Nothing excites home cooks—or publishers—like a one-tool meal. While the past few years have seen myriad titles devoted to the slow cooker, a spate of recent books are celebrating an even simpler kitchen gadget: the sheet pan. Here, a look at some of the forthcoming titles pushing the idea that you can craft a robust meal with nothing more than this commonplace kitchen tool.
Sheet Pan Suppers Meatless by Racquel Pelzel (Workman, Oct.)
This follow-up to Workman’s Sheet Pan Suppers, by cookbook author and Saveur contributor Raquel Pelzel, connects to another food trend: plant-based cooking. Its 100 recipes include soups and salads as well as healthy snacks (sesame-miso kale chips) and vegetarian comfort foods, such as “no-boil” macaroni and cheese.
Good Housekeeping Sheet Pan Cooking by Susan Westmoreland (Hearst, Sept.)
In this book, Good Housekeeping’s food director delivers recipes that allow cooks to prepare proteins and sides simultaneously. They include pepper-crusted steak with roasted vegetables and Spanish chicken and peppers.
One Sheet Eats: 100+ Delicious Recipes All Made on a Baking Sheet (Oxmoor, Oct.)
The recipes in Oxmoor’s book span appetizers (roasted shallot dip) and desserts (peanut butter and chocolate pan cookie). Some dishes call for multiple baking sheets and other kitchen tools, such as a food processor, but require no additional pots or pans, which points to another benefit of sheet-pan cooking: less cleanup.
Sheet Pan Magic: One Pan, One Meal, No Fuss! by Sue Quinn (Quadrille, Nov.)
A focus on cooking for the family drives this book by Quinn, whose previously published cookbooks include Super Foods Every Day (Ten Speed, 2015). Her multi-step recipe for potato, chorizo and mushroom hash utilizes the flavors of each element (which remain on the sheet) to embellish the others, turning the possible limitations of the method into a benefit.
All-Time Favorite Sheet Cakes & Slab Pies Easy to Make, Easy to Serve by Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough (St. Martin's Griffin, Oct.)
Slab pies and sheet cakes, which are made using sheet pans, have been enjoying something of a comeback recently, owing to their ease and to the fact they often produce more servings than their circular counterparts. Here, authors Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough (who collaborated on the 2016 cookbook À la Mode) offer recipes for such desserts as lemonade cake and cherry pie with pecan crunch.
