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You’ve deftly avoided the butter mistake keeping you from the flakiest pie crust, expertly transferred your dough to a pie plate, and it’s ready for a blind bake, but you forgot to order pie weights. Instead of taking a quick jaunt to the grocery store to buy dried beans or uncooked rice, all you have to do is open up your pantry and grab sugar instead.
Though many people like to use pie weights or even dried beans, blind baking a pie crust using granulated sugar is arguably the best way to go. As with any pie weight, after shaping your dough into a pie pan and crimping the edges, it’s best to let it chill for a little while in the refrigerator. That solidifies the fat, resulting in a firmer crust that’s less likely to tear, dent, or lose its decorative edge when you add the weight. Simply cover the cold crust with heavy-duty or double-folded aluminum foil and fill the cavity all the way to the top with granulated sugar.
Highly malleable foil with enough excess on either side to act as handles effectively curves around the shape of your crust, making it easier and tidier to transfer the fully cooled sugar back out of the pie crust and into an airtight container. Parchment paper isn’t quite as effective because of its tendency to absorb butter (letting it get into the sugar), but if that’s what you’ve got, crumpling it beforehand helps it form to the shape of your crust. You can also buy pre-shaped parchment paper liners on Amazon for an easy, time-saving solution.
Why sugar works so well for blind bakes
Using granulated sugar is simple, and it doesn’t damage the sugar, which isn’t the case if you use dried beans or rice to blind bake. But the real beauty is in the bake. Because individual sugar crystals are finer than dried beans, rice, or even pie weights, it spread more evenly across the bottom and up the sides of the dough. That makes it the best way to achieve an even bake and prevent the sides from shrinking and slumping.
After the crust cools, just lift the aluminum foil out of the baked crust and pour the sugar right back into an airtight container. You can use the sugar as you normally would or plan to use it for future blind bakes until the sugar takes on a light tan color. Once that happens, you have toasted sugar, which is less sweet but more complex in flavor and perfect for making banana bread or the tastiest whisky sour.
