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!

14 responses total.

I think cold-pressed oils burn and gum up worse.  By "cold-pressed" I 
mean the so-called "unrefined" oils like you can buy in bulk at a co-op.
I use cheap supermarket cooking oil mixed half and half with liquid lecithin.
Works great.  ( I think I got the idea from Laurel's Kitchen...)

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.

I worry about that brown gunk: as oil oxidizes (burns) it forms free
radicals, which are carcinogenic.  The brown gunk is made of burnt oil.
So it seems to follow that it's a Bad Idea to let the brown gunk come
in contact with the food.

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.

So, I'm okay to be using my "well-seasoned" cast iron pan...?

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

Well, that's the latest scientific information, that I know of.
But for all I know, some scientific researcher working for dupont
is just discovering that vegetable oils do something *really* nasty
when left in contact with iron, and it will turn into the
next aluminum scare.

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.

Not only that, but the reputed iron content of raisins was not because
of teh raisins thenselves, but the cast iron containers used for
processing.
  
And have you noticed the demise of holes in Swiss cheeze? I have and
I've also noticed a detrimental taste shift in Swiss cheeze. 
  
Seems that some gummint edict forced a "higher standard" of "micro-
organism" control. <<like soooooo many people were dying from eating
all that "micro-organism manufactured" cheeze>>
  
Yeh, well, several hundred years of delicious, safe Swiss cheese bit
the dust. 

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...

Re #0:  I've found that the dark brown non-stick cookie pans don't
work very well for me.  The cark color causes them to retain extra heat, and
ends up burning the bottoms of my cookies all the time.  I've switched
to *insul.ated* (double layer of metal with air in the middle) shiny
aluminum cookie sheets, and I like the results.  I don't have many
recipes for cookies that call for oiling the sheet first, since 
cookies are usually very high in fat, and the fat that melts out of
the dough is enough to keep the cookies from sticking.  I suppose if
you're cookinhg low-fat stuff, you will need to oil the pan.

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.

I got one of mine at Meijher's, and I think they're a bit
cheaper there than at places like Hudson's.

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.

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