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The Challenger Bread Pan Aced Our Bake Tests, but Most Novices Don’t Need It

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A loaf of bread inside of the Challenger pan, with the pan's lid shown next to it.
Photo: Ben Keough
Ben Keough

By Ben Keough

Ben Keough is an editor covering cameras, working from home, powering, and hobbies. He also writes about coffee, beer, and food for Wirecutter.

Bread is elemental: flour, water, salt, and yeast. All you need to transform it from raw dough into something delicious is heat, as well as a vessel to keep that heat from escaping. For home bakers, that vessel is usually a Dutch oven, which captures the steam to create a burnished, blistered crust (mimicking the effect of the steam-injection ovens that commercial bakeries use). Great Dutch ovens can be quite cheap and can last a lifetime, which is why I did a double-take when I saw the $299 price tag on the Insta-popular Challenger Bread Pan.

Why so pricey? The PR line is that unlike the traditional Dutch oven, which was merely adopted by bakers, the Challenger was made for them. Similar to my go-to bread pan, the Lodge Combo Cooker, the Challenger is made of preseasoned bare cast iron and has an inverted Dutch oven design that functions like a bread cloche, with a tall, domed top and a low-sided bottom that makes dough easier to load. But it differs from the Combo Cooker in some key ways: First, the Challenger’s cast iron is thicker than the Lodge’s, in theory capable of absorbing and retaining more heat during the bake. Second, the Bread Pan’s shape is rectangular rather than circular, so it can accommodate batards and demi baguettes as well as boules. And finally, the Challenger has handles on both sides of the base, plus two on the lid, making it easier to maneuver in a hot oven.

For me—an experienced but inexpert home baker who’s always looking to improve the end product—the real question was whether the extra $250 or so would actually give me noticeably better bread. And if not, was there a cheaper option that might provide some of the same ergonomic benefits?

Researching competitors, I came to realize that the Challenger Bread Pan has carved out its own niche as a purely bread-focused cast-iron baking vessel. In the end, I was able to find only one other pan that offered anything like its combination of features: the 12-quart Golden Spike Oval Roaster from Camp Chef. Although it’s really designed to roast chickens or cook casseroles over a campfire, the Golden Spike Oval Roaster has a flat, shallow lid that you can invert to use as a baking surface, just as on the Challenger Bread Pan and the Lodge Combo Cooker.

The Golden Spike oval pan, the Challenger pan, and the Lodge pan, shown side by side.
Photo: Ben Keough

There’s really only one way to test bread pans, and that’s to bake in them. So for a couple of months, I baked four loaves a week using my standard two-loaf sourdough recipe (PDF). (Yes, that’s upwards of 32 loaves. No, I didn’t eat all of them myself.)

For some bakes, I split the loaves between two different baking vessels. For others, I used the same pan but varied the baking time, the temperature, or the shape of the loaves, trying to find the parameters that would consistently produce the crunchy, dark, Tartine-style crust I crave while retaining a tender, moist crumb. In almost every case, I preheated the cookware for 30 minutes at 500 degrees Fahrenheit before loading the dough, baked for 20 minutes covered at 450 °F, and then let it go uncovered until the result was browned to my liking. During each bake, I took notes on ergonomics and other practical considerations.

A side-by-side image of the handles of the Challenger pan and the Golden Spike pan, showing the easier to hold handles on the Challenger pan.
The Challenger Bread Pan’s wide, D-shaped handles (left) are easier to grab than the Golden Spike Oval Roaster’s smaller, rounded handles—especially when the Oval Roaster is inverted. Photo: Ben Keough

Once I got down to testing, it quickly became apparent that although the Golden Spike Oval Roaster is a substantial, beautiful piece of cast-iron cookware that is perfectly capable of baking a beautiful loaf, it’s far from an ideal choice for home bakers. Its small handles and extremely top-heavy nature (when inverted) make it tough to maneuver, as does its sheer bulk. At about 20.5 inches wide, it’s almost 6 inches wider than the Challenger, and just a few inches narrower than my 5-cubic-foot oven. And at 26 pounds, it’s more than twice as heavy as the Lodge Combo Cooker and 4 pounds heavier than the Challenger Bread Pan, even though it’s made of thinner cast iron.

After setting the Golden Spike Oval Roaster aside, I got down to putting the Challenger Bread Pan through its paces, comparing it directly with my trusty Lodge Combo Cooker. Here are the key points where they differed:

  • Ergonomics: Although the Challenger is much larger and heavier than the Lodge, it delivers on its promise of improved handling. The D-shaped handles on the bottom reduce wrist strain both when you’re loading the pan into the oven and when you’re pulling it out (though I’d prefer them to be angled up a bit more), while the handles on the lid make it easier for you to remove the top after the steam portion of the bake is finished. In contrast, the stick-shaped handles on one side of the Lodge make maneuvering the pan more difficult, and when the handles on the top and bottom halves align, it can be slightly tricky (especially with oven-mitted hands) to remove the top half after your loaf is done steaming.
  • Preheat time: The thicker cast iron of the Challenger pan means it takes longer to preheat than the Lodge. In general, I found that it needed at least 30 minutes at 500 °F to produce the dark, crispy crust I prefer, and I got even better results (with prettier blistering) when I preheated it for closer to an hour before loading my dough. The Lodge, in contrast, produces similarly browned loaves with just 10 to 15 minutes of preheating, and you can use it straight out of the cupboard if you prefer a lighter crust.
  • Cook time: Once the Challenger heats up, it retains and radiates considerably more heat than the Lodge. In bake after bake, my Challenger loaves browned and reached the desired internal temperature faster than my Lodge loaves. After some experimentation, I was able to achieve the same crust color and crumb texture with a 45-minute bake in the Challenger as I did with 55 minutes in the Lodge.
  • Flexibility: With its roomy, rectangular design, the Challenger accommodates boules, batards, and demi baguettes with ease. I’ve tried baking batards in my Combo Cooker, and while it’s technically possible, due to the tight confines I’ve never been able to produce a full-size batard that wasn’t malformed. Baguettes? No chance. That said, the Combo Cooker has a different kind of versatility: It’s designed so that you can use it with the deeper pan on the bottom for making chili, say, or frying chicken. The Challenger, in contrast, is a pure unitasker.
  • Storage: Unless you have an especially large kitchen with lots of cabinet space, you’ll struggle to find a convenient place to store the Challenger Bread Pan. Whereas my Lodge Combo Cooker stacks snugly with the other cast-iron skillets in our collection, the Challenger’s shape gives it a unique footprint. For lack of a better place to keep it, I ended up leaving it in the oven between bakes, annoying my partner to no end. (There’s nothing like preheating the oven only to find a blazing hot lump of iron waiting for you inside.)
A loaf of bread baked in the Challenger Bread Pan, shown cooling after being baked.
Photo: Ben Keough

The Challenger Bread Pan produces beautiful loaves, and it provides real advantages over cheaper baking vessels. Even so, the sky-high price makes it hard to give the pan a blanket recommendation.

If you’re a novice baker, especially one who is not yet sure whether you’ll stick with the hobby, skip the Challenger. You can bake bread that’s just as good in a Lodge Combo Cooker, which costs less than a quarter of the price. Yes, the Lodge will limit you to boules or downsized batards, and baking them will take a little longer. But you don’t need to preheat the Lodge as long, and the bread will still be delicious. Another upside: Your Lodge pan will be easier to store and useful for making more than just bread.

But if you’re an experienced baker who wants the best baking experience available—or if you’re hunting for a gift that will impress a bread-obsessed friend—the Challenger delivers. Yes, it’s a unitasker, and yes, it takes up a lot of space. But it will produce the bread you want and give you the flexibility to make a variety of loaf types in the same pan. No other baking vessel we’ve seen offers the same combination of features and quality.

Meet your guide

Ben Keough

Ben Keough is the supervising editor for Wirecutter's working from home, powering, cameras, and hobbies and games coverage. He previously spent more than a decade writing about cameras, printers, and other office equipment for Wirecutter, Reviewed, USA Today, and Digital Camera HQ. After four years testing printers, he definitively confirmed that they all suck, but some suck less than others.

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