➜ The Cook’s Illustrated Thanksgiving Guide:

You can trust the editors of Cook’s Illustrated—experts of all things Thanksgiving—to deliver recipes that work.

WATCH: How to Serve a Perfect First Slice of Pie

WATCH: How to Make Pie in a Cast-Iron Skillet

Our recipes for pumpkin and pecan pies call for prebaking the crust and then adding the filling. (This step ensures that the bottom crust is crisp rather than soggy.) Sometimes, however, the pie shells crack or slump when they bake. How can you fix them?

The easiest solution is to patch the trouble areas with extra pie dough, so don’t throw away the pastry trimmings after you assemble the shells. Instead, save them to spackle the crust, pressing the extra dough over the cracks, and then fill the pie and finish baking it according to the recipe.

So save your trimmings; it’s an easy step and a great way to make sure that your pies are as perfect as possible.

America’s Test Kitchen is a real 2,500 square foot test kitchen located just outside of Boston that is home to more than three dozen full-time cooks and product testers. Our mission is simple: to develop the absolute best recipes for all of your favorite foods. To do this, we test each recipe 30, 40, sometimes as many as 70 times, until we arrive at the combination of ingredients, technique, temperature, cooking time, and equipment that yields the best, most-foolproof recipe.

Each week, the cast of America’s Test Kitchen brings the recipes, testings, and tastings from Cook’s Illustrated magazine to life on our public television series. With more than 2 million viewers per episode, we are the most-watched cooking show on public television.

More than 1.3 million home cooks rely on Cook’s Illustrated and Cook’s Country magazines to provide trusted recipes that work, honest ratings of equipment and supermarket ingredients, and kitchen tips.

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