Étiquette : Pans

One thing I wish someone had told me when I started cooking in a restaurant kitchen is that you only spend about 50 percent of your time actually cooking. The other 50 percent is mostly spent fighting with other cooks over, more or less, everything: Who gets the best burner. Who gets the good squeeze bottles (and who gets the ones that are permanently stained mystery orange). And, most critically, who gets to use the ovens.

Restaurant ovens are particularly coveted real estate, because there are almost always fewer ovens than there are cooks who need to use them. I very quickly learned to a) set up my cutting board every day at the work station closest to the ovens, and b) keep a stack of quarter-sheet pans near me at all times. At about 9½ x 13” quarter-sheet pans are the little sibling of the sheet pans you probably already use at home to roast potatoes and bake cookies, and they were my secret weapon tool for maximizing kitchen efficiency. The second another cook would take out their giant trays of roast chicken/carrots/walnuts/whatever, there I was ready to claim that newly free rack with three or four tiny baking sheets of sesame seeds, croutons-to-be, and nuts that could all cook at once.

And while I haven’t touched my fancy restaurant tweezers once since I stopped cooking professionally (there’s something very tragic about using tweezers to plate a meal I’m eating alone in my pajamas), quarter-sheet pans remain one of the top five most useful tools in my home kitchen. I’m constantly reaching for mine to toast a few handfuls of walnuts for a salad, bake a couple of sweet potatoes, broil shrimp, or heat up leftover pizza—tasks that don’t merit a half-sheet pan, which is only twice as big but ten times more annoying to handle. And since several quarter-sheets can fit in the oven together comfortably, I can roast garlic, make crispy Brussels sprouts, and bake fish fillets for dinner all at the same time like some sort of kitchen ninja.

Need more proof that quarter-sheet pans are the hardest-working tools in the kitchen? I use them as a dish for breading crispy cutlets; as a makeshift cover for my one saucepan without a lid; for transporting tongs, oil, salt, pepper, and dish towels to the grill; and (my personal favorite) as counter garbage pail for scraps and trash. This mini pan‘s greatest advantage, however, comes after cooking: It slides right into the bottom of my sink for easy cleaning and reusing. I’m no longer fighting with anyone for oven space, but the line cook in me is still all about that maximum efficiency life.