We Tested Popular Pie Dishes to Find the Best Ones for Bakers

Our Favorite Pie Dish

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.

How We Selected the Pie Dishes

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.

Factors to Consider

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.

• Broadly speaking, metal pie tins conduct heat rapidly and very efficiently, which guarantees a well-cooked bottom crust when making filled pies, such as apple or rhubarb, but can lead to over-browning and other inconsistencies when working with custard-based pies (like pumpkin or buttermilk) whose fillings may require a longer cook time to set. Inexpensive and shatterproof, the majority of metal pie plates are made of aluminum. These days many are also coated with nonstick surfaces that, while making for neat and easy slice removal, can be easily scratched by sharp knives and serving spatulas.
  

• Disposable foil pie tins may seem like a convenient choice if you are bringing your pie to a school potluck or other community event (or if, like Joanne Chang, who uses them widely at her Flour bakeshops, the pies you are prepping are primarily for sale), but their flimsy construction can lead to uneven baking and provides inadequate support for most fillings. One helpful solution Kate McDermott offered: if you must use a disposable pan, bake it inside a glass or ceramic pan — which will aid with even heat distribution and add stability for handling — and remove it only once it has cooled and is ready to serve. "I once saw a beautiful, piping hot apple pie baked in a disposable pan fold in half and slump to the floor when the baker took it out of the oven," said McDermott. "And that was a very, very sad sight."

• Glass pie pans, which the Pyrex brand is most ubiquitous for, are no-frills, affordable, widely available, and often the plates that many cooks learn on. Indeed, because their clear material lets you see when the bottom crust is firm, browned, and nicely baked, they can be a boon to bakers of all experience levels. They also conduct heat slowly and evenly, allowing the pie's pastry and filling to cook at the same moderate pace (although this does also mean that they may require a few more minutes in the oven than their metal counterparts). Several years ago, consumer websites reported some alarming stories of glass baking dishes "exploding" after moving from a hot oven to the countertop and cooling racks (apparently a result of the manufacturers' switch from super heat-resistant borosilicate glass to the slightly more fragile material of tempered soda lime). But in our tests (and in our many previous years of baking with glass pie dishes), we never had one shatter on us, nor did any of the experts we queried.
• Weighty in the hand, appealingly earthy, and available in a rainbow of styles and glazes to suit any occasion and mood, pottery and ceramic pie dishes stand out from the pack in terms of aesthetics — and they are sure to win appreciative comments when you present them at the table. Like glass dishes, ceramic pie dishes conduct heat slowly and evenly, which helps yield uniformly golden crusts and thoroughly cooked fillings, even when making fruit pies that require lengthy cooks to soften down. Some ceramic pans also come with appealing and smartly-designed flourishes, such as ruffled rims that help guide fingers when fluting crusts, or generous handles that make transferring from oven to table a cinch. While they do tend to be pricier — especially the ones made by the three big French makers: Emile Henry, Le Creuset, and Staub — when well cared for, most ceramic pie dishes will last a lifetime and are pretty enough that you'll want to pass them down. Vintage pottery pie dishes can be quite beautiful, too, but if you stumble on one at a flea market or estate sale, exercise caution: older glazes may contain lead, and when in doubt, it's best to avoid them.

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.

How We Tested Pie Dishes

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).

Other Pie Dishes We Tested

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)

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.

Our Expertise

• 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.
• For this piece, she consulted several baking experts, used data from our pie dish tests, and drew from her own experience and expertise to recommend the best pie dishes for baking.