As a chef and food-trends pundit, I anticipate emerging trends and occasionally even create them. To name a few -- Little Meals, culinary minimalism (Recipes 1-2-3), Hudson River cuisine, herbs in dessert (Venetian Wine Cake), new Israeli cooking, the doughnut craze and more; I have often been called “too previous.” Now, with a sheet-pan revolution well underway I can, with pleasure, add it to my list.
I wrote the first story about sheet-pan cooking for Bon Appetit on November 7, 2011 (it appeared in March 2012). Editor-in-chief Adam Rapoport immediately went on the Today Show, and demonstrated the recipes. The article was called "Dinner on a Sheet Pan” but could easily have been called “cooking in two dimensions” where all the elements of a single dish were cooked together, but separately, on a rimmed baking sheet. And that idea came from a cookbook I wrote for teens called "Eat Fresh Food: Awesome Recipes for Teen Chefs" where I featured a new-style of chicken parm coated with grated parmesan cheese (instead of breadcrumbs) with roasted grape tomatoes, olive oil and herbs on the opposite side of the pan, all choreographed so that they cooked at proper times and then assembled and stacked before service. The idea was that individual ingredients come together as a beautiful whole once the dish is plated. That was 2009.
And that idea emerged from my collaboration with French chef Gerard Pangaud in our three-star kitchens at restaurant Aurora and the Rainbow Room. Pangaud, as well other nouvelle cuisine chefs at the time, believed they could pre-plate (but not cook) entire main courses, and pop a dish to order into a hot oven – hoping to speed peak service and produce a nifty entrée. It didn’t always work well but indirectly led to my sheet-pan discovery – which worked like a charm. Success has many mothers.
The original recipe ideas for that first article were as follows:
Wasabi salmon with bok choy, red cabbage & shiitakes
Parmesan chicken & roasted apples on cashew “Caesar”
Herbed pork medallions with “braised” fennel, grape tomatoes & carrots
Sizzling “steak-style” tofu with string beans, red onion & lime
And the introduction went like this: Cooking on a sheet pan is a blast: A blast in a super-hot oven to exude, concentrate, “braise,” roast, or caramelize ingredients to their most delicious end. It is also a blast to think about this as a new minimum-effort, low-fuss approach to cooking, with unexpected results. Using a standard-size rimmed sheet pan one can assemble all the components for a main course, side dish, or even dessert. The recipes have been devised so that the disparate ingredients cook to maximum perfection. Not until the entire dish is assembled on the plate will you remark at the professional “finish” of each dish and the multi-layers of flavor within.
As a bigger idea, I proposed using this new technique for cooking large quantities of spinach (as in sheet-pan spinach, radicchio & thyme, where the leaves are spritzedwith water from a spray bottle), and decided it was a great way to handle lots of mussels. Four pounds of mussels and two cups of dry white wine fit perfectly on a rimmed baking sheet (which later get served with a red curry-garlic broth). I also deployed the technique, unexpectedly, for a voluptuous dessert called “baked pineapple with wildflower honey & pistachio dust.” Viva la revolution. A trend was born.