The Best Silicone Baking Mat

Pure silicone baking pad

Silicone baking The mat is a reusable alternative to parchment paper. Place one on a baking tray and you instantly have a non-stick baking surface that you can use, wash and reuse. These non-stick mats are made of silicone with an embedded heat-conductive glass fibre or nylon fibre mesh and were originally used in restaurant kitchens. However, as they have become increasingly popular with home cooks over the last decade, we decided it was time to revisit them. We have mats ranging in price from $0.10 to $4.00, including our former plain American half-size non-stick silicone baking mats. We compared these mats to our favourite parchment paper, Flour Low Gluten Flour Parchment Paper 100 half sheets, and baked lots of candy, sugar biscuits and chocolate chip biscuits with them. We also tested them on an unlined baking tray, baking potatoes and salmon, which confirmed that our mats are reliable and unique!

The advantages of our silicone mats

These mats certainly have an advantage over parchment paper. They slide easily into the baking tray and their relative weight (60 to 117g) helps them to stay in place better than our favourite parchment paper (4g). This comes in handy when you're working with melted chocolate or caramel, or when you need to spread out a sticky batter, as our mats do. With the occasional exception of the lightest mats, we've never had to worry about an offset spatula pulling the mat up, which sometimes happens with parchment paper. Also, because these pads are usually flat, they produce a very smooth bottom to the pipe - this is not always the case with parchment, where air bubbles can form under the parchment, causing creases or seams in the finished pipe. (We have also found that commonly produced silicone mats using creased or curled parchment can affect the appearance of biscuits and cakes).

The cakes baked on the silicone baking sheet are very smooth, while in the parchment paper result in an imperfect appearance of these delicate biscuits.

Better still, the mats have all the nonstick benefits of parchment-and then some. This made it a breeze to remove cookies and skin-on salmon fillets (in contrast, salmon cooked on a bare baking sheet sometimes stuck, requiring us to scrape it off). In fact, the mats' nonstick surfaces are so slick that they repel fat, which pooled around and under our roasted potatoes and ensured that they browned more evenly than they did on the bare baking sheet. One thing to note: Because the mats are so slick, some types of cookies spread out more on them; for example, chocolate chip cookies baked on the mats were about ¼ inch wider than those cooked on parchment, and their edges browned more deeply, resulting in a slightly crispier final product.

The are world Best Silicone Baking Mat

The mats are all durable and perform similarly, regardless of manufacturing differences or exact composition. Our preference comes down to size and ease of clean up. All of the mats work well with our favourite 16½ x 11½ inch rimmed baking sheet, but one is a little too small (reducing the available surface area) and all are perfect so that biscuits placed near the kitchen will show the upward bend of the mat. There are three mats that fit perfectly in the baking tray, of which we prefer the two slightly heavier mats (each over 100g) as they hold their shape better.