Not to be confused with baked beans

Baked beans

Baked beans is a dish containing beans, sometimes baked but, despite the name, usually stewed, in a sauce. Most commercial canned baked beans are made from haricot beans, also known as navy beans – a variety of Phaseolus vulgaris – in a sauce. In Ireland and the United Kingdom, a tomato...

.

Baking beans, also called pastry weights, baking weights and pie weights, are round balls, often ceramic

Ceramic

A ceramic is an inorganic, nonmetallic solid prepared by the action of heat and subsequent cooling. Ceramic materials may have a crystalline or partly crystalline structure, or may be amorphous...

, that are used in the blind-baking

Blind-baking

Baking Blind is the process of baking a pie crust or other pastry without the filling. Blind baking a pie crust is necessary when it will be filled with an unbaked filling or when the filling has a shorter bake time than the crust...

 of pastry

Pastry

Pastry is the name given to various kinds of baked products made from ingredients such as flour, sugar, milk, butter, shortening, baking powder and/or eggs. Small cakes, tarts and other sweet baked products are called "pastries."...

 (especially shortcrust and puff pastry) instead of dried legumes (e.g. peas

PEAS

P.E.A.S. is an acronym in artificial intelligence that stands for Performance, Environment, Actuators, Sensors.-Performance:Performance is a function that measures the quality of the actions the agent did....

, beans or rice

Rice

Rice is the seed of the monocot plants Oryza sativa or Oryza glaberrima . As a cereal grain, it is the most important staple food for a large part of the world's human population, especially in East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and the West Indies...

).

Before baking, the pastry is covered with baking paper and the beans are placed on top of the paper. They perform two functions during cooking:

1. preventing the pastry from rising excessively, and
2. assisting in the even distribution of heat through the pastry.