I think my first victim was a batch of chocolate chip cookies. A dozen biscuits followed. But it was only after I ripped the bottom off a loaf of my favorite Pumpkin-Walnut Focaccia with Gruyère that I was finally impelled to act.
Once, long ago, while baking in the kitchen of a friend who is a bona fide gourmet, I actually had a non-traumatic experience with a baking tray. Once being the operative word. On the whole, I’ve found baking trays—even those claiming to be nonstick—to be patently unreliable. They’re too easily crusted, stained, and otherwise tattooed with unidentifiable (yet thoroughly disgusting) residue. And after the first hardened black splotch, it’s all pretty much downhill from there. Forget about bringing a decent batch of cookies to any potluck or social gathering. (If only the tops of cookies were as coveted as those of muffins.)
The one baking tray I currently own is hardly the most mottled of the baking trays I have owned and destroyed over the course of my experience as a cook. But the pumpkin focaccia was, as they say, a shot across the bow: I would either need to replace the tray, or find a way to revive it.
I stumbled along for several more weeks by falling back on my stores of parchment paper and tinfoil. It wasn’t that I was loath to replace the tray; it was more that I saw before me a baking career filled with an endless string of ruined trays. (Not to mention ruined cookies.) It was too depressing, really. Why buy another tray only to render it unusable? There had to be a better solution.
Friends who have bigger kitchens than I are blessed to have the space and resources to store an entire cast of trays ranging from the spotted to the sparkling. I envied them their choices: pristine for those delicate sugar cookies, spotted and crusty to catch the drippings from that bubbling-over summer cobbler.
But being The Apartment Gourmet, I couldn’t allow myself to mope. I had a job to do, a quest to complete. All the cookies I planned on baking in the future would thank me for it. And so, I told myself, would you, my readers.
I stumbled upon my answer quite by accident. Poking through a hit-or-miss kitchen goods store in nearby Coolidge Corner, I discovered an entire display of products by Siliconezone. Siliconezone, the makers of a fabulous set of muffin cups, which I’d purchased, several years ago, during an outing to Cambridge. At the time, I’d been won over simply by the idea of something reusable. But as I baked more muffins, I’d fallen in love with the perfect heat distribution and a 100% reliable nonstick surface.
I was struck by this revelation. Could silicone be my answer for tray-based baking, too? Oh yes, yes it could. Because one perfect batch of cookies later, I was more than a believer. I was a convert.
Siliconezone is smart enough not to make a baking tray (too flimsy), but they do offer a selection of baking mats, which you can even cut down to the size of your tray if you feel so inclined. My mat, which I purchased for under $15, I kept intact. It’s a little big for my current baking tray, but should a roomier oven come into my life someday, at least I’ve left myself some wiggle room.
For the time being, I’m content—make that, overjoyed—with my silicone tray cover, which releases my cookies like a dream, browns the bottoms of my scones to a perfect shade of golden, and cleans up in sudsy water in under thirty seconds.
I challenge anyone to find a “nonstick” tray that can boast of such baking prowess.