The Best Ready-Made Graham Cracker Crusts

To determine which was the best store-bought option, we bought four top-selling nationally available graham crusts, including one gluten-free crust, and asked 21 staff members to taste them plain and in our Lemon Icebox Pie.

“Graham” is just another term for coarsely ground whole-wheat flour; it refers to Sylvester Graham, a prominent 19th-century preacher who encouraged eating a bland, whole-grain diet as a way to stave off temptation and lust. Sugary, nutty graham cracker crusts made primarily from enriched wheat flour (a misleading term for plain white flour) scarcely resemble the bland bricks Graham envisioned, but they still usually contain at least traces of whole-wheat flour. It’s no surprise, then, that tasters immediately singled out one crust: the gluten-free product, which was made with rice flour, tapioca starch, and “natural graham flavor” instead of wheat flour. It was, in short, unpalatable—crumbly, chalky, and mushy, with a lingering array of fruity and vegetal aftertastes. We vastly preferred products that stuck to a mixture of white and whole-wheat flours, which produced the subtle, slightly nutty flavor and tender texture we were looking for.

But that’s not to say products made from wheat flour were completely free from texture problems. One wheat-flour crust was gritty and shattered into hundreds of tiny pieces when we sliced into it. A comparison of the ingredient labels revealed that it contained less fat than our top-ranked products—4 grams per 21-gram serving, compared with 5 grams in our favorite crusts. Flour needs fat to create structure and shape; products with more fat were tender and moist and could be cut into pristine, neat slices. Though none of the products contain butter (like our homemade graham cracker crust does), we found that those with enough vegetable oil could replicate the moist, even crumb we like in graham crusts.

Flavor was important, too. A good crust is a supporting actor—it should add some pizzazz but not steal the show—so any crusts with overpowering sweetness or distracting strong flavors were out. Sweetness in the crusts came from a variety of sources: granulated sugar, corn syrup, molasses, honey, and cane syrup. While the types of sweeteners didn’t seem to matter, the total amount of sugar was paramount, with our favorite products having about 6 grams of sugar per 21-gram serving—a gram less than lower-ranked crusts. Though this difference amounts to only about ¼ teaspoon of sugar per slice of pie, we found that it was enough to draw the line between a crust that was cloyingly sweet and one that was pleasantly sugary.

Our favorite crust was made by Keebler, the company that also makes our winning graham crackers. Like those crackers, Keebler Ready Crust Graham Pie Crust had a subtly wheaty, slightly savory flavor that finished with a punch of sweetness.

We did want to be sure about one last thing before we awarded the Keebler crust top honors. When we tasted store-bought pastry pie crusts, we found that the prefitted shells were smaller than our winning pie plate, so they couldn’t hold all the pie filling for our recipes (this was one reason why we preferred roll-style pastry crusts). To make sure this wasn’t the case with our winning graham crust, we double-checked its capacity by filling it with 4 cups of pudding, about ½ cup more filling than most of our recipes yield—including our Lemon Icebox Pie. The filling fit just fine, so we’re confident this crust provides a handy shortcut when a homemade crust isn’t an option.