Can a pan "cook too fast"?

Cook's Illustrated has demonstrated that different baking sheets can cook differently. They found that some of the sheets would cook unevenly or would even cook faster than other sheets, in the case of a double-layer one they tried. Their results were that finish (light or dark) was not as important in determining how a sheet behaved. More important was thickness and material. Sheets that were thin would cook faster than thicker sheets (overcooking the bottom in the time it took to cook the top) and aluminum sheets behaved better than steel sheets.

This review does not make sense as it's incompatible with the physical laws of the universe. A change in bakeware material or thickness may alter how quickly heat is transferred from the air in the oven to the food, perhaps enough to change cooking time in some cases but not significantly enough to burn things.

Take for example a thick cast-iron pan versus a thin aluminum pan, the aluminum pan will get up to temperature very quickly and the cast-iron slowly as aluminum has a much higher coefficient of heat transfer than iron, and there's less of it to heat. If you're baking cookies then this could make a difference in your overall cooking time as on the aluminum sheet would start cooking the bottom of the cookies faster than the iron, and cooking time is short. In a cake it isn't likely to make any noticeable difference to cooking time at all.

In neither case would food suddenly burn - the heat difference between the food and the oven air isn't enough. If a 350F oven didn't burn food with one pan it's not suddenly going to reduce your food to a pile of ash with a different pan. I don't know what happened with this reviewer, perhaps their oven broke coincidently at the same time they bought the pans, or perhaps they just made it up - who knows! I'd ignore that in favor of other reviews.

50% seems a big difference to me, but if you're comparing against a baking tray that keeps the bottom of the cake cool for several minutes, then switching to one that heats through very quickly will certainly mean the cake has less time-to-live in a hot oven before it starts to "burn". If you're only baking for a few minutes anyway then the time the pan takes to heat is a pretty significant part of the cooking process.

As GdD points out, this supposes that the oven is hot enough to burn the cake at all, in the case of them being left in some minutes past the point of being cooked. My experience is that this often is the case in cookie and cake recipes: if you don't take them out they burn. Where I define "burn" to mean any amount of undesired blackening, not necessarily that they actually ignite. Whereas for GdD it violates the laws of physics to bake cake hot enough to burn, so we're either using different oven temperatures or different definitions of "burn".

If this is what's happening then arguably the reviewer should expect there to be a difference between a paper-thin tray and a heavy one. Or, taking things to even more of an extreme, a double-layer tray like Lorel describes in comments. Or, why not: a Pyrex lasagne dish takes time to heat up. You can bake a sponge cake in one no problem, but you're on your own as to cooking time if the recipe is written for a normal cake tin.

The reviewer's failure to predict the inevitable, or belief that thin baking pans are just plain wrong, doesn't necessarily mean that this is not in fact what they observed :-)

As for why the reviewer can't just make the adjustments and stop burning things: if you want the top of it to cook hotter than the bottom then a thin pan doesn't really work whatever you do to the cooking time. That's not often necessary, but maybe they like their brownies crunchy on the top and squidgy on the bottom?

This information may be completely useless to non-British readers, but also when making Yorkshire pudding the gauge of pan can easily be the difference between burning or not, and therefore require an adjustment to cooking time.

Thermodynamics indicates heat transfer through contact (conduction) is the most significant means of heat transfer. Rate of heating via conduction is a factor of type of material and thickness of material. Law of thermodynamics applies to "sideways" distribution as well as through heating.

So let's take an extreme case: Starting from room temperature, with 50% of the surface covered in cookie dough, would a thin copper baking pan transfer more energy (heat) into the bottom of the cookie dough than a thick silicone pan for a given period of time?

Yes

Copper pan will transfer the ovens energy into the bottom of cookies notably faster than silicone would due to at least 100 fold difference in thermal conductivity. Thermal conductivity Copper 385 (W/m K) compared to Silicon Rubber - at best 2.5 (W/m K)

Thus important in the cooking experience is the rate of movement of heat both across and through a pan.

Note

• in this example the top surface of the pan is also collecting heat energy
• even though both pans would eventually reach the same equilibrium temperature in an oven, at any given time before the steady state is reached the cookie dough (and subsequent cookie - yum!) would get hotter quicker on the copper pan.
• this would cause burning issues if bottom of cookie got too much heat energy in comparison to rest of the cookie, which is heated via convection and conduction through dough (again low thermal conductivity vs copper)
• while different baking pan behaviour is definitely possible by law of physics, I would not know if reviewer is credible
• some Google searches for above material but overall Rates of Heat Transfer - The Physics Classroom gives synopsis