How To: Blind Bake a Pie Crust

With Thanksgiving fast approaching you may see pie recipes that call for “blind-baking” or “pre-baking” your pie crust. This is a very simple step that may be highly confusing to some cooks, especially if you don’t often bake pies.The first thing you need to realize is that blind-baking is VERY easy. You are simply prebaking the pie crust before you add the filling. This is most commonly called for when you have a cream filling or anything else that you don’t need to bake. Here are a few steps you can follow if you need to blind-bake your crust.First, you will want to use pie weights. This is key, in that if you don’t you will end up with a shrunken pie crust. If there is no filling inside the crust will slide down the sides while baking and you will end up with something that is unusable.If you don’t have pie weights on hand, you can simply use rice! I know, it’s a cool little hack that will save you a bunch of time searching for pie weights and money. You can reuse the rice over and over again since it never actually touches the pie. I keep mine in a ziplock bag after I use it and it has cooled. I just make sure to clearly label the bag so I don’t accidentally use this rice for cooking.You want to fill the pie crust as full as possible with rice. This will prevent any sliding of the crust what so ever. Make certain to put a piece of foil or baking parchment down first or else you will never get all the rice out of the crust.Bake your pie crust at the temp called for on the box or in the recipe. You typically will blind-bake a crust for 15 minutes with the pie weights, then remove the weights and bake for another 10 minutes. This will ensure your crust is crispy and cooked all the way through. Make certain it does not brown too much though as that can throw the taste of the finished pie off.Once you’ve cooled your crust you can add any type of filling you like to it. I hope this clears up some of the confusion you may have around holiday pie baking. (Keep an eye on the blog next week for this amazing Maple-Pecan Cream Pie recipe!)