Parchment Paper History: How We Got Paper Perfect for Baking (2019)

I can add some information to this from the UK market

The best baking paper is Silicone Vegetable Parchment. This can be baked on usually 5-6 times so is great for a commercial bakery. The one we sold was a two-sided emulsion of Polydimethylsiloxane coated on 42gsm vegetable parchment. It could be used for dry, wet, fatty foods and for baking application up to 220ºc, together with frozen food, food interleave and industrial uses

There is a silicoat baking paper which is cheaper but can only be used a couple of times. The one we sold was 57gsm Silcoat is a bleached, high density paper, manufactured from virgin fibre with high chemical purity, coated on both sides with silicone and was certified to be Home Compostable.

There is also baking parchment which is is widely available for consumers, these tend to be quite thin and only suitable for single use. It's a parchment paper with silicone coatings.

There is also basic greaseproof (which we used as kids as "tracing paper") which can take some temperature but is nothing like as robust.

> NO The answer to the question, “Can I replace wax paper with parchment paper in the kitchen?” In fact, doing so might be a great shortcut to starting a fire. See, silicone material is designed in such a way that resists heat, which makes it perfect for baking; wax paper, also known as “greaseless paper,” is not. (As the Reynolds website notes, though, there are some cases, though, where wax paper makes sense in the oven—say, at the bottom of a cake pan, below some batter, where it’s not directly exposed to the oven’s heat—but you wouldn’t just want to randomly swap it in because you’re out of parchment paper.) So despite the fact that these materials seem like kitchen doppelgängers, DO NOT CROSS THE STREAMS.

> Editor’s note: This post has been clarified to note that there are some use cases for wax paper in the oven, though not as a direct replacement for parchment paper.

The note at the end says that the post has been "clarified", but isn't the base problem that that question is asked backwards? The question they should be asking, and indeed the question they are answering is "Can I replace parchment paper with wax paper", and answer is indeed that with rare exceptions this would lead to disaster.

But the question as quoted (but not answered) is "Can I replace wax paper with parchment paper in the kitchen?" Which is a question rarely asked, but less obvious. My guess would be that in almost every case you can indeed replace wax paper with parchment paper, because to a first approximation wax paper is always a disaster in the kitchen.

Separately, I'll add that despite being quite interested in this topic, and quite passionate in my love for parchment paper and my hatred for wax paper, I found this article to be really painful to read. What terrible stylistic choices! Are there people out there who prefer this style of ADHD vomit in the articles they choose to read?

A tip I recently learnt: if lining a cake tin or similar with baking paper, scrunch it up really tight, then flatten, and it will fit to the tin very really

Parchment paper was definitely widely used in kitchens before the 00s.

is it different from butcher paper?

TL/DR: We Have Got It Because of PFAS