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The distance between the kind of person I am and the one I want to be is a long, straight line. Literally: I wish I was the sort of gal who broke out her scissors every time she needed to make a smooth edge in the kitchen—a perfect square of wax paper, a tidy label for leftovers—but the truth is I don’t know her. Instead, I am the person holding the end of the roll of masking tape with my teeth and ripping indiscriminately, creating a slanty, jagged trapezoid. This is fine, I think, holding my ugly nonsense shape. Everything is fine.
Aside from just looking awkward, my terrible tear-jobs also (bonus!) don't work very well. Plastic wrap goes diagonal and wonky, one end not long enough to cover a bowl of rising dough. Tin foil torn with abandon helpfully covers just 72% of a burrito. And worst of all, it’s always the bare corner of a sheet pan, uncovered by my weirdo parchment paper geometry, that gets sticky from the oozy side of a fruit galette. You’d think I would have learned my lesson by now, but if there's one thing I hate more than doing dishes it's wasting time; every second you spend making a nice paper rectangle is one you will never get back.
It took working with ex-restaurant chefs to discover that I could have it both ways. Their sharp-cornered parchment-lined sheet pans, I learned, were not the result of years of practice but a smart shopping decision. They had boxes of the precut stuff, perfect rectangles designed to fit a half sheet, ready to go at a moment's notice. With some of my own, I could be both lazy and tidy, haphazard and beautifully neat. Parchment rectangles would make it look like I had my life together, temporarily fooling even me.
Precut parchment paper sheets are a luxury, there’s no doubt about it. They’re slightly more expensive than the long rolls, and if you opt for a box that sits flat rather than one that coils (which I recommend—if you’re gonna do it, do it right), they take up a bit more storage space as well. But whipping out a neat, perfectly proportioned sheet in seconds rather than fussing with scissors or a razor-tooth box edge is a total delight. Precut sheets mean no rough ends failing to fill your pan from corner to corner, and no tear lines that won’t sit flat. The flat box versions lay evenly without curling back up under themselves, so you can focus on your actual cooking project and not the disposable tools.
They also deftly tackle all other tasks you might tap parchment for in the kitchen, like crumpling, clipping, and funneling dry ingredients into a stand mixer. I'm not just a neater baker because of my precut parchment paper but a better one, too, because the time I save on pan prep I can spend double-checking measurements and applying finishing touches. And it's thrilling to know that even though it seems like cheating, this particular shortcut gets the professional chef stamp of approval.
