easy tutorial: Blind Baking Pie Crust

Blind baking pie crust is the technique used to bake a crust without a filling. It is most often used for pies that have no-bake fillings, fresh fruit, or custard pies. Blind baking ensures that your crust doesn’t shrink down the sides of your pie plate, is crisp, and perfectly flaky. For my whole pie crust tutorial and recipe you will want to check this post out.

What you will need to blind bake a pie crust

How to blind bake pie crust

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Roll the pie dough out into a 12 inch disc.

2. Once you get the pie dough rolled out and in the plate, press down lightly with your fingers ensuring that the crust doesn’t have any air bubbles under it, and it is formed to the pie plate.

If you landed on this post and need more details about how to get to this point with your crust go here.

3. Now that you have your pie crust in the pie plate, formed, and the edges are crimped perfectly; take a fork and carefully press the tines all over into the crust. Be careful not to move the crust or alter the shape in any way. Just poke holes.

4. This step can be a bit tricky because you don’t want to alter the shape of your raw pie crust in any way. Take heavy duty aluminum foil and carefully place it inside of the pie plate. You want to make sure that the pie crust is completely covered.

5. Pour dried beans or pie weights into the aluminum foil, until they come close to the top. I have used these same beans for about two years now, they are inexpensive, and if you let them cool you can pour them back in a sealable container and reuse. When they start breaking down and falling apart it’s time to throw them away and buy another bag of beans.

6. Lightly press beans down to even them out. This will also help your foil form to the crust. No need to worry about the foil sticking to the crust; there is enough fat in the crust to prevent this. Place crust in a preheated oven for 40 minutes or until pie crust is lightly browned, and appears done. You can pick up the foil and look at the bottom. It should not look soft, or doughy at all. Crust should appear dry and crispy.

7. Allow the crust to cool for 20 minutes, then bring edges of the foil together and lift out the beans. Set the beans aside, they will need longer to cool off before returning them to a sealed container, or zip-loc bag.

Now your crust is ready to fill. This process can be done a couple days in advance, just be sure to cover with plastic wrap.

You should be able to remove the crust, like so, from the pie plate once it has fully cooled. This shows that it has properly baked.

Not the most in focus photo, however you can see the layers of flakiness of the crust. Also my scarred, knobby thumb knuckle from grating it off with the cheese grater! YUM! How about some knuckle with your taco?

Fresh Strawberry Pie is the perfect example of when you would need to blind bake a pie crust.

Par baking a pie crust

Minnies Chocolate Pie is an example of a pie crust that needs to be par baked. Baked, but not completely baked. Bake just like blind baking only remove after 30 minutes, add filling and bake per recipe. You can also do this with a custard pie such as pumpkin, if you wish. I do not par bake my pumpkin pies. However if you are worried about soggy crust par baking will solve your problem of soggy pie crust.

Full recipe & pie crust tutorial is here.

Please comment below with any question you may have regarding blind baking pie crusts. I am happy to try and help! If you find this helpful please share and pin!

Happy Baking! XO Sheila