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Why does it seem to be uncommon/impossible to find baking sheets that are the same size as a full oven rack? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I've often thought it would helpful if the thing I was cooking on was close to as wide as the oven itself. In Australia ovens are usually 60x90cm. I often see and use American recipes because they're so common on the English speaking web and they quite often refer to sheet pans or baking sheets, which seem not to be a very common thing here. They look bigger than the types of things I can commonly buy here, which tend to be cookie pans that are really small. I used to think those American baking sheets were literally as big as the oven and slid in as racks but on further research it seems they're not actually that big and also need to sit on racks themselves and aren't as wide as the typical American home ovens.

I guess my theoretical baking rack would need it's rims to be less wide than the distance between rack grooves otherwise the food would touch the oven walls and baked goods that rise would might rise up to those grooves which would be no good either, but still that should only be a few cm. I actually sort of already have what I want as it came with the oven. It's a rack, that's not a wire and is a solid continuous sheet of metal that slides in to rack positions. The problem is, it always produced weird results when baking and seems to burn the bottoms of cookies and also has a large shallow ramp at the front that messes up what you can put on it. I read my oven instructions and discovered you're not actually supposed to cook on this thing and it's for catching drips. That's super weird to me since on occasion it's been used for this purpose accidentally and it's singularly unsuited to the task as any drips immediately bake right on to it and are impossible to remove and produce lots of smoke on the next use of the oven. I guess it's sort of better than nothing since I can theoretically clean that off when I take the rack out to clean it as opposed to the oven floor, but it's only marginally better since the effect of the baked on drippings is so thorough that it's near impossible to scrub off. Anyway, point is, while it's for whatever reason unsuited to the task presumably because of whatever it's made of and it's slightly odd shape, it's proof in my mind that the concept makes sense and can be done, and yet I can't find anything designed for this.

You can buy additional wire style racks, but seemingly not continuous metals sheets of appropriate size to fit in to the rack grooves.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (2 children)

You wouldn't want a baking sheet that matched the oven that closely.

You'd block all air movement, and reduce heat transfer as well. With most ovens, that means burnt bottoms and badly cooked tops. You might as well just throw the piece of metal on the range top and do it that way.

The drip tray (idk if there's another name) is meant to catch the stuff and have it on that instead of the bottom of the oven itself, which is much harder to clean than the removable drip tray. It's burning things because it's too thin. The heat doesn't get transferred evenly across the surface, and is too intense because of that. You need a little more mass than drip trays offer, though not as much as you would for pans on a hob.

Cleaning drip trays can be a pain in the ass, but usually you can either use harsher chemicals, or freely scrub with heavy abrasives. Tbh though, barkeepers friend should get the job done. A scraper can help too.

Baking much of anything on a rack isn't going to end well without adjusting the cook temp and time, if it even works at all. You can usually do stuff that's already partly cooked, or is solid enough it doesn't matter (like potatoes, rather than pastries and such). You wouldn't do anything that's a dough on the rack itself.

There are baking sheets that fit in slots in ovens, but they aren't the typical home oven. That's more bakery oriented ovens. Which, if you've got the funds and space, there's nothing stopping a person from having one at home, but I can't imagine justifying the cost and space for even high volume home baking. You make enough cookies at once to merit that kind of gear, you're turning out dozens at once.

Half sheet pans are generally your best bet tbh. You get better results, especially if you've got a convection oven. But you can get full sheet pans.

The general sizing is full sheet = a little over two feet × a foot and a half. (26×18 inches)

Half sheet is a foot and a half × a little over a foot. (18×13).

There are minor variations in those sizes, but that's the norm afaik. That's imperial units because it's late here and I ain't putzing with conversion lol.

A full sheet pan covers most of a rack in my oven, with a little room from front to back left over, and maybe two inches on the sides, but I never really use the one I have any more. I get better results with two half sheets on two different racks if I want to do bigger batches (but that's with convection).

Seriously, for a home oven, a sheet pan that fit into the rack slots would be a horrible idea. You'd have to reconfigure every recipe you tried because there just wouldn't be enough air flow around the edges.

Fwiw, if you don't like the drip tray that came with your oven, you can get super cheap aluminum and steel full sheet pans and use them on a lower rack. They tend to be a little easier to clean, and can usually be put in a dishwasher in a pinch.

For sourcing pans, try restaurant supply places. They tend to have the standard sized pans, which are supposed to be standard in Australia too (last time this general subject came up on reddit), if not necessarily what's marketed to home use.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Hadn't thought about the idea of it blocking airflow. The oven does have one big fan that at the back that spans most of the oven height that I'd hope would be moving air at all rack positions. That one activates when the oven is on regardless of fan or convection setting and then there's also an additional fan on top activated in fan forced mode and some type of vents or perforations on the sides which I assume move air around as well because there's a mode for cooking from the bottom top and sides at once.

I think I definitely do need a proper sheet pan though whether it's full oven sized or not. I don't know if it's just the world of internet cookery giving me the wrong impression, but they seem like standard equipment in the states that you can presumably just get anywhere. They're all small, thin, Teflon, high walled roasting trays or muffin tins here. They never give the desired results. There's the odd flat tray with shallow walls but they always seem very thin and nothing like those big heavy duty looking "baking sheets" the internet has me coveting. Wonder why they're not more common here.

Shall have to try a restaurant supply shop as you say. Can you typically buy just one or two of something from them? I thought they'd have minimum orders in the tens or something.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Yeah, baking sheets here are typically available singly at restaurant supply places. The ones I've been to are basically just stacks of things. You pull off however many you want and head to the register. All the restaurants I worked at (which was only a handful, and it wasn't my main job, so not a huge data set) were established, so you'd just be replacing stuff that was no longer usable, which meant whoever got sent was only picking up a few things, and sometimes only one thing.

Can't promise a brick & mortar place in Australia would be the same, but restaurants only need to buy in bulk when they're starting up, so it seems strange that they wouldn't sell things individually.

As far as thickness goes, they don't have to be much thicker than the drip tray you've got. A millimeter difference in thickness is a lot for this kind of thing. I can't recall how thick mine are, but it's still about twice as thick as my drip tray. Now, the fancy non stick calphalon type gear is much thicker than a drip tray. But you get too thick, and you run into trouble with the bottoms not browning, so there's an upper limit.

[–] Delphia 2 points 3 months ago

I second the restaraunt supply store route, I dont shop anywhere else for my kitchen.

[–] Slapplebags 2 points 3 months ago

I'm guessing convection is a big factor

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Is this a gas oven thing? Sounds insane.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Why would what type of cooking sheet is available be related to whether the oven is gas or not?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Because I've only ever seen two common sizes of oven. 50 and 60 cm. Just like all kitchen furniture. And the sheets and grids all match the oven and slide on the rails at the sides. But apparently somewhere in the world there's problems. Also somewhere there's gas in common use. Maybe it's related, maybe it's not. That's why I was wondering.

I can see bread and pie pans being obviously smaller but the actual oven parts? That just makes no sense.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

It's an electric oven. I'm not actually sure exactly how the measuring is done when websites tell you standard Australian oven size so I measured the internal dimensions of my oven. It's hard to decide where I'm measuring from and hard to be very precise but it's about 60cm wide by 40-45ish deep and about 40-45ish cm high. I don't really know where the 90cm figure came from and now that I'm googling it again I think it was a google 'answer' that I'm not seeing anymore that was misleading. I think it's more that most of them are 60 OR 90 cm widw and they seem to not typically give height or depth measures (I guess they're always the same?). Almost every oven here is Electric, gas is rare except in super old houses. I don't think the gas vs electric idea relates to sizing, but I don't have a gas oven to compare. In any case, I don't have one.

Anyway, there's confusion on confusion here so I'm probably just adding to it. I initially thought that these 'sheets' I was seeing on internet cooking videos were what I'd call oven parts as you say, but then again, I've never had an oven come with any such part. It seems like they're more akin to oven accessories, just a pie tins and bread pans are. Nevertheless, even when I figured that out, I still assumed these sheets were for sliding in to the oven rack grooves, in fact I'm pretty sure I have seen exactly that in many of these youtube cookery videos. The trouble is that the better quality such videos that I'm more likely to watch, have some money behind them and even though they're sort of aimed for home cooks, they probably use professional gear a lot more than most home cooks. I went looking for these things in the standard consumer places here: large supermaket chains, special kitchen shops in shopping centres even big discount stores that sometimes have random kitchen gear and none of those places have rack sized baking sheets or anything called or resembling baking sheets in fact. I couldn't even find ones that sit on racks, that are actually the same thing as these American 'sheets' which was a big surprise because I didn't think this seemed like a particularly clever or sophisticated invention or the type of thing I'd expect to be culturally different, they're just heavy duty metal trays designed for ovens. These standardised size baking sheets seem distinct for their lack of being anything special, which is exactly what I want out of them. All I seem to be able to find are various baking trays marketed for specific kinds of food, or roasting tins. They're nowhere near the size of my oven width, even the biggest ones, they're usually high walled, they have special features designed for particular foods in mind like pouring spouts, or non-stick coatings, or divets for making muffins etc. etc. The closest has been 'cookie trays' or brownie pans, but they're much thinner than the things I'm looking for and much smaller. They seem to be designed for small batches of very small cookies. I think it's weird because I'm not aiming for something unusually ambitious for home cooking here. I'm making what I would think would be considered a pretty small batch for anything commercial, and just normal to large-ish for a domestic baking. Sticking with cookies because they're a good example. I typically like them to be bigger, and one of these cookie trays I can find could fit, maybe 3 big cookies. If I made ones closer to the size they seem to envisage, even then I'd be making like 6-9, maybe 12 if they were absolutely miniscule.

I'm ranting here but I'm just so surprised that this is somehow an obscure and specialist want. I feel like it isn't for the Americans, but then, I only have potentially misleading sources to go on having never been there. So I'm half asking where and if I can get them, and also half asking if they are as commonplace as I assumed they were. It is sounding like the full rack sized ones I wanted are a bit more unusual wherever you are, but at the very least I hope to figure out if the 'half' or 'quarter' sheets are something your average American has in their home, or if that's all just Babish and Serious Eats and various other popular media giving me the wrong idea.