I’ve been using it for so long I don’t recall when I first heard about parchment paper, but I do have a vague recollection of thinking the name conveyed some sort of official, fancy, tied-up-with-a-ribbon kind of purpose.
Thankfully, it’s much more prosaic than that.
Parchment paper is one of the most useful, practical items to have on hand in your kitchen. Thanks to a silicone coating, it’s resistant to grease and moisture, flexible enough to fold but sturdy enough to not tear. Parchment paper is also pretty heat resistant, capable of standing up to oven temperatures as high as 450 degrees. (Any hotter and it has a tendency to turn dark and brittle.) That heat tolerance is not the case with wax paper, so they aren’t always interchangeable. You can buy parchment paper in rolls, or as pre-cut sheets and rounds to fit your pans with less waste. Depending on what you employ it for, a sheet of parchment can be reused several times.
