Time for new cookie sheets? Here’s the deal

It’s that time of year when a happy cook’s mind turns to holiday baking. And that, of course, means lots and lots of cookies (you have entered our holiday bakeoff, right?). And that, in turn, means getting out your old cookie sheets and wondering whether you can somehow get one more season out of them.

For me, the answer was finally “no”. I mean, really, having gotten 10 years out of a set of Ikea baking pans is a miracle anyway, right? Finally I faced up to the fact that these things are warped even when they’re not heated. Actually, they were pretty serviceable, at least for an infrequent baker. Still, this time I wanted to get something good.

But what do I know about buying cookie sheets? So I did what any modern cook might do and took it to my Facebook friends. There were, of course, lots of opinions. One of the most frequent recommendations was to go to Surfas and buy their sheets. Probably a good idea, but I can’t go near that place without dropping a couple of hundred dollars on things I never even knew that I wanted, much less needed, until I walked in. For my financial well-being, it’s a store of last resort.

The next most popular suggestion was the cookie sheets from an outfit named Doughmakers. They sounded good and sturdy and came with lots of kitchen cred, having been recommended by Zanne Early Stewart, the longtime test kitchen director at Gourmet, and by baking goddess Dorie Greenspan, who says her recipe tester swears by them. (Dorie herself makes do with no-name sheets she buys at a kitchen supply store, which is the kind of thing I suppose you can do when you’re Dorie Greenspan.)

I shopped around a bit and found what seemed to be the best deal at Wayfair, a website I’d never used before, but that turned out to be terrific. A little more than $50 for three sheets, including shipping. They arrived in two days

The funny thing was, to make sure I was ordering the right size pans, I went into the Test Kitchen to measure what we had. And found that, you guessed it, we’ve been using the same set of Doughmakers pans for at least the last 10 years. And happily, they are still working as good as new.

Great new cookie sheets and a new website to spend money at. How sweet is that?