I love bacon.
So, how do we make quiche, a brunch staple for decades, into a Paleo-friendly dish? Well, first instead of a crust made out of wheat flour, we make our crust out of sweet potatoes. Aside from being just plain old Paleo-friendly, this substitution adds vitamins and minerals to the crust that you’d never get from a traditional wheat flour crust.
One of the notable ones is vitamin A, which gives a sweet potato its gorgeous red-orange color. Plus sweet potatoes are packed with fiber – something you’d get almost nothing of in a regular wheat crust.
Make sure you peel the sweet potato before you shred it. It won’t be horrible if you don’t, but it’s a little more tasty without the skin. Once it’s peeled, go to work shredding that baby. I use an attachment on my food processor to shred veggies like sweet potatoes, but you can also use a good old-fashioned stand up shredder.
The egg white and the almond flour (instead of not Paleo-friendly wheat flour) will bind the sweet potato shreds together. Don’t forget to add these two critical ingredients before pressing your sweet potato into the crust shape. If you neglect to put these two ingredients in, you’ll end up with a crust that doesn’t stick together after baking! And that’s not a very good crust.
But with the egg white and almond flour included, the sweet potatoes will form a crust to keep all the other ingredients in their pie-shaped form. Normally, quiche Lorraine is made with bacon and cheese, with milk or heavy cream whipped into the eggs. We love the egg part. Eggs are packed with protein! But since Paleo recipes stay away from dairy, we’re substituting cashews, blended until they are smooth, for the cheese and milk product.
The blended cashews will give the egg a silky consistency and will keep the quiche from tasting just like plain eggs. Plain eggs are fine and dandy, but we’re taking eggs to the next level here!
And, of course, the bacon just takes everything up yet another notch. I recommend using nitrate-free bacon. It’s a little more expensive to get all natural cured bacon, but the taste is phenomenal and the health benefits are worth it.
Just like other folks, I like to serve my Quiche Lorraine at a brunch with friends. They appreciate the unique sweet potato crust, even if they aren’t Paleo eaters, and they never guess that their quiche is packed with the protein and fiber of cashews. So serve this on up with a side of berries and you’re ready for your next brunch.
-Ingredients
- 20 ounces sweet potatoes, shredded
- 1 egg white
- 2 tbsp almond flour
- 4 tsp olive oil
- 1 cup cashews, soaked in water 1 to 2 hours
- 3 ounces bacon , cut into ½-inch pieces
- ½ tsp garlic powder
- 2 tsp lemon juice
- 4 eggs
- 4 tbsp almond milk
- 1 tsp salt
- ¼ fresh ground black pepper
- pinch of nutmeg
Directions
- Preheat oven to 400 F. Grease a 9 inch pie plate with 1 teaspoon of olive oil. Set aside.
- Place the shredded sweet potato, egg white, almond flour and ½ tsp salt in a bowl and toss to coat. Transfer to pie plate, and pat evenly into bottom and sides to form crust. Drizzle the crust with 2 teaspoons of olive oil and bake for 15 minutes.
- Meanwhile make the filling. Drain the cashews well. Place them in a blender along with lemon juice, garlic powder, almond milk and ½ teaspoon of salt. Blend until smooth and set aside.
- In a skillet heat 1 teaspoon of olive oil over medium heat. Add the bacon and cook until crisp. Remove from the heat and set aside.
- In a large bowl combine the eggs, cashew mixture, bacon, nutmeg, remaining salt and black pepper.
- Remove the crust from the oven and pour the filling over the crust. Reduce the temperature of the oven to 350 F. Bake for 30-40 minutes or until set.
- Remove from the oven and serve warm.