I’ve tried to pull the trigger on a couple of these but just couldn’t. I don’t do things that really need them, and just use foil or parchment.
Plus careful where you buy them as there are a lot of knockoffs out there, especially on eBay and Amazon.
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I should just do this more often. Put something on my baking sheet, instead of spraying it. That would be more challenging though with something like muffins. But I don’t usually have problems washing Pam off. Only when I bake it three times first. Doh!
The method I use is to make a paste of baking soda and hydrogen peroxide. Coat the pan. Let rest overnight or as long as you have patience for. Wash / rinse it using barkeepers friend and a steel scrubber. That works for most stains. If you want to go further, soak the pan in a tub of water and lye. That will restore it to it’s original surface. It’s a technique (that is lye) i use to restore old cast iron pans.
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I have really leaned into parchment - even for doing things like roasting veg in a sheet pan.
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In Greece they sell bathroom cleaner which is basically a squirt bottle of hydrochloric acid. I used that on a couple pans & it worked REALLY well. Unfortunately not available here. I use oven cleaner with pretty good results.
My baking pans look like that . I don’t think it’s going to come clean as new .It’s like my battery drill that I dropped multiple times off the ladder . Is it ugly yes . Does it still work well yes . I’m a fan of parchment , foil , and silpat also .
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I like parchment or foil better for messy things because it is usually wider than the pan, and I can make it so stuff doesn’t run underneath. Silpat is great for neater things like cookies and biscotti. For bread I put the pizza stone in the oven. For English muffins I use a dry griddle and all other muffins go in cast iron pans. Interestingly I have good results with things releasing on a dry cookie sheet. Parchment is great for getting a loaded pizza onto a stone.
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I wish I had never bought a Silpat. Expensive, and impossible to clean. I baked hand pies on it. You can see their outline, and the circumscribed surface became tacky as opposed to the sheen of the areas not covered by food. I tried the recommended tricks to removing the stickiness. Nothing doing. It’s been parchment paper for me ever since.
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All the oven cleaners I have used say not to use on aluminium, so you might want to bear that in mind, especially for the overnight in a bag system.
I find that scrubbing with a green plastic or stainless steel pad whilst submerged in really hot soapy water (the pan, not you) works best as the loosened residue is washed away.
Alternatively, how about running it through an oven cleaning cycle?
I use parchment for anything that’s being baked. Cookies, brownies, buscuits/rolls, in the air fryer, under reheated fries and pizza, roasted veg…it just makes life easier.
Yes… that would be my suggestion, as well. I’d heat the baking tray up in the oven to about 200-250 degrees, put on an oven mitt, take it outside and spray it with oven cleaner. Let it soak a few minutes, put on rubber gloves and it should come off.
I recently cleaned my small convection oven that way. Heated it up a bit, unplugged it, took it outside and sprayed it with oven cleaner, waited a few minutes and it cleaned up quite nicely.
The worst part is the fumes, that is why I did my convection oven outside.
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I have nothing to add as far as cleaning. In the future I would suggest parchment paper which can be reused multiple times.
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Have you tried Coca Cola? My grandfather cleaned his machinery with it (he was a machinist who made specialty hip replacements)
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I wonder what professional bakers do? For starters, I’m guessing that many use those expensive hard-to-find black steel pans, well-seasoned, but with no added oils. I can’t imagine they would bother with parchment. Does anyone know?
Try frying both sides in butter, and finish in the oven for a few minutes. I recently stumbled on to this method and it is amazing!
For me it is a muffin pan with paper cups… for corn bread, blueberry, cheesecake, etc. No sticking, no oil needed, and really easy to freeze leftovers.
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The whole appeal with the dry griddle approach is how simple it is, though.
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A quick update. Barkeeper’s didn’t work. Baking soda/vinegar/scrub hard worked pretty well, after letting the stuff sit for a few hours. Although my husband and kid laughed at that because they said the 2 cancel each other out. It wasn’t so much the black on the sides that I minded, as the rubber-y sticky stuff on the cooking surface. Think rubber cement on your cookie sheet, or any type of old tape where the adhesive starts to come off in little black balls. Who wants to cook their food on that? Anyway, for the record, commercial cooking sprays have propellants in them that, when exposed to high heat over long periods, seem to change their chemical composition and create a very strong seal between them and the sprayed surface. I’ll try to avoid that in the future! Lesson learned.
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Agreed, and always used to make them that way… until I tried the butter fried/baked way, which only takes a few more minutes… and the results are WAY better.
This is where I learned the method: https://youtu.be/6bDoFO7NgI8 (but I don’t bother to clarify the butter).
it’s the lecithin used as an emulsifier in the spray cans.
it also kills Teflon, makes a brown haze on the Teflon that is not non-stick…
Muriatic acid is readily available at any home improvement store. It’s just another name for hydrochloric acid.
That being said, I wouldn’t use any kind of strong acid on aluminum. I would just scrub with a Brillo or SOS soap pad.
