Sounds like you might have the pot pie too high in your oven, or that the top coils of your particular oven are heating to a higher temperature than the bottom ones.

To compensate for eithr of those, try moving the cooking rack lower... if that ends up too low, then just put the pie on a metal pie pan or glass baking dish, etc., to raise it a bit higher, or even on a block of wood or a couple of logs of scrunched aluminum foil.

You can buy a cheap oven thermometer from a grocery or Walmart, etc., then check the temps in differnet parts of your particular oven if you want to see if that could be true, and also to get true specific temps for your oven.

Do be aware though that the bottom and side crusts of a pot pie will never brown and crisp up the way the top will because their moisture is trapped. So if that's what you're thinking of, the only option for crispy crust on all sides would be to do something like you're doing (perhaps just with the bottom crust baked alone), or I think some of those pot pies come in containers which are coated with a "self-browning" material.**

**There's also a special browning paper (in a roll like waxed paper) that you can buy at the grocery store which could work if you cut a round piece to put under the frozen bottom inside the metal container, but don't know. I just looked at mine (it's called "Microcrisp" microwave crisping/browning wrap) but guess that's only for the microwave.

Diane B.

Diane B.