After 10 minutes the tops of the cookies were browned and done, but the bottoms still so soft that they folded up when I tried to take them off the sheet. I think the manufacturer has done his job too well. The idea is that the layer of air protects the bottom of the cookies from getting too brown - 'No More Burned Cookies,' says the literature optimistically - while the tops bake. The bottom of the sheet looks a little like a tufted sofa cushion. They are made of two sheets of aluminum with a thin pillow of air sealed between them. The air-cushioned sheets are relatively new on the market. In other words, the pan is so thin that the heat transfers directly and intensely to the bottoms of the cookies and cooks them before the top has a chance to cook, too. After 10 minutes the cookies were quite brown on the bottom and significantly less brown on the top. The flimsy aluminum sheet performed exactly as all the experts always have said flimsy aluminum sheets perform.

But they were also perfectly evenly baked with both top and bottom equally brown. They were done all the way through but in no way dried out, and, after waiting a few seconds after taking them out of the oven, they were easy to get off the pan.Ĭookies baked on the dark steel pan - in this case a professional-weight, blued carbon steel - were considerably darker after 10 minutes than the first batch and in danger of being too brown.

I baked cookies on all these sheets, a dozen at a time, in the center of a good gas oven set at 375 degrees.Īt the end of 10 minutes the first batch, baked on the heavy-gauge aluminum sheet (ungreased, as directed in the Toll House recipe) were browned exactly evenly on top and bottom.

The other day I tested conventional wisdom by baking chocolate chip cookie dough on five different kinds of cookie sheets: a plain, heavy aluminum sheet made by Commercial Aluminum, a sheet of dark steel, a flimsy aluminum sheet, one of the new air-cushioned sheets and a pizza stone, which its makers advertise as being useful for cookies, too. Except in the case of cookie sheets, in which conventional wisdom goes that the best sheet for the job is one that's heavy-gauge plain aluminum. Conventional wisdom says that conventional wisdom is always wrong.

Baking sheet vs cookie sheet