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On January 11, I wrote about the appearances of the bottoms of cookies which had been baked on different pans to the point when each cookie looked the same on top. Today I will write about both tops and bottoms, when the cookies are baked to an equal amount of crispness.
I said before that it is highly desirable to have the tops and bottoms look about the same. Some baking sheets deliver much more heat more quickly to the bottoms of cookies than others, and the former make the bottoms brown more quickly than the tops.
The photo on the right shows eight vertical pairs of cookies in four rows. The view shows:
Row 1: tops of cookies baked on these pans, in order left to right:
15 x 14 aluminum insulated
I said before that it is highly desirable to have the tops and bottoms look about the same. Some baking sheets deliver much more heat more quickly to the bottoms of cookies than others, and the former make the bottoms brown more quickly than the tops.
The photo on the right shows eight vertical pairs of cookies in four rows. The view shows:
Row 1: tops of cookies baked on these pans, in order left to right:
15 x 14 aluminum insulated
15 x 14 Goldtouch insulated
13 x 9 Good Cook
13 x 12 Good Cook/Oneida slide-off (non-stick)
Row 2: bottoms of cookies baked on the same pans as row 1
Row 3: tops of cookies baked on these pans, in order left to right:
15 x 14 Good Cook/Oneida slide-off (non-stick)
Row 2: bottoms of cookies baked on the same pans as row 1
Row 3: tops of cookies baked on these pans, in order left to right:
15 x 14 Good Cook/Oneida slide-off (non-stick)
15.25 x 10.25 Wilton Everglide (non-stick)
16 x 14 Williams-Sonoma Commercial Quality Cookie Sheet
15 x 12 Chicago Metallic jelly roll pan (non-stick)
Row 4: bottoms of cookies baked on the same pans as row 3
All the cookies were baked to the same degree of doneness. Ignore the pockmarks in the cookies, which are from a defective recipe or procedure. They do not affect what is of relevance here.
Only two pans baked the cookies fully without browning either the tops or the bottoms of the cookies. They were both insulated pans.
Only one other pan yielded identically and evenly-browned tops and bottoms, with both top and bottom just barely and pleasantly browned. That was the Williams-Sonoma Commercial Quality Cookie Sheet, which is a heavy-weight traditional finish baking sheet. The browning on these cookies was not really noticeable except when the cookies are placed next to the unbrowned cookies from the insulated pans.
Two other pans yielded nearly unbrowned tops and moderately-browned bottoms, with the browning strongest just around the edges: the Wilton EverGlide sheet and the Chicago Metallic Jelly Roll Pan. These are both heavy-weight non-stick pans.
The light-weight pan with traditional finish - and the least expensive pan - delivered cookies that were notably browned on both top and bottom. The color was even across both tops and bottoms. The cookies did not appear burnt, but the browning was obvious.
The two moderate-weight non-stick pans both yielded cookies that were just browned around the edges on top but very significantly browned on the bottom. The larger of the two, which had the higher density, browned the bottom to, in my opinion, a totally unacceptable degree.
It was interesting that two of the pans did not have the cookies spread as much as the others - the shiny very light-weight traditional finish pan and the larger-sized medium-weight non-stick pan which had higher density than its smaller Good Cook/Oneida twin which did have the cookies spread. I don't understand enough about baking to be able to explain why the cookies spread on most pans, but not all. I saw that cookies from exactly the same batch spread on some pans but not the others, so it wasn't just because some cookies were somehow made differently.
Obviously some of the cookies look horrible. On one hand it's the fault of the recipe or procedure, but on the other hand, the same dough makes decent-looking cookies on other pans. What seems to happen is that if the cookies get too hot, the dough collapses. Whether it's a defect in the recipe or a mismatch of pan to recipe or procedure is debateable, but it's obviously better if a pan can even do well by fragile recipes. I don't make overly much of the pockmarked appearance of the cookies on some pans. However, this difference in behavior shows an interesting contrast between how various pans bake cookies. Some pans deliver a lower level of constant heat over a long period of time, and some pans apparently keep getting hotter and hotter until towards the end of the short baking time they are way too hot for some cookies and weak dough may collapse and bottoms brown.
Some cookies actually look best when they are a little brown. We are very used to seeing brown chocolate chip cookies. If someone gave you a chocolate chip cookie that wasn't brown, would it seem "right" to you? It would sure seem weird to me! We don't really want all our cookies to be white. But the appearance of these cookies from the insulated pans and the Williams-Sonoma Commercial Quality Baking Sheet is superior to any of the others, in my opinion, and the taste is totally without any hint of burning. All the cookies are edible if you can take the appearance, but flavor of the cookies from the Good Cook/Oneida pans and the light-weight Good Cook pan is not so great because they got much browner, and if those were my only baking pans I'd think about replacing them based on what I've seen with this recipe.
There's one big caution against jumping to conclusions, though - parchment paper and especially baking mats or baking pads are supposed to have significant effects. One could resort to them on pans that are otherwise inferior. On the other hand, those items aren't free, so it might still be most economical to simply buy better pans, unless you are already set in your methods.
For most of my life I only had very inexpensive pans not too different from the light-weight Good Cook pan I just said I would replace if it were my only baking sheet. Unfortunately I don't have any of those older pans to test with now. It's possible they were slightly heavier and gave different results. But I have a feeling that, more likely, they made lesser cookies and I just ate them however they came out. It's quite possible that the light-weight pan works pretty well for some recipes, and not so well for others. As I continue to try various cookie recipes in the future, I'll see if there are some recipes that work great with the cheap pan, and others that don't. We can't all afford to go out and spend $35+ on a pair of really nice baking sheets, and it would be really nice to have some recipes that work great even on cheap baking sheets!
As for the Good Cook or Oneida slide-off pans, I guess I don't think much of them at this point. I commented about the poor handle design earlier, and the baking results with this recipe aren't very good either. I have a feeling they do give decent results with some recipes, but every time I look at them I'll be thinking, "Oh, here I go again with those pans." I suppose I'll continue to test with them just because they're an example of inexpensive medium-weight non-stick baking sheets. But when I make Christmas cookie in the future, I doubt I'll even consider using them.
The two heavyweight non-stick pans, the Wilton EasyGlide and Chicago metallic jelly roll pans, don't come out on top with this recipe, but one thing I noticed about both of them was that every cookie looked almost the same. That was actually pretty impressive. The same was true of the best three pans, of which two were insulated and one was quite heavy-weight. I think near sameness of appearance is the quality one gets from using heavy-weight baking sheets that distribute heat pretty evently across the entire surface. I mentioned in a previous post that most recipes for butter cookies say "bake until slightly browned around the edges." That's exactly the condition that marks "done" for this recipe when using these two pans, and considering that and the evenness of baking, they are really very high quality pans. I would choose one of the top three for butter cookies rather than one of these two, but I think there are probably many recipes for which either of these will prove to give nice results, perhaps even slightly superior to the others.
It's interesting that the best three pans for this recipe all seem to be traditional finish pans rather than non-stick. There is a reason why people use non-stick instead of traditional finish pans! Cookies from this recipe never stick to the pan because of all the butter they contain. I know for sure that's not true of all recipes. I bet there are plenty of recipes where I will vastly prefer the convenience of the non-stick, and be glad to sacrifice whatever advantage there might be from one of the other pans.
Although I have purchased and started to use eight different baking sheets, there are at least dozens and probably hundreds if not thousands of baking sheets being manufactured. I probably have some pan fairly similar to most of them, but, for example, I don't have a non-stick insulated baking sheet. In addition, Williams-Sonoma sells a simple non-stick baking sheet (not insulated) under the Goldtouch label. It's probably also manufactured by Chicago Metallic. I looked at it. The finish is actually gold-toned, rather than gray-ish like all the other non-stick pans I have. I'm very curious whether it behaves differently from the pans I have in any significant way. In short, I don't have representatives of all the variations on pans there are, and it's virtually certain there are some great pans I won't be looking at or mentioning. It's a matter of time and money - I just can't go buy all of them! Or calibrate all of them, or bake cookies on all of them. But if people can learn how to make great cookies reproducibly as a result of learning how things go for me with the pans I have, I'll be happy and I hope others will be too. :-)
Row 4: bottoms of cookies baked on the same pans as row 3
All the cookies were baked to the same degree of doneness. Ignore the pockmarks in the cookies, which are from a defective recipe or procedure. They do not affect what is of relevance here.
Only two pans baked the cookies fully without browning either the tops or the bottoms of the cookies. They were both insulated pans.
Only one other pan yielded identically and evenly-browned tops and bottoms, with both top and bottom just barely and pleasantly browned. That was the Williams-Sonoma Commercial Quality Cookie Sheet, which is a heavy-weight traditional finish baking sheet. The browning on these cookies was not really noticeable except when the cookies are placed next to the unbrowned cookies from the insulated pans.
Two other pans yielded nearly unbrowned tops and moderately-browned bottoms, with the browning strongest just around the edges: the Wilton EverGlide sheet and the Chicago Metallic Jelly Roll Pan. These are both heavy-weight non-stick pans.
The light-weight pan with traditional finish - and the least expensive pan - delivered cookies that were notably browned on both top and bottom. The color was even across both tops and bottoms. The cookies did not appear burnt, but the browning was obvious.
The two moderate-weight non-stick pans both yielded cookies that were just browned around the edges on top but very significantly browned on the bottom. The larger of the two, which had the higher density, browned the bottom to, in my opinion, a totally unacceptable degree.
It was interesting that two of the pans did not have the cookies spread as much as the others - the shiny very light-weight traditional finish pan and the larger-sized medium-weight non-stick pan which had higher density than its smaller Good Cook/Oneida twin which did have the cookies spread. I don't understand enough about baking to be able to explain why the cookies spread on most pans, but not all. I saw that cookies from exactly the same batch spread on some pans but not the others, so it wasn't just because some cookies were somehow made differently.
Obviously some of the cookies look horrible. On one hand it's the fault of the recipe or procedure, but on the other hand, the same dough makes decent-looking cookies on other pans. What seems to happen is that if the cookies get too hot, the dough collapses. Whether it's a defect in the recipe or a mismatch of pan to recipe or procedure is debateable, but it's obviously better if a pan can even do well by fragile recipes. I don't make overly much of the pockmarked appearance of the cookies on some pans. However, this difference in behavior shows an interesting contrast between how various pans bake cookies. Some pans deliver a lower level of constant heat over a long period of time, and some pans apparently keep getting hotter and hotter until towards the end of the short baking time they are way too hot for some cookies and weak dough may collapse and bottoms brown.
Some cookies actually look best when they are a little brown. We are very used to seeing brown chocolate chip cookies. If someone gave you a chocolate chip cookie that wasn't brown, would it seem "right" to you? It would sure seem weird to me! We don't really want all our cookies to be white. But the appearance of these cookies from the insulated pans and the Williams-Sonoma Commercial Quality Baking Sheet is superior to any of the others, in my opinion, and the taste is totally without any hint of burning. All the cookies are edible if you can take the appearance, but flavor of the cookies from the Good Cook/Oneida pans and the light-weight Good Cook pan is not so great because they got much browner, and if those were my only baking pans I'd think about replacing them based on what I've seen with this recipe.
There's one big caution against jumping to conclusions, though - parchment paper and especially baking mats or baking pads are supposed to have significant effects. One could resort to them on pans that are otherwise inferior. On the other hand, those items aren't free, so it might still be most economical to simply buy better pans, unless you are already set in your methods.
For most of my life I only had very inexpensive pans not too different from the light-weight Good Cook pan I just said I would replace if it were my only baking sheet. Unfortunately I don't have any of those older pans to test with now. It's possible they were slightly heavier and gave different results. But I have a feeling that, more likely, they made lesser cookies and I just ate them however they came out. It's quite possible that the light-weight pan works pretty well for some recipes, and not so well for others. As I continue to try various cookie recipes in the future, I'll see if there are some recipes that work great with the cheap pan, and others that don't. We can't all afford to go out and spend $35+ on a pair of really nice baking sheets, and it would be really nice to have some recipes that work great even on cheap baking sheets!
As for the Good Cook or Oneida slide-off pans, I guess I don't think much of them at this point. I commented about the poor handle design earlier, and the baking results with this recipe aren't very good either. I have a feeling they do give decent results with some recipes, but every time I look at them I'll be thinking, "Oh, here I go again with those pans." I suppose I'll continue to test with them just because they're an example of inexpensive medium-weight non-stick baking sheets. But when I make Christmas cookie in the future, I doubt I'll even consider using them.
The two heavyweight non-stick pans, the Wilton EasyGlide and Chicago metallic jelly roll pans, don't come out on top with this recipe, but one thing I noticed about both of them was that every cookie looked almost the same. That was actually pretty impressive. The same was true of the best three pans, of which two were insulated and one was quite heavy-weight. I think near sameness of appearance is the quality one gets from using heavy-weight baking sheets that distribute heat pretty evently across the entire surface. I mentioned in a previous post that most recipes for butter cookies say "bake until slightly browned around the edges." That's exactly the condition that marks "done" for this recipe when using these two pans, and considering that and the evenness of baking, they are really very high quality pans. I would choose one of the top three for butter cookies rather than one of these two, but I think there are probably many recipes for which either of these will prove to give nice results, perhaps even slightly superior to the others.
It's interesting that the best three pans for this recipe all seem to be traditional finish pans rather than non-stick. There is a reason why people use non-stick instead of traditional finish pans! Cookies from this recipe never stick to the pan because of all the butter they contain. I know for sure that's not true of all recipes. I bet there are plenty of recipes where I will vastly prefer the convenience of the non-stick, and be glad to sacrifice whatever advantage there might be from one of the other pans.
Although I have purchased and started to use eight different baking sheets, there are at least dozens and probably hundreds if not thousands of baking sheets being manufactured. I probably have some pan fairly similar to most of them, but, for example, I don't have a non-stick insulated baking sheet. In addition, Williams-Sonoma sells a simple non-stick baking sheet (not insulated) under the Goldtouch label. It's probably also manufactured by Chicago Metallic. I looked at it. The finish is actually gold-toned, rather than gray-ish like all the other non-stick pans I have. I'm very curious whether it behaves differently from the pans I have in any significant way. In short, I don't have representatives of all the variations on pans there are, and it's virtually certain there are some great pans I won't be looking at or mentioning. It's a matter of time and money - I just can't go buy all of them! Or calibrate all of them, or bake cookies on all of them. But if people can learn how to make great cookies reproducibly as a result of learning how things go for me with the pans I have, I'll be happy and I hope others will be too. :-)
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