This year, I read several new recipes, for pie crust, and for apple pie, and I read several blog-posts from the ThermoWorks blog. I learned some very useful things: 1) Both new pie crust recipes called for pre-baking the crusts blind, but only to a pale golden color, and one of them had a novel set-up for blind baking: they use granulated sugar as the weight. You line the chilled crust with a 16” square of foil and fill it to the top (almost) with granulated sugar, which you use later in whatever recipe you want. Bake about 20 minutes, remove foil and sugar, and bake the crust another 10 minutes, until pale golden. The idea of using sugar as “pie weights” is brilliant! We all have sugar on hand and you just “borrow” it, since you can reuse it! 2) On the ThermoWorks blog, they talked about the cracks in pumpkin pie and how to prevent cracks. Bottom line — pull the pie when the center is 170 degrees F. Pretty much the same advice you gave. I tried both methods and they work. And this year’s pies were silky smooth. We think they were the smoothest pies we’ve ever made. As for a good recipe, I use my family’s traditional recipe which goes back to the mid Nineteenth Century. It makes damned good pumpkin pies!!!

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