Thrift Week 2019, Day 4: Silicone baking mats

Yesterday, I told you about how lids made of stretchy silicone helped us entirely eliminate plastic wrap in our kitchen. Today, you'll hear how silicone came to the rescue yet again to save us from another disposable product in the kitchen: parchment paper.

We weren't always dedicated users of parchment paper. We used to keep cookies from sticking to the pan the old-fashioned way, by greasing it, but this didn't always work all that well. A cookie would still stick from time to time, and even when they came off cleanly, the pans had to be scrubbed afterwards—a challenging task with our smallish sink and drying rack.

Nonetheless, we probably wouldn't have started using parchment paper in the first place if we hadn't happened to try some recipe—I forget now exactly what it was—that required it. Then, after shelling out five bucks on a roll, we figured we might as well use the rest of it up, so Brian took to lining baking pans with them and found it to be a total game-changer. No more greasy baking sheets, no more sticking cookies, no more complicated cleanup—all he had to do was pull off the paper and discard it.

This left him with a dilemma when the roll ran out. On the one hand, he didn't much like the idea of spending another five dollars on something he didn't technically need, but on the other, it really did make baking a lot easier. Finally, he decided to spend the money, but with so much reluctance that I decided then and there to start looking for a reusable alternative and spare him from having to go through this raging inner conflict again.

So I did a little research and quickly discovered silicone baking mats. These nonstick mats work just like parchment paper, except you can wash and reuse them over and over. They can stand up to oven temperatures, they clean up easily with soap and water, and you can even put them in the dishwasher (if you have one). I was planning to get him some for Christmas that year, but when my relatives called me up asking me for gift suggestions, I decided to let them have that one—so he ended up getting not one but three mats, a large one from my mom and a pair of smaller ones from my aunt.

This turned out to be the perfect combination for him. He uses the large mat for roasting veggies on our big jelly roll pan and the smaller ones for baking cookies (and other baked items laid out on cookie sheets, such as spinach balls). Because the mats are flexible, they're much easier to wash in the sink and dry on the rack than a large, rigid pan. And he discovered yet another perk of baking with them: they somehow store and release heat more evenly than the metal pans. In the past, when baking cookies, he found he had about a two-minute window between underdone and burnt; with these mats, the cookies brown more slowly and gradually, giving him a lot more wiggle room.

He also uses these for applications that he wouldn't have bothered to waste parchment paper on. For instance, this morning he was baking a loaf of sourdough bread, and he realized that if he shaped the sticky dough directly on the metal baking sheet, it would probably stick. So he slipped one of these mats underneath it to make sure it came up easily.

These silicone mats aren't saving us a huge amount of money. At the rate we were going through parchment paper, we probably wouldn't have spent more than about ten bucks a year on it. But considering that you can pick them for as little as $3.29 apiece on eBay, they're still an investment that will pay for itself in under a year. And for Brian, at least, if they can prevent him from losing any cookies to burning, that's a good enough reason to buy them in and of itself.