Kat Thompson is the associate editor of Eater at Home, covering home cooking and baking, cookbooks, and kitchen gadgets. Her favorite thing to cook on a sheet pan are roasted potatoes.
There is nothing quite like a sheet pan meal to save the day when cooking just feels like a slog. The flattened versions of one-pot recipes, sheet pan recipes are typically as easy as they are quick, and though no one likes scrubbing a sheet pan after dinner, tin foil and parchment make that task a little easier. Our favorites include a chicken and potato tray bake loaded with lemons, an easy gnocchi tossed with mushrooms and spinach, and a maple and miso glazed salmon. Here are the sheet pan recipes you should try the next time you find yourself in a cooking slump.
Ali Slagle, NYT Cooking
Sure, everyone got into sheet pan cooking earlier in the pandemic, but call me a late bloomer: Over the last few months, a lack of time, combined with a complete lack of will to do lots of dishes at the end of the night and a reinvestment in home cooking over takeout, has compelled me to seek out weekly sheet pan recipes. This sheet pan gnocchi recipe hits all the right notes for me. They key is to not overthink it. Roasting shelf-stable gnocchi (one of the ultimate premade ingredients) seems like it shouldn’t work, and New York Times commenters have noted this with some skepticism, questioning whether it should be boiled first. But rest assured, the gnocchi comes out of the package as stuck-together pellets of flavorless, dry dough and emerges like magic from the oven toothsomely crisp on the outside and warm and pillowy on the inside. The recipe also avoids another common sheet-pan recipe pitfall: It doesn’t treat all the ingredients with the same cook times and temperatures. Instead, the gnocchi and mushrooms go in first, with the spinach added in the last few minutes. That means that the fungi come out caramelized under piles of wilted-to-slightly-baked spinach topped with a zingy horseradish and honey mustard. — Brenna Houck, cities manager
Holly Erickson and Natalie Mortimer, The Modern Proper
Making crispy chicken in an oven typically involves some kind of short-cut crust and suspending disbelief — panko, crushed cereal flakes, or a cakey layer of flour are all par for the course. But the Modern Proper’s crispy oven-baked chicken thighs require none of the magical thinking or imitation fried skin; instead, you need a frothy egg wash. I tried this recipe on a night I wanted nothing but sheet pan simplicity. It calls for the oven to be cranked to 450, which warms the kitchen as you dust bone-in, skin-on thighs with flaky kosher salt, black pepper (I use Trader Joe’s rainbow peppercorns for flair), and paprika. After lining a sheet pan with a piece of foil and propping a cooling rack over it, you lay the thighs skin-side-up and brush them with whipped egg whites. That’s kind of it — lower the oven’s temperature to a still-balmy 425 and bake the chicken for 30 minutes. The proof of concept is scraping a knife against skin so crispy it could have been starch-battered and deep-fried. I ate the batch in one night. — Nicole Adlman, cities manager
Colu Henry, NYT Cooking
This is the recipe that converted me from frying to baking fish, meeting my requirements for both flavor and ease. I had assumed baked fish would be blander than fried, but that’s not a problem when you coat the fish with the power couple of miso and maple. Piling the green beans and the salmon together on the sheet pan also makes this recipe as quick as frying, without that aftertaste of existential fear I get when fish threatens to stick to a frying pan. I appreciate that the recipe is flexible for brown or white miso. My only note would be to scale back the maple syrup; even with my sweet tooth I found the flavor a bit heavy in the recipe as written. — Nick Mancall-Bitel, associate editor
Eric Kim, NYT Cooking
Many are the nights when I’ve looked in the refrigerator, assessed the situation, and put whatever I can find on a sheet pan to be cooked all at once. This, along with a love of bibimbap and a frequent supply of leftover rice, made me naturally gravitate toward this recipe. Along with being an excellent vehicle for leftover rice (and sundry vegetables), it’s an object lesson in balance and simplicity. You just put some mushrooms, sliced sweet potato, and kale on a sheet pan, roast them up, and then break a few eggs onto another sheet pan with some cooked rice. By the time the eggs are cooked, the rice is nice and crispy. This is also one of those recipes that’s highly customizable — while the combination of kale, sweet potatoes, and mushrooms is a winner, you can swap them out for other vegetables you may have on hand (just adjust the cook times accordingly), and you can use various seasonings, too. While Kim recommends topping the bibimbap with a bit of gochujang, someone in the recipe’s comments section provided a quick recipe for a very delicious gochujang-based sauce that I use instead. Again: simple and customizable! As weeknight cooking should be. — Rebecca Flint Marx, senior editor
Shilpa Uskokovic, Bon Appétit
“Lots of lemon” is my love language. This breezy sheet pan recipe roasts its chicken thighs alongside a bed of fingerling potatoes with giant lemon rind shavings that season the bird to the bone. I reduced the salt content by half and only used about 4 ounces of crumbled feta , but the combination of its creamy, equally tangy goodness over the chicken and potatoes’ crispy skin is eye-rollingly good. The fact that you also add the lemon juice at the very end not only punches up the brightness a bit, but also makes it impossible for me, a frequently spaced out cook, to burn it the way I sometimes do with chicken piccata. I top it off with a fistful of dill (the recipe says parsley will also work, but I find that the dill’s delicateness doesn’t try to compete with the rest of the dish) and serve it alongside a crunchy romaine salad with some ramps and watermelon radishes in the spring. — Francky Knapp, commerce writer
