The best silicone baking mats are easy to use and prevent food from sticking to the pan. We have two co-winners: The Demarle Silpat Non-Stick Silicone Baking Mat is a go-to for professionals and home bakers alike. It produces beautiful baked goods, fits perfectly in a standard-size baking sheet, and is dishwasher-safe. Note: The manufacturer has recently gone out of business. It’s still available at some retailers; if you can find it, we highly recommend it. We also love the Mrs. Anderson’s Baking Nonstick Silicone Baking Mat. If you regularly bake bread at home, we recommend the Breadtopia Bread Sling, a silicone round with tabs that makes it easy to transfer bread dough into and out of a hot Dutch oven.
Silicone baking mats offer a reusable alternative to parchment paper: Pop one into a baking sheet and you instantly have a nonstick baking surface that you can use, wash, and reuse. Made of silicone embedded with heat-conducting fiberglass, these nonstick mats were originally intended for use in restaurant kitchens, but they’ve become increasingly popular with home cooks and bakers. We tested a range of silicone mats by making baked goods, like tuile cigars, sugar cookies, and chocolate chip cookies, and by roasting potatoes and salmon.
We also tried out silicone bread slings, which are made from similar materials to the mats but are a different shape: a circle with a long, narrow wing on each side. Many bakers use parchment to transfer proofed bread dough from a banneton to a preheated Dutch oven, and these offer a reusable option; they can accommodate both round and oval 1-kilogram loaves. We used them to bake pain au levain. If you’re an avid baker looking to cut down on waste, a reusable mat is worth adding to your kitchen.
What to Look For
- Releases Food Easily: We often reach for parchment paper to prevent sticking, so baking mats should offer the same benefit. All of the mats made it a breeze to remove everything from cookies to skin-on salmon fillets.
- For Mats, Compatibility with Standard Baking Sheet: Because all of the mats performed similarly, size and compatibility made a big difference. The cooking surface of a standard rimmed baking sheet measures 16½ by 11½ inches, so we preferred mats with close to those same dimensions. Shorter mats reduced the usable surface area; longer mats curved upwards, warping the edges of cookies.
- For Mats, Weighs at Least 100 Grams: One advantage that silicone mats offer over parchment is that their comparative weight (107 to 117 grams) helps them stay put better than parchment (4 grams). This comes in handy when you’re working with melted chocolate or caramel or when you need to spread out clingy batters such as the one for our Tuile Cigars. Because these mats sit flat, they produced tuiles with perfectly smooth undersides—not always the case with parchment, under which air bubbles can form, resulting in wrinkles or seams. Similarly, they don’t lift up as you pull away your spatula after smoothing your confection.
- Dishwasher-Safe: Over time, mats accumulate fats and oils and can retain odors. Silicone is porous at a microscopic level and can absorb detergent odors when routinely washed in the dishwasher, but we appreciated having the option to give them a thorough cleaning periodically. Mats that were cleaned in the dishwasher emerged feeling cleaner and less sticky. See our FAQ below for more cleanup tips.
Other Considerations
- Spreading: Due to the slick nonstick surface and the increased insulation of silicone mats, you may notice that certain cookies spread more on silicone baking mats than on parchment. The higher the ratio of fat to flour and the softer the fat, the more they’ll spread. When we prepared chocolate chip cookies made with melted butter, those baked on the mats were about ¼ inch wider than those cooked on parchment. These cookies were still attractive and delicious; they just tend to be a bit thinner and more crisp.
The Tests
- Bake store-bought sugar cookie dough on new mat to evaluate for any native odors
- Bake Tuile Cigars
- Make Duck Fat–Roasted Potatoes
- Bake five batches of Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies to evaluate durability and grease buildup
- Make Oven-Roasted Salmon
- Bake another batch of store-bought sugar cookie dough to evaluate for any residual odors
- Wash 10 times according to manufacturer’s instructions
How We Rated
- Performance: We evaluated how well and consistently the mats baked the cookies and roasted the potatoes and salmon.
- Ease of Use: We evaluated how easily the mats fit in our winning baking sheet, how stable they were within the sheet, and how well they resisted odors and grease buildup.
