Homemade dark chocolate pie

I wrote about pie crust in this post, but my pictures were of a two crust pie. When you are making a single crust pie with an unbaked filling, such as pudding, you need to pre-bake the crust. This is often called blind baking a crust.

Some recipes may call for par baking, which means to partially cook a crust.

To keep the crust from puffing up too much, you need to treat it in some way. You can pierce it all over with a fork or you can use some sort of weights.

Types of pie weights

Pie weights can be an item you already have around the kitchen, such as uncooked beans or rice. You can also purchase aluminum, ceramic, or steel balls to use as pie weights.

Ceramic weights are supposed to help distribute the heat more evenly when baking. When you use beans, they cannot be cooked later to be eaten. But you can save them to use with the next pie!

If you are using one of these items, you need to line your piecrust with parchment paper so that the items do not stick to the crust. The parchment paper also makes it easier to remove the weights. You need to fill your crust completely with these items.

My tool of choice is a pie chain, It is a series of steel balls connected together. It is easy to remove and fairly small to store. You do need to pierce the sides of the crust with a fork. Using a piece of parchment prevents the little dents from the chain, but I don’t worry about it too much.

Before Baking – You can see that I used a fork around the sides of the crust, then laid the chain on the bottom of the crust.

After baking, remove the chain. You can see there are a few small bubbles in the crust, but nothing that would interfere with filling.

After baking

Plastic wrap to help prevent cracking as the pudding cools.

Follow the instructions in your recipe for how long to bake the crust and whether it should cool before filling.

For my dark chocolate pie, I use a cooked pudding recipe. I chose not to add the meringue, so I put some plastic wrap over the top for the first hour or so while the pudding is cooling. The plastic wrap helps prevent the pudding from cracking or getting a ‘skin’ on it while it cools.

Digging Deeper

My chocolate pie recipe comes from the cookbook Better Homes and Gardens Old-Fashioned Home Baking. It has a number of excellent recipes and it looks like you can still find it for sale used.

To learn more about pie weights, there are a couple of good reads here and here and here.