The best type of pan for baking pie

Even if you don’t bake often, you probably have a pie pan that gets dragged out for special occasions like the holidays. A majority of people have a glass or ceramic pan because those are the most common options, but as Serious Eat’s Rebecca Frey notes, those may not be the best materials to achieve an evenly-baked, flaky crust. She recommends a metal pan instead.

Frey tested three types of pie pans – glass, aluminized steel, and ceramic – by making a fully blind-baked crust. She took photographs of the results, then repeated the test and filled the crusts with lemon curd. She stored the cooked pies in the refrigerator, testing the crust after three and five days to see how well it kept. It will come as no surprise that after five days, most of the crusts had deteriorated in texture and flavor, but one was much worse than the rest: the pie baked in a ceramic pan.

Since ceramic pans are slow to heat up and to cool, they produce inferior pie crusts in two ways. First, the slow warmup means that the dough doesn’t benefit from a burst of steam which happens in metal pans because they transfer heat more efficiently. Reaching that point quicker means flakier layers, so the crust made in the ceramic pan was doughy instead. The second problem is that ceramic also takes longer to cool, so the outer edges – which were darker than the center – became overbaked due to residual heat in the pan.

I have a deep dish stoneware pie pan, and as gorgeous as it is, I no longer use it to bake pies with flaky crusts for the very reasons Frey articulates in her article. Since I’m not enamored with the look of metal pie plates, I often use glass pans because they are moderately more attractive and as Frey points out, they produce an acceptable result.

One vessel that Frey doesn’t discuss is one of my favorites for pie baking: a cast iron skillet. I’ve made spectacular pies in cast iron, and it looks cool to deliver your pie in a skillet. There are two drawbacks to cast iron, however. The first is that the straight sides and lack of a lip make it more challenging to produce a gorgeous crimped edge. Also, you can’t store pies in the pan once cut (or if filling leaks underneath the crust) without messing up the pan’s seasoning. I found this out the hard way when a pan lost its perfect seasoning and I had to start over again.