Aluminised Steel Bakeware

Details

Baking tins in 0.8 mm aluminised steel, the gauge a working bakery buys: steel sheet hot-dip coated in an aluminium-silicon alloy to ASTM A463 Type 1, roughly 20 micrometres a face, with the silicon in the bath at 7 to 11 percent to stop the coating going brittle. It conducts fast and browns evenly, which is why a cake out of these has a real crust instead of a pale damp edge, and it is good far past any oven temperature because the coating is metallic rather than organic. Now the claim this category likes to make and cannot support. Anodising is an electrochemical oxide grown on solid aluminium. It is not a thing that can be done to aluminised steel, because the substrate is steel and the aluminium layer is a few microns of metallurgical coating, not a body. Anodised aluminised steel and hard-anodised baking tray printed over a coated steel product describe nothing that exists, and the giveaway costs nothing to check: put a magnet on it. Aluminised steel is magnetic, because the core is steel. Real aluminium bakeware is not. If a tin sold as anodised aluminium sticks to a magnet it is coated steel, and if a tin sold as aluminised steel ignores the magnet it is aluminium. That one test settles the whole shelf.

• Aluminium-silicon hot-dip coating to ASTM A463 Type 1, about 20 micrometres a face, on 0.8 mm cold-rolled steel
• Not anodised, and not claimed to be. Anodising is an oxide on solid aluminium and cannot exist on this
• No non-stick coating anywhere, so nothing to blister, nothing to scratch through and no replacement cycle
• Rims rolled over a steel wire, which is what keeps a thin tin from warping and wobbling at 250 C
• Straight sides and square internal corners, so a cake comes out with an edge instead of a slump
• Coating adhesion checked by bend test, and food-contact release run on a finished tin
• Magnetic, and we say so as a feature: it is how you verify what you were sold
• It is not non-stick. Grease it and line it with paper, every time, or it will hold on to the cake and you will blame the tin
• Uncoated steel spots if it is left wet, so dry it at once. The tin also darkens with use, which improves the bake and looks worse in a photograph
• No dishwasher, and do not cut inside the tin