STEEMIT IRON CHEF #15 - Red Wine Onion Quiche and Onion Chioggia Beetroot Carpaccio

This weeks topic was a tough one. Onions are an ingredient that I use a lot in my kitchen but when I try to think of a dish with onion as the main ingredient, I don't have so many ideas. Onion Soup, Onion Tart, stuffed onions ... - all of them delicious comfort foods! But it really took a while to create a variation that seemed to be a little bit different and special. The good thing was that I visited my parents for the weekend. So I had plenty time to think about it and there was no danger I would just head to the green market and buy random things without rhyme or reason. This is the result of my findings:

These were most of the ingredients I used ...

Different kind of onions (red and a yellow onion, shallots and one mild vegetable onion), chioggia beets, chicory, endives, lambs lettuce, an apple, celery and carrots, fresh thyme and rosmary, a simple yeast dough I made the day before, silken tofu, smoked tofu, walnuts, nutritional yeast, dried marjoram, citron juice, apple cider vinegar, half a pint of dry red wine, walnut oil, salt and pepper - hmmm, I think that's it. All the green market ingredients were local and in season.

This dish is my contribution to the #steemit-ironchef challenge hosted by @progressivechef. The rules for the challenge can be read here: STEEMIT IRON CHEF #15.

I made a different kind of onion soup as a starter. For this I roasted one yellow onion without peeling and cut in two halfes, some pieces of celery and a carrot and a lot of shallots in vegetable oil, seasoned with salt and pepper, added some twigs of thyme and rosmary, covered with enogh hot water, brought to boil and let it simmer for half an hour to make a vegetable-onion broth.

I strained the broth and put back into the pot. I cut a purple carrot and two shallots in fine slices and let them poach in the simmering broth until tender but still firm. The purple carrot turned the onion broth into a deep purple too:

The main dish is a quiche made of a yeast dough (flour, salt, water, yeast, olive oil), a veganized cream cheese and a topping of red onions, little cubes of smoked tofu and cubes of a sour kind of apple (Boskop - it's a perfect sort for apple tarts) and fresh thyme and rosmary. I cut the onions into eighths and fried them for a few minutes in vegetable oil in a pan to caramalize them.

Then I added the red wine, some twigs of thyme and rosmary needles, seasoned with salt and pepper and let it simmer until almost all the moisture has evaporated. 

Inbetween I put the dough into a Quiche form and whisked together the silken tofu with apple cider vinegar and lemon juice - two tablespoons each, three tablespoons of nutritional yeast, a very tiny pinch of Kala Namak salt to imitate the specific taste and smell of eggs (very little Kala Namak because I was used to very fresh eggs from my grandmother's chickens! They never smelled much!), a tee spoon of dried marjoram, sea salt and fresh ground black pepper and white pepper. I poured the mixture on the dough and spread well.

I set every single eighth of the caramalized drunken onions on the cream cheese one by one, springled cubes of the apple and the smoked tofu on top, garnished with dabbed thyme leaves and rosmary needles and seasoned with fresh ground black pepper and coarse sea salt.

I let it bake for 20 minutes in the preheated oven with 180 degrees Celsius.

For the side dish, my carpaccio, I cut very thin slices of a mild onion and the beautiful pink and white striped chioggia beets and placed them on a plate. I put the plate in the microwave for one minute to cook the vegetables a little bit so they wouldn't be too raw and to reduc the pungency of the onion. Then I added the lettuces, drizzled fresh lemon juice and walnut oil over everything and springled pieces of walnuts, little cubes of the apple and salt and black pepper over carpaccio. Pure and simple and super fresh! 

I placed a piece of the quiche on the same plate and served everything together with the onion soup.

Guten Appetit! 😋