Nearly a decade ago, Molly Gilbert wrote “Sheet Pan Suppers,” a collection of full-meal recipes that could be made on one underrated kitchen tool: the 18-by-13-inch rimmed “half sheet pan,” as they’ve been called in restaurant kitchens for ages. The concept was hard for any busy cook to resist: easy prep, easy clean-up and concentrated flavors in record time.
Sheet pan recipes have been populating the internet, magazine pages and cookbook chapters ever since, and the appetite for them shows no signs of abating.
Now the Seattle-based pastry chef and creator of the food blog Dunk & Crumble is showing us how to utilize the sheet pan in the treat-making department. Its massive surface area, she notes in “Sheet Pan Sweets: Simple, Streamlined Dessert Recipes” (Union Square, $22.99), makes the ideal vehicle for cranking out bars, cookies and other sweet bites to feed a large crowd. And its shallow sides help cakes bake and cool in a fraction of the time required of conventional pans.
Recipes prove her points in six seductive chapters: Sheet Cakes; Layered and Rolled Cakes; Cookies; Bars, Pies and the Like; and Breakfast and Breads. The Chocolate Chip Cookie Brittle I made qualifies as a revelation. Its buttery, chocolate-studded dough is patted out thin to the edges of the pan, sprinkled with flaky sea salt, baked to a crackly crunch, then broken into shards like brittle or toffee. I dare you to stop at one piece.
Homemade snack or cereal blends are no-brainers for a sheet pan, but I can verify that her Pumpkin-Spiced Granola — generous scoops of nuts, seeds and wholesome grains tossed and baked with the flavors and aromas of autumn — makes for an exceptional breakfast.
I’m gaining weight just reading about Apple Pan Fritter Cake, Dozen Donut Cake, Buckeye Bars, and Cranberry Gingerbread Galette.
Do heed her advice and invest in a proper sturdy pan of the correct dimensions if you haven’t already. A jelly-roll pan is too small and flimsy for these jobs. And once you start calling it into action for daily meals, you’ll likely become a sheet pan devotee for life.
Susan Puckett is a cookbook author and former food editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Follow her at susanpuckett.com.
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