School cheese flan, sometimes called cheese and egg flan, was my all time favourite school dinner and the dinner lady got me the recipe many years ago and it’s been a favourite “go to” meal since. It was the school menu item I always chose, without hesitation! As I had milk and eggs that needed using up yesterday, I thought I’d treat myself! The basic school cheese and egg flan recipe is simple and very flexible when it comes to measurements. It doesn’t matter too much if the ingredients you have, or the dishes you have, aren’t quite right. Indeed, today I wanted to use a sheet of pre-made shortcrust pastry and I only had an oversized glass Pyrex dish available, but that didn’t stop me. I should also note at this point probably that my oven is broken, but, I can use the grill + fan option – I knew this meant I’d have to keep a closer eye on it as the heat is fiercer, but the milk and eggs needed to be used today, now!

I knew I’d get a soggy bottom, but I didn’t mind 🙂 Ideally I’d have had a metal dish, of the correct proportions.

Cheese and egg flan is a quiche made with milk and I make this to use up milk. Before the word quiche started to be used, everybody called these a flan! In an ideal world I’d have used half a sheet of pastry, used a smaller dish and had the filling deeper, but I wanted to use up the whole pastry sheet and didn’t have a smaller dish available.

This ratio of milk, eggs, cheese for a school cheese flan “just works” for me, although today’s effort was a “best effort” possible bearing in mind I was trying to use up what I’d got + had a lack of dishes, due to not being sorted out properly yet in my recent move. It’s the minimum of ingredients too, no adding in extra bits and bobs, it was a proper Old School Style baked cheese flan – and it was gorgeous to taste.

Ingredients for School Cheese & Egg Flan:

• 1 sheet of ready rolled shortcrust pastry (or puff, if that’s what you’ve got!) (or half a sheet and to make it a deeper flan)
• 3 large eggs, mine today weighed 178grams in their shells; I’d have used all three no matter what they weighed!
• 300ml of milk, that’s just over half a pint
• 200 grams of cheddar cheese, grated (or you can just slice it thinly

Method:

1. I lined my dish with foil, unrolled the pastry, removed the baking sheet they provide with the pastry (no particular reason, I’d have left it on if my brain had been awake), then I lay the pastry down in my dish. The edges need to be curled up as the pastry case will contain a liquid filling, so the edges need to be turned up to prevent spillage. You can just use flour sprinkled round the dish (to prevent sticking) if you want.
2. Put the pastry into the oven for 10 minutes, just to “blind bake” it, without fussing about covering it. This isn’t critical if you just want to get the cheese flan cooked… I’ve skimped and cut this out before.
3. Mix the milk and 3 eggs together.
4. Remove the part-baked pastry case from the oven, cover it with grated cheese, then slowly pour the egg/milk mix over the cheese. It was very tight and close to spilling over as I’d not really got my sides high enough, but that’s life.
5. Bake at 160°C for 35-40 minutes, checking it every 5-10 minutes. As my oven was on a grill/fan setting I did have to turn the dish round a few times as one corner was browning more than the rest.

SERVE!

Today I served myself a slice of cheese flan with chips and baked beans. I then went back and got a second piece… then a third and a fourth. 🙂

This goes onto my Best Meals of 2022 List. I keep the list to remind myself of my favourites, for when I get stuck wondering what to cook for tea!

Alternative Bases for a School Cheese Flan

While I love the pastry, sometimes I don’t want to make a small quantity just to make a flan, or I don’t want to buy and use a whole ready rolled pastry sheet. When this happens I’ll see what else I’ve got to use as a base. Here are some ideas:

• Use a flour tortilla as a base, just make sure it’s oversized to the dish you’re using, to enable the depth you need for the filling.
• Leftover mashed potato, cold from the fridge this can be moulded into your dish shape. It’s best if it’s cold as it’s more firm.
• Cold instant mashed potato – make up instant potato and let it go cold. Use the cold instant potato, pressed down, as the flan base.
• Frozen hash browns, defrosted and then pushed down to mould into the baking dish shape.
• Frozen chips, defrosted and then pushed down to mould to the shape of the baking dish.
• Leftover cauliflower, or cauliflower rice – best used cold, simply break up cauliflower florets or use cauliflower rice, to mould to the dish shape. It needs to be quite thick so the liquid doesn’t seep through, adding a little instant mashed potato to the mix can help to shape this as a base.

The remaining four pieces I put into takeaway boxes in the fridge. I’ll eat a couple of them cold no doubt!