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This is Highly Recommend, a column dedicated to what people in the food industry are eating, drinking, and buying right now. Here, H Conley shares how they finally gave into a silicone muffin pan and never looked back.
For months I was living inside an infomercial. Every time my partner and I baked Breakfast Egg Bite Quiche Cupcake Muffin Type Things from the You Suck at Cooking cookbook, our allegedly nonstick metal pan came out of the oven cemented with egg and cheese. We tried every type of paper or foil liner, and still so much muffin was wasted on the pan and cups (and you know the price of eggs these days). We continually turned to each other, pleading “There has to be a better way!”
And there is. When one batch fused so securely to the metal tin that we couldn’t Bon Ami it clean, we finally agreed to see what silicone had to offer. We bought the Trudeau Structure Silicone Muffin Pan on a lark at Bed, Bath & Beyond, and the first time we used it, color returned to our world. We oohed and aahed as we popped the bites so easily out of the molds, no eggy residue in sight.
Now our one silicone pan works triple shifts. We converted from cakes to cupcakes, brownies to brownie bites, socca flat breads to baked socca coins. Our metal muffin pans are collecting dust; they just can’t compete. I’m not exaggerating when I say this has been life-changing.
I was skeptical of silicone for a long time. Many silicone cupcake pans are too flexible, meaning they need to be placed on top of a metal sheet pan. Someone with my track record in the kitchen needs something more structurally sound; I knew that set-up would result in raw batter all over our oven. But the Structure Silicone Muffin Pan has a reinforced steel rim around the 12 silicone muffin cups, which gives this pan the structural integrity of a metal pan while offering the flexibility of silicone. It’s oven safe up to 428 degrees and cools quickly, which is ideal for impatient and hungry bakers. It’s also BPA free and dishwasher safe—but, even if you don’t have a dishwasher like me, it’s incredibly easy to clean by hand.
Not that there’s much cleaning to do, thanks to that slick silicone. This is the better way I was searching for.