How to Blind Bake a Pie Crust: A lot of pie recipes call for "blind baking" the pie crust. Blind baking sounds confusing, but it's a lot simpler than it seems!
Make pie dough using this pie crust recipe. Or, if you are using a store bought pie crust, you can skip to step 6.
Preheat your oven to 425 degrees and lightly grease a glass or metal 9-inch pie pan. Thick Ceramic pie pans tend to distribute heat unevenly and may not work for blind baking this pie crust.
Remove the larger disk of your homemade pie dough from your refrigerator and let it sit for 5 minutes or long enough for it to become workable but still cold. Sprinkle a flat workspace with flour as well as your rolling pin.
Starting in the center of the dough disk, roll the dough outward in all directions from the center to the edge until you have a 1/8-inch thick round pie crust.
Place the pie crust over your pie pan using your rolling pin by rolling the pie crust over the rolling pin and allowing it to carry the weight of the pie crust, and then rolling it gently across your pie pan. This will help avoid any stretching or cracks.
(For store-bought pie crust, start here)Gently press the pie crust down into the pie pan, fitting into the crease all the way around. Trim excess pie dough from around the pan with a small sharp knife and with a fork, make small holes around the bottom of the pie crust to allow venting and prevent the pie crust from bubbling up. Place parchment paper over the pie crust and fill with sugar, using the parchment paper as a barrier between the sugar and pie crust.
Bake in preheated oven for 20 minutes, remove the sugar and parchment paper, and continue baking for 5 minutes or until the bottom of the pie crust is just starting to brown. Cool the pie crust before adding any pie filling.
Notes
NOTES: If you don't want to use pie weights, it is possible to blind bake pie crust without weights. You can take a slightly smaller pie plate and set it on top of the crust. This will work the same and prevent the crust from bubbling up. We wouldn't recommend baking it without anything on top of the crust as it will result in very large bubbles that will make it hard for you to fill the pie later.