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What’s the proper way to prepare a baking pan?

The recipe tells you to “grease the pan” or “dust the pan”. What does that mean?

To lightly grease a baking pan, place a small amount of vegetable shortening on a piece of paper towel and spread the shortening inside the pan until all surfaces are coated. The coating should be evenly spread though a few narrow streaks of heavier shortening will not hurt.

Often bakers use butter instead of shortening to grease their pans. If it is a butter rich recipe, we do so too. Because butter burns at a lower temperature than does shortening and because butter contains 15% water, we prefer to use shortening in most applications.

For a heavier coating of grease, use waxed paper instead of paper towel to spread the shortening.

Whenever you are greasing a pan, make certain that it is dry. Wet areas on a pan will tend to cake with the flour in the batter and cause the cake to stick. This is especially important with fluted bundt pans. Water caught in the crevices of the pan can make removal particularly difficult.

To dust or flour a pan, drop a heaping tablespoon of flour into the greased pan. Shake the flour about the surfaces of the pan, tapping the pan against the heel of your hand, until all surfaces are coated. The flour will not adhere to any missed areas. Regrease those missed areas and tap flour over the new areas. When complete, turn the pan over and tap it on a work surface to discharge any extra flour.

The most reliable way to prepare a pan is to line it with parchment paper. For a layer cake, trace the pan on the parchment paper and then cut the parchment paper to fit the bottom of the pan. For bar cookies, we like to use a large sheet of parchment paper and allow the edges of the paper to extend beyond the edges of the rectangular pan. After baking, we grab those edges and lift the entire cake of cookies from the pan and place it on a large cutting board. On the cutting board, we trim and carefully cut the cake into uniformly-sized bar cookies.

When lining a pan with parchment paper, spread a little butter or shortening in the pan before placing the parchment paper. The grease will hold the parchment paper in place while you fill the pan with batter.

When I was a child, my mother lined her baking pans with waxed paper. (I’m not sure that there was parchment paper in those early days.) I think parchment does a superior job but you can certainly get by with waxed paper though I’m not sure that waxed paper is strong enough to lift a cake of brownies from the pan.