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According to Cooks Illustrated:

There’s a good reason angel food and chiffon cakes are always baked in tube pans, and it’s not just aesthetics. These specialty vessels actually help delicate cakes rise. Because egg foam–based cakes like angel food and chiffon contain very little flour, and therefore very little of the structure-building network called gluten, the batter needs something to cling to as it bakes, or it will collapse. Enter the tube pan’s tall sides: As the egg foam heats up, it will climb up the sides (and conical center) of the pan. Well Risen vs Collapsed Angel food cake

This website even claims that you shouldn't grease the pan because

the batter “clings” to the side of the pan as it rises. You will not get as much rise if it is greased.


The above statements seem to be pretty common belief. However, [JoePastry.com][4] discounts them.

It’s a popular myth that the center tube gives an angel food cake more surface area to “grip” as it rises. The reality is that cakes don’t “hold on” to pan sides, nor do they receive “support” from pan walls other than to simply be contained by them. For cake layers the name of the game is heat. The quicker it penetrates the mass of batter all the way through to the center, the more evenly the cake bakes. Pan walls facilitate that heat transfer, which is why batter near pan surfaces rises and sets faster than the batter that’s further away.

I cannot find any other source that supports this.


**Does the center tube help support the Angel Food cake?**

Or does it just help get heat to the center of the cake?

I would have posted this on cooking.se, but it already has concluded that the pan is for support.

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    You might consider posting the Joe Pastry excerpt as an answer to the Cooking.SE question. Also, whether or not greasing the pan helps or hurts could be a separate question entirely. – Brythan Apr 22 '18 at 03:37
  • @Brythan Good ideas. I took out my question about the grease. I am planning on writing an answer to the cooking.se question _if_ we find that the current one is wrong. – user Apr 22 '18 at 04:12
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    This question would be amenable to scientific experimentation. One pan with a thin-walled copper or aluminium tube coated with Teflon, providing heat but not support. Another pan with a center tube made of aerogel or similar insulator, providing the opposite. – Foo Bar May 05 '18 at 12:07
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    I've always assumed that it has to do with evenly heating the batter, vs cooking the edges first, as the flat pan would tend to do. – Daniel R Hicks May 11 '18 at 23:01
  • Cooks Illustrated is itself a reputable source. It's run by America's Test Kitchen, takes no advertising, and extensively tests their recipes. And here is ATK making the same claims. https://youtu.be/37FwFTS3P9Y – Schwern Oct 20 '20 at 04:46

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