We independently evaluate all of our recommendations. If you click on links we provide, we may receive compensation.
The Pyrex Basics Glass Pie Dish makes baking, serving, and cleaning easy. Residential Glass Railing
Sarah Karnasiewicz is an award-winning writer, editor, and cook. In addition to Food & Wine, she has contributed to Everyday with Rachael Ray, Epicurious, Food Network, and Cooking Light, among others. Sarah is the features editor for The Wall Street Journal's Off Duty lifestyle section.
Food & Wine / Sarah Karnasiewicz
Making flaky, perfectly golden pies can be a daunting task for novice cooks and experienced bakers alike. Still, with a little patience and the right tools — starting with a sturdy pie plate — beautiful results are within anyone's reach. Like cake pans, pie dishes come in a wide range of styles and materials, from flimsy disposable supermarket tins to hand-thrown stoneware plates, making it hard to know which one will yield the best bang for the buck. In search of an educated answer, we spent 20 hours filling, crimping, and baking our way through a lineup of some of the most commonly available and widely recommended pie plates on the market.
To assemble our list of contenders and determine the most versatile, easy-to-use, multi-purpose pie plate, we surveyed the preferences of some of our favorite professional bakers. After narrowing the field, we put nine pie dishes to the test. As it turned out, the best was also the most basic: the Pyrex Basics 9-Inch Pie Plate. We also loved two ceramic pie pans. Read below for what you should look for in a pie dish and the complete results of our testing.
In a win for value and a victory of function over form, the most inexpensive and arguably simplest pie dish we tested turned out to be our consistent favorite. Well proportioned at 1.5 inches deep and nine inches wide, the Pyrex Glass Pie Plate lacked the volume of some of the deep dish pie plates we tried, but still ably supported a classic apple pie and perfectly contained the custardy contents of the Libby's pumpkin pie we made.
In both of those cases, as well as during the blind baking, the material's even heat conduction yielded crisp, uniformly golden pastry layers without any weird pale spots — and because the dish was transparent, gauging doneness as easy as taking a peek at the sides or the bottom. Slices of pie came out of the dish cleanly, making serving neat and stress-free, and we never had to worry about scratching the durable surface with sharp knives. The dish's thin, unadorned lip allowed for flexibility when finishing off the crusts, and looked equally lovely whether we decorated the edges with a fork crimp or finger fluting.
Another bonus, pointed out by Genevieve Ko, a recipe developer and author of Better Baking (who also favors glass when baking at home): though not quite disposable, the low cost of the Pyrex dish, combined with its popularity (you can pick one up in most major supermarkets), means that leaving one behind at a potluck or gifting a pie to a host or hostess without the expectation of getting your dish back, is a relatively low-stakes sacrifice. Finally, while some bakers might find the no-frills design a bit blah in comparison to more stylish ceramic plates, we like the pan's utilitarian simplicity. Or, as Ko put it: "The Pyrex dish is such a neutral backdrop that it doesn't distract from the beauty of the pie itself — and isn't that what should be the centerpiece?"
Based on years of home use, the Emile Henry Pie Dish was our odds-on favorite, due to its generous capacity, consistently excellent browning, and elegant European looks — compliments we heard repeated by many of the experts we surveyed, including Kate McDermott, author of the James Beard Award-nominated Art of the Pie. From a practical standpoint, it won points for being microwave, freezer, and dishwasher safe.
We also liked that it was the only model we tested that was specifically approved for use under the broiler, which, while certainly not essential, only emphasized its versatility. Made by a family company in France from Burgundian clay, its pedigree is sterling and seems to justify what might appear to be a comparatively extravagant price tag — plus, as an heirloom-grade piece of gear, it would more than earn back its price over years of use.
Think of the Baker's Advantage Ceramic Pie Dish as the Emile Henry's more affordable (and nearly identical) American cousin — and a very good deal. Made in the USA from high-quality stoneware, it has the same pretty ruffled rim, colorful outer glaze (though in fewer hues), and careful construction as its French counterpart. Indeed, weighing in at 2 lbs. 11 ounces unfilled, it feels even heftier in the hand. That weightiness can translate to longer cook times — because the pan heats evenly but quite slowly, it is sometimes necessary to add as much as a third to a half more oven time to recipes to achieve thoroughly baked results. But keeping those adjustments in mind, the results using the Baker's Advantage dish were predictable and appealing: blind-baked crusts turned out evenly browned and with little shrinkage, while apple pies stood tall and burnished gold.
While the pan takes longer to heat up than a metal pan, for instance, it also takes a long time to lose all that heat, too. Case in point: After one afternoon of baking, I brought the apple pie I'd made in the Baker's Advantage pan to share at a parent's association meeting at my son's school. When we finally sliced into it, everyone marveled that the soft, jammy apples were still warm. For its care, the manufacturer's instructions for the Baker's Advantage dish recommend hand-washing rather than using a dishwasher for cleanup (a small note which, nonetheless, detracts from its practicality and convenience).
All in all, the Pyrex Basics 9-Inch Pie Plate's dimensions, even heat conduction, and simple design make it our top choice. We loved how well this dish kept the pie filling proportionate to the crust, and it released slices easily.
To pick a roster of pie plates to test, we first enlisted the help of professionals, including Kate McDermott, a Seattle-based baking instructor, pie guru, and author of the comprehensive cookbook The Art of the Pie; Genevieve Ko, a food writer, recipe developer, and culinary consultant who penned Better Baking, a collection of wholesome modern twists on baking classics; and Joanne Chang, the James Beard Award-winning pastry chef/owner of Flour Bakery + Cafe in Boston and Cambridge, Massachusets, and the author of Flour, Flour, Too, and Baking With Less Sugar. With their input in mind, we tried to include representatives from all the major categories.
Dimensions: Outliers aside, most pie dishes tend to be 8.5 to 10 inches in diameter (measured from inner lip to inner lip), 1.5 to 2 inches deep. However, they can come as small as three inches and as large as 12 inches. Standard recipes usually call for an 8- to 10-inch pie dish, so nine inches is sort of the gold standard if you want to just own one. Deeper pie dishes add some flexibility in terms of the style of pies you can use them for but require a little more finesse with crusts.
Material: Pie dishes generally fall into three material categories — metal, glass, or stoneware/ceramic — each with its own strengths and weaknesses. The best one for you will be the one that is the most versatile for your style of baking.
Cleaning and Care: Commercial ceramic and glass dishes can go in the dishwasher, but if you buy an artisan-made ceramic dish, ask about cleaning. Metal pie dishes should always be hand-washed, especially if they're made of aluminum or have a nonstick surface.
A well-performing pie dish needs to do a lot more than look good. It should be versatile enough to yield evenly baked, golden crusts and thoroughly cooked fillings every time, whether the task at hand is a fruit pie, savory pie, press-in crust, custard pie, or quiche. Its size should be generous enough to accommodate an eye-catching pile of fruit when being used for rustic, deep-dish style double crust pies, but not so capacious that the ratio of filling to crust feels skewed when making icebox pies, more delicate custard pies, or quiche. Finally, from a value standpoint, a good pie dish should also be sturdy enough to stand up to years of heavy use.
Drawing on our personal collection of pie plates, expert recommendations, and other popular pans, we began testing with a lineup of 10 pans and then whittled that list down to seven finalists that seemed to best represent the range of prices, styles, and design options on the market. To put those contenders through their paces, we settled on a three-part process, comparing the results when each pan was used to blind bake a storebought crust, prepare a classic double-crust apple pie, and make the iconic Libby's pumpkin pie (using the recipe found on the back of the can).
“For width, measure inside edge to inside edge," says Stephanie Lock, founder of Ready to Roll Dough. “For depth, measure from interior edge to interior bottom making sure to lay your ruler against the angled side of the pie pan.”
“They can measure 1.5- to 2.5-inches deep," says Lock. Deep-dish pans are great for two-crust savory pies, single-crust quiches, or pies that have two-layer fillings, like a lemon meringue or chocolate cream, when you want the first filling to leave some exposed crust to contain the topping.
“It depends on the pie pan. I brush softened unsalted butter into fluted tart pans with removable bottoms and disposable pie tins to ensure easy release," says Lock. Most standard pie plates, which are not meant to have the pies removed, will not need greasing.
Williams Sonoma Goldtouch Pro Nonstick Pie Dish ($23 at Williams Sonoma)
This nonstick metal pan is attractive, well-made, and appealingly sturdy in the hand. Made from commercial-grade aluminized steel to distribute heat quickly and evenly, we loved the way it produced blind-baked shells that were uniformly golden and lifted cleanly out of the pan without a crumb left behind. Ultimately however, we ruled it out as not versatile enough: when used for custardy pies, like pumpkin, the edges shrank slightly and the crust set faster than the filling.
Staub Ceramic Pie Dish ($40 at Amazon)
We loved the look of this dish, especially the pretty and practical squared-off handles stamped with the Staub name, but found that its smaller size (it fit entirely inside all of our top selections) made it impractical as an all-purpose pick. Also, while the Staub company made its high-quality reputation with French-made cast iron cookware, these days many of its ceramic accessories (including this one) are made in China.
USA Pan Bakeware Aluminized Steel Pan ($19 at Amazon)
A sturdy, serviceable metal pan that might be a great choice for high-volume commercial kitchens, this dish caught our eye because of its great marks on Amazon. We loved its well-crafted heft, its Made-in-the-USA pedigree, and its lifetime warranty. But we found that the corrugated interior was not as consistently nonstick as touted, making some slices hard to remove and the pan more laborious to clean.
Pyrex Easy Grab 9.5-Inch Pie Plate (Amazon)
Slightly wider than our favorite glass pan and sporting a flat, frilled rim, this pie dish got ruled out because it offered no appreciable benefits versus the basic Pyrex model, and its wide rim felt cumbersome when shaping and filling crusts.
Camp Chef Cast Iron Pie Pan ($30 at Amazon)
Residential Glass Railing We love baking cakes and bread in cast iron because of the way the material's intense heat conduction yields wonderful crunchy edges and firm, golden crusts — so we were curious to see how that performance could translate to pie making. But while this pan performed ably during the making of our apple pie, its aggressive heat retention led us to nearly burn our pastry during blind baking and made timing the cooking of our custard filling difficult. Also, even if you want to play around with cast iron baking, given that many cooks already have a 9- or 10-inch cast iron skillet (which could do double duty as a pie plate, if desired), buying this stand-alone pan is probably an unnecessary expense.