Tin for Chocolate Key Lime Pie

Our answer

Nigella's Key Lime Pie (from Kitchen) is made in a 23cm/9-inch aluminium loose-bottomed tart or flan tin - sometimes labelled as a quiche tin. The photograph of the pie, on p159 of Kitchen, does show a crust made in a tin with fairly small flutes and recently most tins for sale seem to have larger flutes. However this will not affect the recipe in any way and a tin with larger flutes is fine.

Jane Asher sells tart tins with smaller flutes on her website. These are called "French fluted tart tins" and are available in several sizes.

As far as we are aware the tins with larger flutes are available in both Divertimenti and John Lewis, and are available from these stores on-line if they don't have them in your particular store (John Lewis also have an "order and collect" service in some Waitrose stores). There is also a brand called Silverwood who make this size tart tins and they are available in many cookware stores and also via Amazon.

A loose-bottomed tin is useful as it is easy to remove the sides of the tin from the pie and this in turn makes it easy to cut the pie and serve it in neat slices. If a loose bottomed tin is still proving to be elusive then it should be possible to make the pie in a 23cm/9-inch pie dish, but you may find that removing the first slice of pie could require a little dexterity. However once the first slice has been removed it is usually fairly easy to cleanly cut and remove further sices.