I bought these cookie sheets for my sister. I baked some cookies on them, but now they won’t come clean. I burned a batch accidentally (the first round), but the others one came out fine. They sat in my sink for at least a week. After going through the dishwasher, dark circles were still present. I tried everything: soaking it water, soap, powdered cleaner, and Tarn X, nothing works. Through sweat-inducing scrubbin, I managed to get them to fade, and most of the really bad marks to dull, but it still bothers me. There appears to be a blotchiness-type quality to it (probably the darkest of the burned marks). Is there any hope with these pans? They still work and they haven’t warped yet (my biggest gripe with cookie sheets). However, my sister is complaining that they look ugly. Is there a good cleanser/technique that I haven’t tried?
I don’t know, but if you want to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future, just wrap your cookie sheet in foil before using it. Then you won’t get burn marks on it. It’ll make it a lot easier to get the food off it, too- if it doesn’t want to come up, pull it off with the foil, and peel the foil off it. I don’t understand why everybody doesn’t do this.
I like to use parchment for that. It protects the cookie sheet and prevents the cookies from getting burned on the bottom.
We try to put cooking related threads over in our Cafe Society forum.
Moving you now.
samclem GQ moderator
The cookies sheets are aluminized steel, steel sheets are sprayed with an aluminum alloy then tempered to bind the disimliar metals. With aluminum being a porous metal, something in the cookies got into the pores of the metal. When the cookies burned, it physically burned the aluminum too. Your heavy duty scrubbing is removing metal, that is why the stains are fading. Too much scrubbing and you will expose the steel core and ruin the pan. I say learn to live with the stains or buy some new ones.
Left in sink(water) for week didn’t help the situation. Aluminum polish might have worked originally but too late now.
Tell your sister you’re sorry you screwed them up but as she won’t be putting them on display to use baker’s parchment and ‘carry on!’
Buy new ones for your sister. After all it’s only moner, $23 +Shipping, Handling, Insurances, and Taxes. Then use them yourself.
Profit from the experience and NEVER again take a gift for a test drive.
Cookie sheets to me are disposable items. Keep’em for about four to six months then buy new ones. No need to blow a whad of cash on them.
I have these same exact pans. I got stains like you describe on one of them. I didn’t scour it because I didn’t want to toally ruin it. Now I always use parchement.
If your sister is really upset about the pans, buy her new ones and keep these for yourself. They are really great pans, even with stains.
I have these same pans. Mine are about 7 years old. If something sticks to them, I just use steel wool to scrub 'em clean. Mine are still in great shape, despite the warnings posted above about no scrubbing them.
Have you tried a razor blade to scrape any burnt part off? Otherwise, it sounds like they’ve become one with the aluminum, as racer72 wrote.
I’m always afraid I’m going to start a fire with parchment paper (it’s silly, but there you go), so I use those Silpat thingies to keep my cookie sheets in good shape. Nothing ever sticks, you can work ahead on extra sheets, and they go right into the dishwasher.
Don’t sweat it. Keep the stains as evidence that you actually use your kitchen for cooking…unlike several yuppie bastard image-obsessed wanna-be morons I know who own everything that Williams Sonoma ever marked up by 500%, but couldn’t boil water in a volcano.
I use the same method for cleaning cookie sheets as I do for my cast iron skillet and pizza pans.
Soapy water and a sponge.
After a few months of use, they start developing a nice build-up of stuff that’s been cooked onto it. Better than teflon… nothing sticks!
Thanks everyone for the replies. I’ll probably by my sister a new set of cookie sheets. Does anyone know of a good set of nonstick like the ones I bought, or is nonstick not a good idea in general? The ones I used to buy from my local grocer lasted maybe a year, as the nonstick coating erodes. I find it silly that pans need to be protected when baking. Oh, well…
I use an aluminum sheet pan and a parchment sheet. Non-stick and easy to clean. And cheap!
I bought those same sheets a while ago and they are terrible. They burn a lot of things, IMO.
I then turned to my local restaurant supply for commerical baking sheets and have never been happier. They are around 5 dollars a piece. Good stuff. Fit in the dishwasher and are stained to hell.
I also second the parchment paper. I have the “expensive silicone” mats which still require cleaning.
Non-stick cookie sheets are evil, because of the burning and wear problems. The sheets with double layers are my favorite since the two layers give you a little insurance on burning.
I get cheap aluminum cookie sheets. That way, if I wreck them, it’s not expensive when I go and buy a replacement.
OK, in reality, my cookie sheets have marks and stains all over them, but I don’t care.
I was in Costco a few weeks ago, and I saw these men’s jeans on sale.they had a Ralph Lauren label on them, and a proce tag that indicated that they had been marked down from $180.00 to about $70.00. The physical condition of the jeans was deporable, they had been subjected to paint, burns, sandpaper, razor blades, and other horrors that made them look like Ralph Lauren himself had worn them on a weekend when he had rebuilt his sailboat, or something (I think this might make a good justification for charging nearly two hundred smackers for a pair of jeans, and I wondered how much Mr. Lauren charges to pre-chew your steak – but I digress).
This may not look like it has a point, but if you buy a pair of those jeans, and give them to your sister with the cookie sheets, you can let her assume that Ralph Lauren screwed them up, and you love her so much that you paid extra for it.
I have one of those “air-cushion” style cookie sheets that gradually accumulated stains over the years. Eventually it was relegated to sitting on the bottom rack to catch drips from baking above and looked it.
Last month I was using the self-cleaning function in my oven. Even though I thought it would ruin the cookie sheet I decided to leave it in the oven while cleaning.
The cookie sheet came out looking clean. Not new looking, but no stains, just some ashes and what looked like some oxidized aluminum. I put it in the dishwasher, and it is back in service again.
YMMV, but if you are thinking about chucking them out, you may want to consider this.
best to all,
plynck
Non-stick sheets get cruddy, too. However, I think it makes a big difference if you scrub and wash a non-stick cookie sheet immediately after baking, as opposed to letting the used cookie sheet fester for a few days (as my wife does).
I’ve been wondering myself if there were some king of chemical treatment I could give to our non-stick cookie sheets to get them looking decent again. The problem is not so much staining as it is actual food residue stuck to the sheet (how this happens so readily with “non-stick” pans, I cannot fathom). If I can just get the surface of the sheet smooth again, I’d be happy.