When Baking Fall Pies, Reach For This Pyrex Dish

Aromatic with warming spices, fall pies are the height of comfort food. The heady combo of a crisp and buttery crust paired with a generously sweet filling is nostalgic, cozy, and guaranteed to please if you do it right. However, make a mistake with baking the pastry and you can end up with a sloppy pie that can't be portioned into neat wedges. A simple way to guarantee that your pastry is structurally sound is to reach for a Pyrex pie plate versus a metal one.

Pyrex dishes are made of a material called borosilicate glass, which makes it stronger than ceramic bakeware or other types of glass, like soda lime. Aside from its durability and strength, a Pyrex dish also heats up gently and distributes that heat evenly across itself. This makes it perfect for preparing pies, as the crust will bake uniformly across the base, ensuring there aren't any burnt or undercooked areas. This results in a pumpkin, sweet potato, or apple pie that has a wonderfully crisp bottom.

You can use any shape of Pyrex dish, from round, rectangular, and oval styles, however, for that quintessential look, go for a shallow circular pie plate that's accented with fluted details around the circumference. While metal pie plates can do a similar job, they heat up more quickly, which can cause the pastry to cook too quickly before the filling has had enough time to soften. This makes them useful for blind baking but not ideal for preparing filled pies.

The other perk of using a clear Pyrex pie plate is that you can monitor the doneness of the base and sides with ease. If one side is baking faster than the other, you can simply rotate the dish in the oven while it bakes to guarantee the pastry is evenly golden across its surface. In a Reddit thread discussing the pros and cons of using borosilicate glass pie dishes, one fan summed up all of the perks of Pyrex in one comment; "In my own personal experience, I have an easier time slicing & serving pies from glass. If you get the metal pans with a non-stick coating, you're in danger of damaging it when using a sharp/serrated knife. Plus you can see what's going on with your crust — if your bottom is undercooked, you can lift the pie and see that." Meanwhile, another said, "Glass is good and can last years, even decades if you take good care of it".

Dishes made of borosilicate glass are chemically inert (they don't react with anything placed inside) and are also designed to handle quick temperature changes. This thermal shock resistance means you can prep and freeze your pie in advance and take it straight from the freezer to the oven. However, you shouldn't broil food in Pyrex dishes, as direct heat can cause them to shatter.