Silicone pans bring space-age baking to town
Cooks who a decade ago would have had to carry silicone pans home from Paris can now buy them almost anywhere they'd buy ordinary pans. And stores that once carried only the baking mats and spatulas, now offer cake and muffin pans of every size, and even madeleine and brioche molds.
"They're definitely a hot item right now," reports Tom Pierce of Kitchen Arts on Newbury Street, where customers who catch sight of the brightly colored pans, which come in orange, red, and blue, among other colors, often do a double-take.
While exposure to direct flame will ruin them, silicone pans withstand moderate oven temperatures -- up to 428 and 500 degrees for two brands -- and are cool to the touch almost immediately after baking. (The manufacturers instructions advise putting silicone muffin pans on a baking sheet.) They're also a breeze to clean, by hand or in the dishwasher, and easy to store in tight spaces. Perhaps their best feature is the ease with which baked goods turn out. Delicate madeleines or tartlets come out of their molds with a gentle nudge, as do angel food cakes. And in many cases, recipes are quicker because greasing the pans usually isn't required, regardless of what the manufacturers say. Regular muffin pans come with six indentations. Prices vary from $12 to $25.
There are skeptics. Some point to the inferior job silicone does of producing a nicely browned crust. In my experience, this isn't true with every recipe. But the pan's flexibility can be a drawback when its sides bow with the weight of a heavy batter.
And there's the very strangeness of the silicone, which leaves some a little wary of the wisdom of cooking foods inside space-age polymers. Amy Mastronardi, an owner of Hippie Chick Bakery in Amesbury, says she likes to use silicone for "cold molding" of frozen desserts. But items going into her ovens do so in metal pans. "I have mixed feelings about silicone," she says.
I put the pans to the test with muffin and quick bread recipes in both metal (aluminized steel made by Chicago Metallic) and silicone (from KitchenZone and Lekue; another brand available is Bourgeat). The differences turned out to be mainly cosmetic, although breads in the silicone loaf pans did cook a bit more quickly. A dense pumpkin bread batter bowed the sides of the KitchenZone pan and baked into a similarly bowed loaf, although this hadn't been a problem with the sturdier Lekue pan. With a more delicate lemon poppy-seed bread, the KitchenZone pan held its shape. A light, cakey muffin and a considerably heavier bran muffin cooked nicely in the silicone, although they didn't dome quite as high as those baked in metal. The best part of baking with the silicone was the fun of popping the confections right out of the pan.
While the quick breads seemed to brown equally well in the silicone and metal pans, a sturdy but unexpectedly good bran muffin I often bake surprised me. Accustomed as I was to the silicone-pan version I've been making lately, when I pulled a muffin out of the metal pan and took a bite, I realized what I had been missing. Its crunchy exterior was a revelation, crisp and nutty as the outside of a perfectly cooked waffle.
So you have to weigh the convenience against the promise of a delectable crust. 