8 Best Sheet Pans, Lab-Tested and Reviewed

Search for recipes online, and you’ll find scads of recipes for easy sheet pan dinners. But simple one-pan meals are just one reason to own a sheet pan. You can use it for so much more: cookies, roasted veggies, pizza—and, yes, sheet cakes or jelly rolls.

To test sheet pans, we cooked a variety of foods, including a one-pan chicken dinner with potatoes, onions, and carrots, and we baked cookies. We also baked canned pumpkin and cream cheese onto the pans at a high temperature to see how easy it would be to remove the burned-on gunk. You’ll see these results in the cleaning score in our sheet pan ratings. (Spoiler alert: There were significant differences.) We also subjected the coated pans to a durability test in which we abraded the surface with steel wool to see which pans would stand the test of time.

We tested both coated and uncoated sheet pans, including an unconventional cast-iron model. “The coated pans tend to heat up and cook faster,” says Bernie Deitrick, the engineer and cooking enthusiast who conducted our tests. But the uncoated pans fare better in cooking, evenness, and durability. Below, we’ve included the winners from both categories.

The largest sheet pans that fit in most home ovens are often called half sheet pans, because they’re half the size of the sheet pans used in commercial kitchens. Most of them measure about 13x18 inches.