Silicone baking mats - I love mine!
I do enjoy using my oven. I am yet to be the master baker I dream of being. Every time I watch a Youtube clip of CookingTree I feel like the meaning of life must be to create amazing cakes and soothing ASMR. I love my own oven so much, I actually have TWO. One regular, under-my-stove-oven that is pretty much always set at 180 or 200 degrees (the other available temperatures are just there for decoration right?) and one small convection steam oven. I could write a post on my little convection steam oven alone. I use it as a regular oven (aka 'healthy fry'), to steam food, steam bake and even sterilise bottles when my baby was a newborn.
Anyway, the point is that my oven(s) is/are an integral part of my kitchen. How great is it to be able get a head start on those dishes, safe in the knowledge that your honey soy wings are steadily cooking away? As a result of this love affair, I did go through a good amount of baking paper and aluminium foil. For a while I tried to find eco-friendly brands, but with COVID19, often these were sold out or just unavailable.
And then I stumbled across EverEco silicone baking mats on Flora & Fauna. Guys, it lives up to its 5 star reviews. So far I've used the mats to cook fish, chips and fried chicken and it works wonderfully. The mats can be placed in the oven up to 250 degrees (which is about as hot as my oven can get anyway). They are easy to clean (I recommend wiping any excess oil off them, then leaving them to soak in the sink with other dirty dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. They come out clean and good as new. You don't have to oil them before putting food on them and I haven't noticed any discolouring or weird smells. I even find that they work better than regular baking paper because of their weight - they tend to stick to the tray a lot better so you don't have to fold over the baking paper or stress that the paper is going to stick out and block your smooth slide-in-action of the tray in and out of the oven (that's what she said).
I did hear that some baking mats stayed sticky after use or were super hard or annoying to clean, but luckily, this was not my experience with these mats. You get two in a pack and I think I might purchase another pack because my experience with these has been so wonderful. I'm also saving precious drawer space in my apartment kitchen from not having to store rolls of aluminium foil and baking paper - another win!
