Blind Baking - A Tutorial

For a story that's probably not true, it has been told many times and in many versions:

In 1966, a legendary film director was returning to Hollywood after an extended time away, and had not yet heard that the actor Ronald Reagan had announced his intention to run for governor of California. As he was getting off the plane, a reporter asked the director what he thought of  Reagan as governor. He considered it a moment before answering. "No," he said. "Jimmy Stewart as governor. Ronald Reagan as best friend."

So how exactly did I end up playing "best friend" in a video in which the star is a pie crust? Especially since my original plan for this week was to start exploring some wonderful old-school Southern cuisine from my wife's grandmother's cooking notebook? It started when, after a couple of recent posts called for blind baking a pastry crust, a number of people asked me about the right way to do that, giving me the idea that this would be a timely and appropriate subject for this week's entry. Then, while drafting that post, I started finding that many aspects of blind baking, while easy to do and show, are hard to describe. The solution: a tutorial video. Look out, Steven Spielberg! (Crass promotion alert: you'll see that some aspects of the video are aimed at You-Tube viewers not yet familiar with this site.)

I'm still very much looking forward to working with those wonderful Southern dishes in the coming weeks. For this week, "cut and mix" has been replaced by "cut and print!" So quiet on the set...ready...and, action!

That's it for now. As always (and as you just heard in the video), stay well, keep it about the food, and always remember to kiss the cook. ;-)