Page 34 - Pie It Forward: Pies, Tarts, Tortes, Galettes, and Other Pastries Reinvented

Reduce the amount of chilled, unsalted butter to 12 tablespoons
(170 g) and add 4 tablespoons (50 g) shortening, chilled in the
freezer for 10 minutes.

Option 2 Easy Rustic Pie Dough
Cornmeal is a lovely addition to pie dough when you want to add a
rustic feel to your dough. Replace ¼ cup (30 g) of the flour with ¼
cup (40 g) of finely ground cornmeal.

A NOTE FROM THE SWEETIE PIE

Blind Baking!

Blind baking simply means baking the piecrust before you add the
filling. This usually means you are baking it completely because

the filling doesn’t require any more baking. Many cream pies, flan
and panna cotta tarts, and pies filled with mousses and pastry
cream have no-bake fillings that require the crust to be fully baked
ahead of time.
But blind baking can also signify that you are just par-baking,
which means you’re partially baking the crust before adding a
filling, at which point you’ll bake the entire pie. This prevents the

bottom crust from getting soggy. It’s obviously something you
usually only do with a single-crusted pie, since with a double-
crusted pie you can only properly crimp together the top and
bottom crusts around the edges when both pieces of the dough
are raw—if you want a very clean double-crusted pie, that is. I

blind bake double-crusted bottom crusts when I’m not feeling
particularly precious about how perfectly the edges of the pie will
come out or if the top crust is going to be made up of overlapping
cutouts.