Pie may be one of the most perfect desserts that humanity has yet invented, but it's not always as easy as...
well, you know. There's the crust, for one — an intimidating order for many home bakers, but completely doable once you get the hang of it (check out our ). Even once you've achieved a flaky pie crust, though, you want to make sure it stays that way — especially on the bottom, where it inevitably comes into contact with a wet filling, whether you're working with blueberry, pumpkin, or chocolate cream.
The soggy-bottom pie has bedeviled many a baker. But this, too, is manageable. I used to work in a pie shop and, depending on what the flavor was, we had a handful of clever fixes to keep the bottom crust dry.
Take that chocolate cream pie, for example. At the pie shop, we would blink-bake the crusts for cream pies, since they wouldn't be baked again once they'd been filled. As soon as the hot, fully-baked crusts came out of the oven, we'd sprinkle a little chopped-up dark chocolate into them.
Then, after a few seconds, we'd use pastry brushes to spread the melting chocolate around the entire bottom of the crust. The chocolate hardened as it cooled, meaning that, by the time the filling was added, it had turned into a nigh-impenetrable barrier protecting that crust — not to mention a delicious one. There are out there, but don't worry there's a trick for each of them.
How to keep the bottom crust dry on any kind of pie A little extra chocolate never hurt a chocolat.