Do I need to dock my pie dough?
I posed this very question to our staff’s Slack channel, and many of my coworkers immediately expressed their pro-docking stance. “No air bubbles here!” was the unanimous reason. But test kitchen director Chris Morocco entered the chat with a slightly different take. “It depends,” he said, “if you’re working with a fairly fluid filling, there can be a danger of it seeping through.” If you are going to dock your crust, Morocco suggests gently brushing some egg wash onto the pastry bottom once you remove the weights. After a few additional minutes in the oven, this will help seal the holes created by docking.
For Lauren Ko, author of Pieometry and creator of pies that could very well belong in MOMA, docking is optional. “Honestly, I never [dock my pie dough] mostly because I forget,” she explained to me over email. But Ko has perfected a blind baking method that yields a uniform, crisp base without the need for docking. “I like to freeze the pie shell solid, line tightly with foil, and then fill the cavity full to the brim with weights,” she says. “I then bake for about 20 to 30 minutes, remove the foil and weights, and bake for another 10 to 15 minutes until the crust begins to look golden and flaky.”
According to Ko, the key to this method is to bake the crust until there are no visible raw patches before removing the weights. “Anytime I haven’t baked the crust long enough before removing the weights, it does puff up,” Ko says, “then I have to dock the crust retroactively, which tends to be too little too late.” But the shell is by no means ruined, she explains, just a little misshapen by the time it’s deflated.
Sally McKenny, the brains behind the wildly popular blog, Sally’s Baking Addiction, also has a blind baking method of her own, and to her, holes are an integral part of the process. McKenny, who always docks her pie dough when blind baking, bakes the crust with weights first. “After the sides have set (the sides begin to brown a bit), I remove the weights,” she explains, “and then I dock the bottom with a fork and put the crust back in the oven.” The holes, she says, function as an escape route for steam but eventually meld together as the crust is done blind baking.
Morocco, Ko, McKenny, along with every avid pie baker on our staff, have their own opinions on docking pie dough. And you might too. If your tried-and-true method involves poking holes in your dough, more power to you! But if you, like Ko, sometimes fall victim to the fickleness of your memory, forgetting to dock your pie isn’t necessarily the end of the world. Regardless of the process, the goal remains the same: uniform, crisp, golden brown shell for a cornucopia of fillings. And there is more than one way to get there.
