Oiling a baking pan?

Jul 8 01:13 UTC 1994

I've run across a number of recipes that tell you to oil a cookie
sheet, then put things on top of it to bake.  Sometimes the recipe
says to put cornmeal on top of the oil.  Either way, invariably
the oil burns, smokes up the oven, makes the food taste burnt and
inedible, and forms a permanent coating of brown gunk all over
the cookie sheet.  Why would anyone in their right mind oil a
cookie sheet?!

Ideas about what might be wrong:
 * Oil with a smoke point that is too low.
 * My pans are nonstick.  (Usually these recipes work better if I leave
   out the oil and let the non-stickness of the pan do its stuff.)
 * A conspiracy among cookbook authors.

Any thoughts?
Has anybody out there oiled a cookie sheet with OK results?
If so, what did you do?

Thanks!

response 2 of 14:

Jul 14 23:52 UTC 1994

The reason to oil a cookie sheet is certainly to keep things from
sticking to it - the "permament coating of brown gunk" is in fact
nothing more than a home made "non-stick" finish - it's not as durable
as the commercial silicone based finishes, but it's naturally renewable
and they're not likely to find it causes infertility or cancer 40 years
from today.

Personally, I've made an effort to find things without non-stick
finishes, because they're more durable and more immune to kitchen
disasters.  However, I can't imagine any reason anyone would want to oil
a non-stick pan.

Growing up, I think the standard form of cookie sheet lubrication in our
household was actually margarine.  That seems to work just fine.  In
theory, butter is less suited, but it's probably the "traditional"
solution, and it's worked just fine for me as well.  Don't try the diet
margarines - they've got water & won't very well at all.

response 4 of 14:

Jul 16 03:34 UTC 1994

Chemistry is full of free radicals - in fact, without free radicals,
there would be no chemistry.

Living organisms are a dynamic balance of chemical processes; stop those
processes and you stop life.  We've traced some of those processes -
they're composed of dozens or even hundreds of steps - and some of those
steps produce free radicals, not as an unfortunate by-product of the
reaction - but as a *necessary* constituent to the next step.  So free
radicals are hardly foreign substances - and living tissue contains
plenty of enzymes to deal with all sorts of free radicals.  Those
enzymes are present in all living organisms - but because they're so
ubiquitous, some higher organisms have lost the ability to synthesize
them from scratch but depend on other organisms for some of the steps -
we call many of the products of those steps vitamins.

Tobacco smoke contains quite a few free radicals, and so perhaps not
surprisingly, it seems that smoking depletes vitamin C and smokers
should be consuming more vitamin C than the rest of us.

Free radicals don't actually very long as such.  They tend to bump into
"something else" pretty quickly and react.  So the "brown gunk" on the
cookie sheet is almost certainly harmless.  In fact, it's actually
remarkably inert, chemically speaking, which is why it's so hard to
remove.  The smoke that burns off may be of more concern.  A good
exhaust fan (that vents *outside*) may be a wise investment.  All of
this is even more important if you have a gas stove; it turns out gas
stoves are one of the major sources of indoor air pollution.

However, there is one saving grace to take comfort in, and that is human
genetics.  It seems people have been sitting around smokey camp fires
for about a 100 thousand years now, and that's plenty of time for
natural selection to take its course: it seems people in fact *have*
enzymes to deal with a lot of the nasty carcinogens in smoke, and so
some of the nasty carcinogens found in burnt meat, for instance, which
cause cancer in rats, apparently don't cause cancer in humans.

response 6 of 14:

Jul 16 12:30 UTC 1994

Frankly, unless you're scraping up serious amounts of the coating with your
food, I wouldn't give it a second thought.

response 8 of 14:

Jul 24 21:26 UTC 1994

Besides, the last I heard, the little bit of iron you get from 
cooking in an iron pan was supposed to be good for you.

response 10 of 14:

Sep 8 09:57 UTC 1994

Blatant zenophobia!    The Swiss Consulate should raise a fuss & initiate
sanctions, such as a chocolate & watch embargo targeted against the United
States until it stops its senseless, repulsive actions!
 
   The government's actions border on sexism, too, but I don't think I
should go into detail on that one...

response 12 of 14:

Sep 12 14:48 UTC 1994

Ja, the problem often happens for things like calzones.
I'm still waiting for air-bake type cookie sheets to become cheaper;
they are *definitely* on my wish list for one day.

response 14 of 14:

Jan 19 20:04 UTC 1995

Don't use oil for baking pans, use shortening.  The oil not covered by the
cookies, or whatever is being baked, will gum at baking temps.  Shortening
will not.  The only time I got the brown gum on my cookie sheets was the
time I had run out of shortening and had to use oil instead.