Blind Baking a Pastry Shell

How to blind bake a pie shell video recipe

Certain pie recipes call for you to "Blind Bake" the shell before adding the filling; lemon tart, lemon meringue. Mostly these are pies that won't be cooked long enough to get the crust crispy or cooked through.

You can use a fork to prick the shell before baking, or not... Some people (like my mom) just prick it all over and cook it empty. Most people will fill the shell with dried peas, or dried beans - you could use rice and there are even ceramic or metal beads sold for just this purpose.

In most cases, heat your oven to 350ºf and bake the shell for 12-15 minutes with the beans inside, and then a further 5 minutes without the beans.

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Video Transcript - click to open

Hi everyone! Welcome back to Le Gourmet TV. So today, we're going to be baking a lemon tart, and it requires that the tart shell be blind baked first. So I thought I do a little video on blind baking just to make it clear to everybody what it is, some people might not know. It is fairly easy. It's really just taking your tart shell and baking it before you put the filling in.

So, I've got a sweet tart pie dough rolled out here, and you can find that recipe elsewhere on the site. There should be a link directly below this one. We just need to get that into the pan, not pretty, but it works. So you press it into the pan. So we've got it into the shell. It's not pretty, it doesn't really need to be.

Now there is a debate, some people will prick the bottom with a fork and put holes in it, some people won't. I go with the trend of thought that I'm not going to. So, I've got some parchment paper, which I have cut into a round that will roughly fit inside. You put that in first, and then I've got some peas, and you just pour the peas into the middle.

Now, the peas are all about adding weight, just to keep the shell from puffing up while you're cooking it. You could use peas, you could use rice, you could use beans, there are actual little pieces of metal and polymer that you can use that are made specifically for blind baking, but you don't need to buy those, these are already in your kitchen. I just keep them in this can, and use them over and over again just for this purpose.

So, I'm going to put this into the oven at 350 degrees, and you bake it for 12-15 minutes. So that's it. Now we just take the peas out, store them for use again later, and then trim off the excess, flush with the top of the tart pan, and that's blind baking, really nothing to it. So, now this is ready. I think, I'm going to make a lemon tart with it. Thanks for stopping by, hope to see you again soon.