Getting that first brownie out of the pan is, for me, a nightmare. Always has been. Digging a spatula or cake cutter down below the rim of a normal baking pan gives me broken crumbles of brownie that I tuck away to eat quietly by myself in a corner after serving everyone else. So when an ad for a baking slab—a piece of cookware that appears to have been designed specifically to solve my brownie and bar problem because of its low walls— popped up on my computer screen one day, I clicked it (something I’ve trained myself not to do).
Made In’s baking slab looks simple. An almost entirely unembellished white porcelain rectangle, it might not look like anything more than a shallower-than-normal baking pan. But I went ahead and ordered one a couple weeks before Thanksgiving because, at the very least, having an extra piece of cookware around this time of year is never a bad idea. And I’m glad I did. It helped improve everything I made in it in sneaky, subtle ways.
First the obvious: brownies. Because this slab isn’t as deep as a regular baking pan, I thought it would make it easier to slice and serve—and I was right. The slab is only 1.5” tall and I had no problem getting a spatula all the way underneath that first chocolatey corner. But I assumed there would be a trade off, that less height on my brownies would mean drier, crumblier squares. I’m pleased to say that was very much not the case. I used an old favorite recipe of mine, Stella Parks’s glossy, fudgy brownies from her 2017 Bravetart, and my brownies maintained their soft, fudgy core beneath a cracking crust on top.
Variations on brownies and bars are a pretty limited set of uses though, so I wanted to see what else I could do with the dish. Because the baking slab stretches out the surface area of whatever you’re putting in the oven, giving it more exposure to high heat, anything that’s better with a crusty top seemed like a candidate for the slab treatment to me. The dish is a true 9×13 inches, as it’s listed; I have other, taller baking dishes billed as 9×13 that actually measure much smaller—one I use frequently turned out to have a surface area only 7.75×11.5.
And sure enough, when I tried other recipes in the baking slab I got more delicious crispiness. A baked mac and cheese cooked in the Made In was only about one spoonful deep, meaning every bite was guaranteed a bit of crisped panko Parmesan crust. And my on-the-fly decision to make my Thanksgiving stuffing in the baking slab produced the best results I’ve ever gotten on Turkey Day: the perfect mix of moist underneath and crunchy on top.
I will not go so far as to say the Made In slab is the only baking dish you need (your poor cakes would be so vertically challenged), but it’s quickly proven to do much more in my kitchen than I thought a simple porcelain rectangle could.
