You chill the butter, measure the water precisely and follow the instructions to a tee, but your pie crust never turns out right. Hey. It’s not you. It’s because everyone is wrong about pie. In this episode of Milk Street TV, Chris retires the biggest, most common misconception about pie crust and demonstrates the quickest way to make a workable dough. Check out the full episode to see Chris’ mixing method in action, with tips on how to roll out dough, fit it into the pan and bake it off perfectly.

Blind Baking 101

Blind baking is a method for pre-cooking a pie or tart crust, usually used when the filling doesn’t need a long time in the oven. A great deal of pie recipes require blind baking the crust either partially or fully before filling it.

You fit the raw dough into the pie plate, chill it until firm and line it. The lining can be parchment paper, foil or even a large coffee filter. The liner gets filled with pie weights about three-quarters of the way up or completely to the top of the dish. Dry beans, ceramic beads or raw rice all work as weights, but we recommend avoiding glass weights.

The weights keep the crust pressed against the bottom and sides of the pan so it doesn’t bubble or slump, ensuring the pie shell is perfectly shaped. Bake it until set and browned to your liking. No more soggy, irregularly shaped pies.

When to blind bake

For pies that have no-bake fillings, like puddings, mousses or cream pies, you want to blind bake the crust completely. This is the only opportunity you have to bake the crust at all, so you want it to be thoroughly cooked, perfectly golden and crisp all the way around, especially on the bottom.

And it’s not just no-bakes that benefit from a blind baked crust. Custard pies and tarts are always prime candidates for blind baking—a liquidy filling poured into a raw shell is a recipe for undercooked dough. Pumpkin pie that’s been baked in a raw shell has a noticeably pale, gummy crust. The same goes for citrus curd tarts and pecan pie. The filings in these pies are so watery that they prevent the crust from ever drying out, let alone browning on the bottom. For these types of pies, blind bake the crust about halfway beforehand, then fill and return to the oven.

When you add the filling to the crust matters, too. For best results, and to prevent a wilted crust, pour your custard filling into the blind baked crust while it’s still hot. The residual heat will kick start the cooking process.

Choose your pie pan wisely

The perfect pie crust is not only beautifully shaped and tender, but evenly browned. This boils down to two things: evenly rolling out the dough and choosing the right pie plate. There are a multitude of pie plates available, made with a variety of materials—light aluminum, perforated metal, ceramic, glass, heavy enameled steel—and they all conduct heat differently. So, we ran some tests.

Metal pans, especially darkly colored metal pans, conduct heat aggressively and are great for browning. Do be wary of metal pans that have mesh bottoms, however. In our tests, that type of pie dish browned the crusts unevenly.

You may be tempted to use a disposable aluminum pie pan or a thick, glass-glazed ceramic pie pan this holiday season. The disposable ones are lightweight and great for traveling, and the thick ceramic ones certainly look pretty, but be cautious. Super thin, disposable aluminum pans can leave the bottom crust vulnerable to hot spots and burning. If you get stuck using one, be sure to check on the blind bake early and often, and bake your pies on a sheet tray to protect the bottom.

Thick ceramic pie pans have the opposite problem, they’re sloth-slow to heat up and even slower to cool down. If you decide to use one of these, you’ll need to significantly increase the cook time. Check on the pie occasionally, and don’t be surprised if it needs an additional 40 minutes in the oven. Browning is hard to achieve with ceramic pans, so don’t bake it on a sheetpan. If you’re worried about drips, place the sheetpan on the rack below the pie. And be prepared to wait around four to six hours for that pie to cool.

Our two favorite pans are an enameled steel pie plate and a classic glass pie plate. The enamel coating makes for a nice non-stick finish. The heavy metal core conducts heat quickly and evenly throughout the dish. You get the browning benefits of a metal pie dish and the non-stick, polished aesthetic of a ceramic dish, without any of the heating issues. As an added benefit, the construction of this type of plate means it can withstand dramatic temperature shifts (like moving from the freezer to the oven) without cracking or warping.

The benefit to glass pie plates is that they’re widely available and affordable. And, more importantly, you can actually see how the bottom is browning during the bake. Pies baked using these pie plates browned evenly within the suggested bake time. Watch the full episode to see the dramatically different results of our pie pan tests.

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Allie Chanthorn Reinmann

Allie Chantorn Reinmann is a Digital Staff Writer for Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street. She’s a Thai-American chef who earned her diploma for Pastry and Baking Arts at The Institute of Culinary Education and worked professionally for over a decade honing her craft in New York City at places like Balthazar, Bien Cuit, The Chocolate Room, Billy’s Bakery and Whole Foods. Allie took her know-how from the kitchen to the internet, writing about food full-time at Lifehacker for three years and starting her own YouTube channel, ThaiNYbites. You can find her whipping up baked goods for cafés around Brooklyn, building wedding cakes and trying her hand (feet?) at marathon running. She’s working on her debut cookbook and lives in Brooklyn, NY.