Right here at CNN Underscored, we love discovering sustainable swaps that may provide help to cut back waste in your day-to-day life. We’ve already sung praises about bidets, Stasher baggage, Swedish dishcloths and far more, however our newest love is the common-or-garden silicone baking mat.
I exploit these almost every single day, and so they’ve helped me reduce aluminum foil and parchment paper out of my life fully. Right here’s why you want them.
When you begin utilizing silicone baking mats, you’ll marvel the way you ever cooked with out them. Mats can be found in single packs, two-packs and even three-packs, in addition to in a number of dimensions and shapes.
Silicone mats like these are obtainable in loads of completely different manufacturers, colours, styles and sizes, however the MMmat Silicone Baking Mats in orange are the very product I’ve been utilizing for the previous two years. I retailer them folded in half with my reducing boards and would guess that I exploit them not less than 5 occasions every week.
So, what’s so nice about these flimsy little issues? I’d say their largest profit is that they render single-use tinfoil and parchment paper almost ineffective. Earlier than these mats, I’d tear off a brand new piece of aluminum foil virtually each time I’d put one thing within the oven. From leftover pizza to raw salmon to cookie dough to veggies drizzled in olive oil, each meals would get a recent sheet of foil to separate it from the baking sheet.
Whereas I’m certain baking sheets are supposed to be cleaned repeatedly, this isn’t one thing that occurs with dependable certainty in my family. Our sheets are rife with burn stains and generally sticky with an oily residue even after a cleanse within the dishwasher. Cooking with the silicone baking mats, which — reward the powers that be — are dishwasher-safe, makes me assured that no matter meals I’m making is not going to be contaminated by what’s left on the sheet. I may also be certain the mats will preserve the baking sheet itself from getting dirtied.
The silicone sheets can stand up to oven temperatures as much as 500 levels Fahrenheit and are protected within the freezer too. They’re actually nonstick and extremely straightforward to wipe clear. I haven’t tried this transfer but, however some reviewers say they use the sheets to line their fridges — they’d undoubtedly preserve in place — to maintain all the things spotless.
Shopping for one thing new isn’t the best choice with regards to training sustainability. However these, I consider, are definitely worth the buy as a result of they so drastically reduce down the necessity for single-use sheet liners.
Like I discussed earlier, I’ve had mine for 2 years now, and I see them lasting for a lot of extra to return. A method to make sure they final is to keep away from reducing immediately on high of them, because it’d be potential for a pointy knife to slice into the silicone and finally tear a gap.
Whereas tossing away foil is hardly our largest environmental offense within the kitchen (and really, aluminum foil is recyclable in lots of municipalities in case you do it appropriately), these reusable sheets are a win in our ebook with regards to making small adjustments to chop down on waste.