash, rather than risk artery fuzz.

Anyway, back to the quiche. It’s made with gram flour, which is simply ground up chickpeas. These have the added benefit of helping ward off osteoporosis with their high levels of calcium and phyto-oestrogens.

Personally, I love flours with gluten in them, such as wheat flour, just as much as those without. Sensible helpings of wheat within a nicely varied diet seems like a good idea to me, unless you’ve been diagnosed with coeliac disease. But eating wheaty toast for breakfast, wheaty sandwiches for lunch, a wheaty cake at teatime and wheaty pasta for dinner isn’t a good idea. It’s all a case of using a bit of common, and being aware of what you’re putting inside your body.

The culinary reason this quiche is made with gram flour is so that it doesn’t rise. It produces a compact, crispy pastry that’s ideal for holding the filling without going soggy. It tastes pretty much the same as regular pastry, although it’s more crumbly in a delicate and really delicious biscuity way. And it’s great to have the added chickpea phyto-nutrients and protein, which help make this a totally top tart.

Enjoy it hot or cold, with seasonal leaves or Balsamic Beets salad (see page 233).