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All of a sudden, it's the end of August. And if you're like me, that means a state of panic has set in. Right now, I can make dinner in 5 minutes from some fruit and a ball of mozzarella. But what about next month, when the cooler weather demands a real dinner?
Don't worry, I tell myself. Because I've just remembered that there's only one thing I need to move seamlessly from the vacation state of mind to September reality. And it's called a sheet pan.
Yes, that humble rimmed rimmed baking sheet (aka sheet pan is the best weapon in the battle for simple weeknight dinners.
There are a lot of reasons to love a sheet-pan dinner. You don't have to spend any time hovering over the stove. Cleanup is a breeze. And, if you follow the tips below, you can make dinners that aren't just quick and easy, but also unexpected, crave-able, and worthy of company any night of the week.
You know how delicious potatoes taste when you drizzle them with a rich, meaty pan sauce? With a sheet-pan dinner, there's no need for drizzling. Just cook your meat or poultry right on top of the vegetables. The vegetables absorb all the tasty juices as the meat cooks, becoming more tender, more flavorful, and usually more crisp than they'd ever be if cooked on their own. (Just make sure not to overcrowd the pan, so there's plenty of room for things to get golden brown and crunchy.)
To achieve next-level sheet-pan dinners, you might consider adding a...next level. Fitting a rimmed baking sheet with a metal wire rack creates two cooking areas, and allows air to circulate around whatever's on the rack. That gives any breaded food (from eggplant and chicken cutlets) a terrific crunchiness with minimal effort. We put this technique to work to make these pumpkin-seed-crusted fish tacos.
The wire-rack technique also works well if you want to roast a sizzling steak while basting the vegetables beneath it with flavor. (And trust me, you want to.)
Yes, it's simpler when you can combine everything on one tray and set it and forget it, like you can for our cumin-roasted chicken thighs with squash. But if you're willing to open the oven door once or twice, you can expand your sheet-pan possibilities. Start by roasting the ingredients that take the most time to cook through—your bone-in chicken, your butternut squash, your potatoes. Then, after the amount of time your recipe specifies, add the quick-cooking ingredients—things like kale, cherry tomatoes, or thinly sliced onions. And hey, when your sheet-pan dinner emerges from the oven, no one's stopping you from topping it with finishing touches that don't need any cooking at all, like sliced scallions, fresh herbs, or a drizzle of olive oil.
To nail that toasty roasted flavor and cook food evenly, two sheet pans are a great idea. Set racks in the upper and lower thirds of the oven, and rotate the pans once or twice during cooking, and you've doubled your cooking surface area. Here, we cooked prosciutto-wrapped chicken on one sheet pan, and potatoes on the other. Once we divided the side and the main, we had room to top the potatoes with vinaigrette-tossed kale towards the end of cooking. So do yourself a favor and make sure you have two 13x18 heavy-duty rimmed baking sheets—it'll open up another level of sheet-pan dinner options.
One of the challenges of cooking full meals on sheet-pans in the oven is that pastas and grains are out of the question. Or so I thought. Then I remembered a recipe for making rice in a roasting pan, and the tinkering with doing it in a sheet pan commenced. The idea here is an untraditional but totally satisfying version of paella; to achieve that, a second sheet pan comes into play as a lid for the first, trapping all the steam and helping the rice cook evenly in the oven. Once you master this basic technique, you can dream up a whole slew of rice based sheet-pan dinners.
OK, so you can't cook pasta in a sheet pan (at least I think you can't), but you can get a very good (and healthy!) pasta substitute by roasting a spaghetti squash alongside the ingredients for a hearty puttanesca sauce. Just roast it cut-side down so that the insides steam and get tender. Then scrape that squash out into spaghetti-like strands and toss it with the flavorful sauce that's roasted alongside it. You'll wonder why anybody still uses the stove for pasta. (If you come up with the answer, let me know.)
