How to transport a pie without wrecking it

Cold pies travel, hot pies do not

The single biggest decision is temperature. A pie fresh from the oven has a molten filling and pastry at its most fragile, and every corner taken in the car shifts the contents against the walls. Cooled completely, the filling sets into a sliceable solid, the pastry hardens, and the same pie becomes robust enough to survive a lap of the ring road.

So build your schedule backwards: bake early, cool for at least 2 hours at room temperature or overnight in the fridge, travel cold, and reheat at the other end. The reheat also re-crisps the pastry, which means the pie arrives at the table better than it would have survived the journey hot.

Step by step

This assumes a dish pie travelling by car. Hand pies barely need the checklist; a raised pie needs all of it.

1. Bake the pie the day before or early on the day, and cool it completely.
2. Leave it in its baking dish. The dish is the best pie carrier ever made.
3. Cover the top loosely with foil or an upturned bowl. Cling film pressed onto pastry sweats it soft.
4. Sit the dish in a snug box or roasting tin so it cannot slide, padding gaps with tea towels.
5. Place the box flat in the boot or a footwell. Never on a seat, which tilts, and never on a lap, which is a hostage situation.
6. Drive as though the pie were a driving examiner.
7. At the destination, reheat uncovered at 160C (325F) for 20 to 30 minutes until the centre is piping hot.
8. Rest for 5 minutes, then serve from the dish it travelled in.

Special cases

A hot water crust raised pie is the great traveller of the pie world, designed to be eaten cold and sturdy enough to be carried in a paper bag. If a picnic is the destination, consider making that the pie rather than persuading a saucy pot pie to do a job it hates.

For long journeys in warm weather, treat a chicken pie like the perishable it is: a cool bag with ice blocks for anything beyond half an hour, and keep it out of direct sun on the way from car to table. For a single pie in a lunchbox, a test of keeping a picnic pie's base crisp comes down to cooling it fully and wrapping it in paper rather than plastic, and a pie given as a present needs boxing that holds it still, as covered in this guide to sending pies as gifts.