The Best Pie Dishes

After narrowing the field based on input from our favorite pro bakers, we put nine pie dishes to the test. As it turned out, the best was also the least expensive—asimple Pyrex model。我们也爱两个陶瓷派锅, as well as one made with aninnovative combinationof ceramic and glass. Read below for what you should look for in a pie dish and the complete results of our testing. Happy baking.

最好的馅饼菜：

• Our favorite:Pyrex Basics 9" Pie Plate, atamazon.com
• Great ceramic pie dishes:贝克的优势陶瓷深盘馅饼板（在amazon.com），埃米尔·亨利现代经典馅饼菜（在amazon.com)
• Best of both worlds:Creo SmartGlass Pie Plate, atamazon.com

测试细节和方法,继续阅读。For more pie tools you need for perfect pastry-making:15个制作完美馅饼的糕点工具

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. Confused by the options? 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. Our conclusion: Sometimes the simplest tools really are the best.

为了组装我们的竞争者列表，并确定最通用，易于使用的多功能派板，我们调查了一些我们最喜欢的专业面包师的偏好，包括西雅图的烘焙教练派派夫人，派尔·麦克德莫特（Kate McDermott）和综合新食谱的作者The Art of the Pie; Genevieve Ko, a food writer, recipe developer and culinary consultant who recently penned更好的烘烤，关于烘焙经典的有益健康的现代曲折的集合；以及乔安妮·张（Joanne ChangFlour,面粉也是andBaking with Less Sugar。我们还访问了网络，咨询了亚马逊上的用户评论，并在其他已建立的烹饪和消费者网站上进行了综述。

When picking a roster of pie plates to test, we tried to include representatives from all the major categories. Outliers aside, most pie dishes tend to be 8 ½ to 10 inches in diameter (measured from inner lip to inner lip), 1 ½ to 2 inches deep, and fall generally into three material categories—metal, glass, or stoneware/ceramic—each with their own strengths and weaknesses.

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 overbrowning 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.

如果您将馅饼带到学校的Potluck或其他社区活动（或者像Joanne Chang一样，在她的面粉面包店中广泛使用它们，您正在准备的馅饼主要出售，则可以将箔馅饼罐带到学校的Potluck或其他社区活动（或者像Joanne Chang）一样，似乎是一个方便的选择。）但是，它们的脆弱结构会导致烘焙不平衡，并为大多数馅料提供不足的支持。凯特·麦克德莫特（Kate McDermott）提供了一种有用的解决方案：如果您必须使用一次性锅，将其烘烤在玻璃或陶瓷锅中 - 这将有助于进行热量分配并增加处理的稳定性 - 并且只有在冷却并准备好食用后将其删除。麦克德莫特说：“我曾经看到一个美丽的，吹热的苹果派在一次性锅中烤制的一半，当面包师把它从烤箱中取出时，我就会跌落到地板上。”“那是一个非常非常可悲的景象。”

玻璃馅饼盘中的Pyrex品牌最普遍，是无水的，负担得起的，可广泛的，并且通常是许多厨师学习的盘子。确实，因为它们的清晰材料使您可以看到底部的外壳何时结实，褐色且烘烤精美，所以它们可以成为所有经验水平的面包师的福音。他们还缓慢而均匀地进行热量，使馅饼的糕点和馅料以相同的中等速度烹饪（尽管这也意味着它们在烤箱中可能需要比金属对应物多几分钟）。近年来，消费者网站有reportedsome alarming stories of glass baking dishes "exploding" after moving from a hot oven to counters 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, or our friends and neighbors.

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 are sure to win appreciative comments when you present them at 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, like apple, 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.

A well-performing pie dish needs to do a lot more than look good. Namely: 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.

利用我们的个人收藏的馅饼盘子,expert recommendations, Amazon's most popular pans, and a few wildcard options thrown in for good measure, we began testing with a lineup of ten 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 (using这个品牌), prepare Food & Wine's classicdouble-crust apple pie（准备食物和葡萄酒亚搏电竞亚搏电竞全锅面团), and make the iconicLibby's pumpkin pie(using the recipe found on the back of the can).

Our favorite pie dish: Pyrex Basics 9" Pie Plate (available atamazon.com)

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 ½ inches deep and 9 inches wide, the Pyrex Basic 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. 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 was 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 flexibililty 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 (who also favors glass when baking at home): though not quite disposable, the low cost of the Pyrex Basic 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?"

Going into the testing process, the Emile Henry pan was our odds-on favorite. Having used one at home for years, we were always happy with its generous capacity, its consistently excellent browning and its elegant European looks—compliments we heard repeated by many of the experts we surveyed, including Kate McDermott. 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 specifically approved for use under the broiler, which, while certainly not an essential, only emphasized its versatility. Made by a family company in France from Burgundian clay, its pedigree was sterling, and seemed to justify what might seem 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.

贝克认为的优势深盘饼盘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, 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 ⅓-½ more oven time to recipes to achieve thoroughly baked results. But keeping those adjustments in mind, the results using Baker's Advantage were predictable and appealing: blind baked crusts turned out evenly browned and with little shrinkage, 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—and when we sliced into it, everyone marveled that the soft, jammy apples were still warm.

Still, while there was a lot to recommend both the Emile Henry and Baker's Advantage pans, when put through their paces alongside the Pyrex and other contenders, a few shortcomings emerged that kept them out of the top spot. Both produced deeply browned crusts without any sogginess, but the insides of both pans were not reliably nonstick, and removing clean slices of pumpkin or apple pie without leaving bits of the bottom crust behind proved tricky. Also, while the generous depth of the dishes ably contained the mountain of fruit called for in our apple pie recipe, after baking the fruit settled dramatically, causing the tall sides of the pan to leave a significant gap between the filling and the crispy top crust. Finally, 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.

Best of both worlds:Creo SmartGlass Pie Plate (available atamazon.com)

CREO Smartglass Pie板是一个相对崭新的市场，其目的是结合玻璃馅饼盘和陶瓷锅的最佳功能，并且很大程度上成功地做到了。它的手中轻巧宜人，将外部耐硼硅酸盐玻璃内饰与时尚的陶瓷外观配对，并在一系列漂亮的哑光色调中配对，导致盘子始终如一地进行pyrex和时尚，烤箱的热传导外观是Le Creuset或Emile Henry。盲烤的外壳变成了金色，破碎的酥脆，永不粘。南瓜馅饼烤了奶油，没有潮湿的底部。底线：如果您不介意花费额外的$ 10，那么这个锅是Pyrex Basic的一个有前途且非常漂亮的替代方法。我们将其旋转。

Williams Sonoma Gold Touch（$ 19 atWilliams-sonoma.com)

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(available atamazon.com)

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(available atamazon.com)

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 warrantee. 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英寸派板(available atamazon.com)

比我们最喜欢的玻璃锅宽略宽，并带有平坦的褶皱轮辋，这款馅饼被排除在外，因为它与基本的pyrex型号没有明显的好处，而且它的宽边缘在塑造和填充地壳时感到笨拙。

Camp Chef Cast Iron Pie Pan(available atamazon.com)

我们喜欢铸铁中的烘烤蛋糕和面包，以及材料强烈的热传导的方式，可以产生脆脆的边缘和坚固的金皮，因此我们很好奇地看到这种性能如何转化为馅饼制作。但是，尽管锅在制作苹果派期间表现出色，但它的侵略性保留使我们在盲烘烤期间几乎燃烧了我们的糕点，并使我们的蛋ust填充的时间变得困难。另外，即使您想玩铸铁烘烤，鉴于许多厨师已经有9英寸或10英寸cast iron skillet(which could do double duty as a pie plate, if desired) in their arsenal, buying this stand alone pan is probably an unnecessary expense.