Re: cookie sheets

Hi, genevieve-
I'm not familiar with the All-clad brand. I can only speak from my experience.

A single-layer, heavy-to-medium weight, shiny surface, all-aluminum cookie sheet is perfectly adequate for almost all cookie recipes. When I started baking cookies forty years ago, the only kind of sheets you could buy were steel or aluminum. The best bakers knew aluminum conducted heat the best, and that's what they invested in. Then, for some reason, it began to happen that the most readily available versions were steel. (That's what Baker's Secret is made of.) People got tired of the rusting and poor baking results, and manufacturers saw a profit-making opportunity. So they began a campaign that sold people on the idea that it wasn't the steel, but the single-ply metal that was the problem. They began selling the pricey air-insulated kind of sheets. At first, these were made from aluminum, which of course, was the better metal, so produced better results (because of the aluminum--not because of the extra ply). People got the idea that the air insulation was the magic fix. Now there are steel 2-ply sheets that are no better than the 1-ply. And again, people are disenchanted. My sister had ignorantly invested in the latter kind, and had terrible results. When she inherited our mom's heavy aluminum, 1-ply sheets from 60 years ago, her baking dramatically improved.

So you can see that in my opinion, you shouldn't have to spend a fortune on cookie sheets to get a good product. You may be able to get as good a value from an estate sale where a old-fashioned baker has lived.