I tried to make do with aluminum pans, I really did, but I couldn't stand them. They may be less than a third the price of steel, but they are miserable to clean. I sucked it up and bought these steel pans from Lindy's and though they set me back – I needed four! – it was totally worth it. Steel pans are not for everyone. They tend to "spring" when heated. They have a structure to the bottom which may make them unsuitable for fancy cake baking. But, by gum, you can run them through the dishwasher. They can scratch when scrubbed, but not anywhere as bad as aluminum pans. I don't have to wonder what they're leeching into my food, like with aluminum and non-stick pans. They wash up beautifully. Crucial for me, these have strictly vertical sides, so, unlike with glass 9x13s, I can fit four of them in my oven at once. This is important to my cooking schedule, and in the summer I absolutely don't want to have to run the oven more than once at a time. I will say the quality control on the Lindy pans was imperfect. I had to return one and get a replacement because the lid was so tightly fitting we couldn't get it back on once we took it off. The replacement was also stiff, but less so. Also, I found some metal splinters along one rolled edge, and, yeah, I found them the hard way. I dock them half a star here. One design issue with these is that they don't have any sort of handle or lip. This can make them a bit more challenging to lift and manipulate while hot, or greasy, or full of liquid (or, worse, all three at once). Note that the natural way to lift them is with your fingers curled underneath, that puts your fingers on a collision course with the rack in your pre-heated oven – you'll need to be extra careful putting them in. I recommend getting a really good pair of kitchen gloves for using these. I dock them another half a star here, too. This is why I've given them four out of five stars. All that said, we mostly love them, and they are in heavy rotation in my house. We love that we can bake in them, cool on the counter, pop the lid on, and shove the whole thing right in the fridge. No tin foil, no plastic wrap, and you can stack one on top of another. (I use a soft trivet between them so the top one won't slip off the bottom.) The metal lids are just as durable as the pans themselves, unlike pans with plastic lids that wear out long before the pan itself does. They're not "non-stick" – they don't have those awful "forever chemicals" on them! – but if you grease with Pam or other oil spray, they're pretty darn close.
