We just saw this simple yet brilliant tip over at Martha Stewart: Transport your holiday pies from your oven to Grandma's house inside a bamboo steamer basket.
These round, tall bamboo boxes are the perfect shape and size to carry a pie — maybe even two or three pies, depending on the height of your pie and the size of the steamer basket.
• Hostess Gift Ideas: Pie Carrier at Martha Stewart
Steamer baskets are true multi-functional workhorses of the kitchen; they're traditionally used for making steamed dumplings and pork buns, but they are also great for steaming vegetables, fish, and meat. They make great lunchboxes too.
• Find it: Norpro Deluxe 3-Piece Bamboo Steamer Set, $17.99 at Amazon.
You can also find these easily at Asian grocery stores and supermarkets — probably for even less than the Amazon set listed above.
Do you use steamer baskets? What do you use them for? And how do you carry your pies from one place to another? Do you have another trick for getting them there in one piece?
More pie carriers:
• On the Move: Three Good Pie Carriers
• Dessert on the Go: Vintage Cake Carriers
• Outdoor Dining: A Pie Carrier
(Image: Martha Stewart)
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So I do think this is a great idea - but can someone that has used one of these tell me - how exactly do you get the pie in and out without tipping it?
That is brilliant. I'm constantly running around town with baked goods in tupperware, and constantly worried they'll be ruined. Maybe one day someone will give me a cupcake carrier.
I had four or five pies to transport to my nephew's house one Thanksgiving. I got out my largest stockpot (truly a monstrous thing), my dinner plates and some masking tape.
I used the masking tape to make 1" - 2" tabs on opposite sides of the dinner plates. The first dinner plate went into the stockpot on the bottom, right-side-up. A pie was stacked on top of the plate, then the next dinner plate went into the stockpot upside-down (to keep from crushing the pie). The next pie sat on the upside-down plate. I continued alternating upside-down plates and pies until the stockpot was full.
When I arrived at my nephew's house, I simply used the tape tabs on each plate to lift out the pie and plate it was resting on simultaneously. Every pie made it to Thanksgiving and not a single crumb was broken off the crusts in the process.
Tessler, that is brilliant. Are you an engineer? :)