Whip Up the Perfect Apple Pie This Fall With a New Pie Dish

To bake or not to bake a pie? The answer is always bake that pie, and maybe bake a cobbler tomorrow, too. But as all bakers know, not all pie plates (also known as pie dishes) are created equal. Not only in terms of, you know, diameter, but also in terms of material, edge qualities (straight, slightly wavy, or crimped to the max), and more. The magic, of course, is in the TLC you put in each pie, but a good pie plate goes a long way to change your dessert fate.

Best Pie Plates

• Best Overall: Pyrex 9-Inch Pie Dish
• Runner-Up: Great Jones Sweetie Pie
• Best for Fluted Pie Crusts: UNICASA Pie Dish
• No-Frills Pie Plate: Cuisinox Non-Stick Pie Pan
• Best for Quiche: ZONESUM 10.2-Inch Pie Pan
• Prettiest Design: BIA Cordon Bleu Quatro Pie Dish
• Best Small Pie Plate: NUTRIUPS 6.5-Inch Small Glass Pie Dish
• Best Mini Pie Pan: Aunt Shannon's Kitchen Porcelain Ceramic Individual Mini Pie Pans
• Best Luxury Pie Plate: Le Creuset Stoneware Pie Dish, 9-Inch
• Best Pie Plate and Lid Set: OXO Good Grips Glass Pie Plate with Lid

What to Consider

When buying a pie plate, you’ll have to think about several factors. Pie plates come in a variety of sizes ranging from small ramekins if you’re making individual cobblers for a dinner party, to ten inches and larger. A 10-inch pie plate holds about eight large slices of pie or 10 smaller slices of pie, so think about how large your typical audience will be in Dessert-ville before purchasing.

Material, too, matters. Pie plates come in glass (great for heat conduction; you can easily check on your crust’s progress thanks to the transparent factor), ceramic (they also conduct heat quite well, but their main selling point is their “wow factor” on the table), and utilitarian metal (we like these best for blind-baking crusts). Disposable pie pans are also an option, but we’re all about eco-friendly choices.

One word for the wise: Baking in an aluminum pan means your pie or whatever you’re making will cook faster, while glassware is slower to heat up than metal but will retain the heat longer, so that apple pie you left on the counter before eating dinner, will likely stay warm until it’s time for dessert. Ceramic pie dishes heat up even slower than glass or metal, but they tend to be deeper than these other two types of dishes, so if you prefer thicker pies and/or like the aesthetics of ceramic pie plates, these are your best bet.

When selecting a pie plate, you also want something that can go straight from the freezer to the oven if you’re someone who like to food prep ahead of time. For our lazy souls, dishwasher- and oven-safe pie plates are great features to have. Last but not least, consider price. A good pie plate runs the gamut from about $10 for a budget buy to $80 for a splurge (and even more if it’s a one-of-a-kind piece or small-batch release from an independent pottery studio or local artist).

How We Evaluated

Yes, there was apple pie baked in our house. But quiche, cobblers, tarts, savory pies, and more can all be baked up in this versatile piece of cookware. For this sugar-fueled task, we baked up dozens of fruit pies with recipes from our quarantine bible, The Four & Twenty Blackbirds Pie Book, but we also blind-baked several crusts (i.e., baking the crust sans filling), to make sure the crusts came out even and without breaking apart.

We also pored over customer reviews to see what home cooks had to say about the pie plates, and even consulted with our sage French baking genie, a professional chef in a teaching kitchen, to make sure our picks had their stamp of approval.