Technique: Blind Baking - useful for pies.

I had never heard of this until the other day when I had to make a lemon meringue pie (next post). Stupidly the first thing that went through my head was 'where do I get a blind man from to bake' and 'surely that means baking by feel not by calculations and time etc.'... Suppose this is the reason why I am doing this challenge, as I was wrong on both accounts.

Blind Baking or "Bake Blind": 

 Blind baking is the technique cooks and chefs use to pre cook a pastry, when the filling it will be used for:

• needs little cooking itself so pre-cooking the pastry shell is important so as not to serve a raw pastry
• is wet or a liquid, so pre-cooking or blind baking is required to stop the pastry absorbing the moisture and being a wet mess
• is dense, so we pre cook the pastry to ensure it is cooked

METHOD

Loosely cover an unbaked pastry case with a sheet of baking paper larger than the size of the tin. Fill with dried beans, pasta or rice and bake. This ensures the pastry base is cooked sufficiently for holding moist fillings. Baking blind beans or rice can be stored and re-used.

It took a couple of goes to get this right- the first time I did it, there was not enough rice weighing the baking paper down and the pastry rose- which is not very good if you need to actually put something in your so called "pie"! The second time was better, I also pricked the pastry with a fork before putting more rice on the baking paper.