My Cookie Sheets

I bought a variety of cookie sheets to experiment with at the local supermarket, at prices ranging from about $2.50 to $7.00. Nothing fancy. I also have one insulated aluminum cookie sheet I purchased quite a few years ago, and I recently bought a second insulated cookie sheet from Williams-Sonoma for something over $20. I've attached a photo of them, though there's only one of the insulated sheets in the picture, on the bottom.

Cookie sheets come with non-stick and traditional finishes. Most cookies have so much butter or shortening content that it would be hard to get them to stick to a pan if you tried, but there are exceptions. The salesperson at Williams-Sonoma told me I'd need to purchase a pan with traditional finish if I wanted to make any spritz cookies. Those cookies are made with a cookie press. If the surface is non-stick you wind up dragging the cookies across the pan as you squeeze them out, and I can imagine that would be darned irritating and might indeed not work at all. A second implication of the non-stick vs. traditional finish choice has to do with the reflectivity of the pans. Non-stick pans always seem to be much less reflective of not only light, but heat as well. You can see it in the color of the pan - non-stick pans seem always to be darker, and never silvery or shiny. The effect of the finish is that non-stick pans get hotter faster in the oven, so cookies bake more quickly. I wouldn't have guessed that the color would make that much difference, but it does. I'll talk about that in my next post.

My heaviest and darkest pan is described by the manufacturer Wilton as a "medium cookie pan," dimensions 15.25 x 10.25 x 0.75. It has a non-stick finish. There are two nice handles on the edges. It looks very much like the picture of the Avanti(R) Everglide(R) metal-safe non-stick cookie pan pictured on the manufacturer's Web site, where the price is rather more than I paid at the supermarket. There is a very slight difference in the appearance of the photo from my pan, so I may not in fact have the Avanti(R) Everglide(R) pan, but I didn't see anything else with a more perfect resemblance to mine on the Wilton Web site so I think I probably just have an older or newer model than the one pictured on the site.

By the way, the Wilton site I mentioned above is a fun one to visit. They sell numerous baking items of their own manufacture, including dozens of formed cake pans in various shapes. I've never been interested in that, but some people would have great fun with those. They also offer fifty cookie recipes on the site. :-)

Two of the other pans I bought - in the top row of the photo above - are manufactured by Bradshaw International under the Good Cook brand. They are the same except for their sizes - the larger one measures 15 x 14, and the smaller 13 x 12. They are described as "slide-off cookie sheets." I find an announcement of their 2006 release to the market with no picture here, but surprisingly don't see a site that seems to sell them, after searching for a bit. Maybe they aren't very popular and now Bradshaw doesn't push them. I'm afraid I may already know why that might be - the handles on the sides of the pans are too low, so you can't get your fingers under them easily when you put them into or remove them from the oven. That makes it too easy to burn yourself if you aren't extremely careful, or wear oven mitts. These sheets' advertised feature is that there are no rims at all on two sides, which makes it possible to slide cookies just out of the oven off to a cooking rack without lifting them or bending them, especially helpful when they have been baked on parchment paper. Lack of sides also helps the heat to circulate over the tops of the cookies while baking, another plus. These cookie sheets are made of fairly heavy metal, but not as heavy as the Wilton pan. They have a non-stick surface which is slightly lighter in color than the Wilton pan's, though still pretty dark. Except for the handles they seem like good cookie sheets, but I think the handle issue is a pretty significant design flaw.

I also so pans that look exactly the same as the Good Cook slide-off pans to me, sold under the Oneida brand at Bed, Bath & Beyond.

I see that Williams-Sonoma sells slide-off baking sheets which they name Williams-Sonoma Commercial-Quality Cookie Sheets, albeit at a much higher price than what I paid at the supermarket for the slide-off sheets I have. The Williams-Sonoma sheets look good and appear to have far safer grips, but the pans apparently don't have a non-stick surface. I don't think the non-stick surface matters much for cookies if all you are thinking about is the convenience, but the price is more important, especially considering it's really helpful to have two of whatever kind of baking sheet you are using, obviously doubling the expense. I see Williams-Sonoma is currently offering about a 12% discount on these sheets if you buy two of them, which is nice, especially if you can get them from a local store so you don't pay shipping. If it saves me getting burned multiple times, which I can imagine happening with the slide-off sheets I bought, the extra cost would be well worth it. With the discount it's only $7 extra per pan over what I paid for what I got at the supermarket, but I'll probably look around and see what else is available first. Or not - I hate shopping all over for the best deal on something that doesn't cost that much! Life is short. Anyway, that's a decision for another day. I'll use what I have for now as representative of a type of cookie sheet.

My fourth pan is also sold under the Good Cook brand. It is a very simple pan with a shiny traditional (i.e. not non-stick) surface. Two sizes were available, but I only bought the small one, which measures 9.5 x 13 x 0.5. It is very light in weight compared to any of the other pans, and was also the cheapest, costing only about $2.50. In the photo it's on the right in the second row.

My two insulated sheets were a lot more expensive than any of the basic cookie sheets I bought at the supermarket. The one I bought from Williams-Sonoma, described here, cost about $25 at the store. Neither my older aluminum insulated pan nor my new Williams-Sonoma pan, manufactured under the brand Goldtouch(TM), is non-stick. Williams-Sonoma does also sell the same insulated pan with a darker non-stick finish, however.

An insulated pan has some gas, usually air, sandwiched between layers of metal. Air doesn't conduct heat nearly as well as metal, and using an insulated cookie sheet keeps the bottoms of the cookies from getting baked much faster than the tops, and I've already seen there is a significant difference in the result, though how much difference it generally makes in the taste and appearance I don't yet know. Both the pans I have are the same size, 15 x 14, but the older one is strictly aluminum while the newer one is steel and somewhat heavier in weight. The aluminum pan says "do not immerse in water" - I suppose the seal at the edges is not water-proof and it would certainly harm the insulating properties of the pan if water seeped into the space between layers. That does make it a little more inconvenient to clean, though. The new pan has no such caution. I'll be paying attention to see whether my two insulated sheets give different results in use.

One thing I notice about these cookie sheets in general - aside from the heavy Wilton pan and possibly the insulated pans, they are pretty easy to dent. After I got them home I found that two of them already had dents in them from handling at the store or from shipping (I hope not from me getting them home!), and I was able to pretty much press one of the dents in the baking surface out with only my fingers. If I thought it mattered I would have exchanged the dented ones for undamaged ones, but I don't see it affecting their function and the dents were pretty small, and so it didn't seem worth the extra trip to the store to exchange them. However, I can see I need not to throw the pans around with wild abandon like I might have had I not seen those dents!

I've already used all these pans a little bit, and made these initial observations:

1. The finish on the cheapest, traditional-finish pans degrades rapidly. It almost looks like the baking surface is peeling off in small flakes. This is surely not exactly what is happening, but the shiny finish must be electro-plated and very thin. I scrubbed the pan with an abrasive pad to get a burnt butter stain off, and that may have been what caused damage to the surface - the hard scrubbing might have actually scraped bits of the plating off, exposing other metal underneath. Since it only cost $2.50 I don't feel too bad, but dang! You get what you pay for, I guess. I may buy a better non-insulated traditional-surface pan later, but all the pans at the supermarket except these were non-stick. If I get the slide-off Commercial Quality Cookie Sheets from Williams-Sonoma, I think I'd have a far better pan with traditional surface, but I was actually wanting to experiment with cheap lightweight pans to see what actually makes a difference. If nothing else, I'll replace my cheap degraded pan with a new one if it continues to get worse, and make a point of using less abrasive pads on them when I wash them.

2. As I mentioned above, the slide-off pans from Good Cook have lousy handles, making them darned inconvenient to work with if you really don't want to burn yourself on the oven rack.

3. The heavy pan from Wilton holds the most heat, and is the only one I couldn't hang on to for long after I took it from the oven. The heat went right through the oven glove and hot pad in fairly short order. I was surprised at that. Both my glove and hot pad were old and probably cheap, and maybe buying a better oven glove would help. Otherwise I need to make sure I am prepared to set it down immediately after I take the pan from the oven. The pan does cool off fairly quickly, though, which is important. In addition, it's heavy enough that I feel a lot better holding it with both hands than trying to carry it about the kitchen in only one hand. All the other pans are light enough that I feel OK carrying any of them across the kitchen with one hand if necessary. It's not like the Wilton pan weighs thirty pounds - it's just a matter of having secure and firm control over the pan while moving it. Needing two hands instead of one doesn't seem like a big deal - who would advise carrying around cookie sheets with one hand anyway? Sounds like a good way to wind up spending some time cleaning the floor. It's just something I noted right away with that pan.

4. The insulated sheets take a lot longer to cool to room temperature after I take them out of the oven than any of the others. Experts say that your cookie pans should always be at room temperature when you put them in the oven, in order to get batches of cookies that always come out the same when baked at the proper temperature for the specified period of time. The insulated pans take so long to cool that it affects the repetitive baking process. My options seem to be: 1) cool them by running a paper towel with cool water over the surface and then dry them before putting a second batch of cookies on them 2) wait significantly longer between batches 3) purchase a third insulated pan to rotate through while baking multiple batches 4) turn them over a few minutes after removing them from the oven so the top of the pan also comes into contact with a heat-conducting surface that will drain the heat of the top layer away 5) ignore the rule of cooling pans to room temperature and hope for the best. The last option might generally make the most sense given the expense of purchasing a third insulated cookie sheet, but I'm not going to dispense with the rule for any cookies I talk about in this blog. I'm trying to make this be about how to make good cookies, after all! :-) If it gets too bothersome I'll buy a third insulated sheet.