KitchenAid Five-Ply Stainless-Steel Clad 8-Inch Open Skillet

If you want to experience cooking with a steel clad frying pan, but don't want to spend 115-150 dollars, I highly recommend this frying pan. You will be very pleased. You will not believe how tender chicken or pork will cook in this pan. Also, fried eggs cooked in this pan are fabulous. I'm not a gourmet chef. I'm a regular Joe. I am very happy with this pan and believe you will be also. If you are a chef who has worked in a five star French restaurant, you may want to spend the $150. Be my guest. LOL

I own a set and open stock pieces of this, and love how easy I can nest different pieces because of the handle design. Cleanup is easy, and occasional use of Bar Keepers Friend keeps my cookware looking new. [I agree that the inside rivets can be frustrating to clean; I keep an old toothbrush handy for that.]
Flat bottoms are essential for ceramic glasstop stoves and thankfully these are flat.
Ditched my nonstick and discovered truly versatile, dependable, beautiful cookware when I bought KA 5-ply!

I absolutely love this pan. I made my first Fritata with it. I make my egg almost every morning with it and it wipes clean with water and a paper towel. I use spray pam before cooking. I will be saving money to buy more of these pans. Cheese does tend to stick a little but I just add later rather than as I am cooking.
Gotta have it.

I am not impressed with this skillet for two reasons: the handle is riveted through, so as to produce two dirt-catching bumps on the inside surface; and the handle weighs about as much as the pan, making it unstable on small gas burners. Apart from that, it performs well. Such items are hard to find; most such skillets have a non-stick coating, making them unsuitable for sauteeing because of the high heat--Johns Hopkins research has recently discovered that high heat releases dioxins from non-stick coatings into the food.
Cheers.

For some reason (marketing?), the kitchenaid five-ply stainless cookware is being perceived as a tier below the equivalent all-clad. This may be true of the enamel over steel stuff that kitchenaid sells at K-mart, but the five-ply is actually a cut above.

All-clad is three ply, Kitchenaid is five. All-clad has two rivets holding on the handles, Kitchenaid has three. All-clad has weirdly shaped handles that are uncomfortable when lifting large pans and oversized on small ones. Kitchenaid has two different sizes of wide, comfortable handles. All-clad has a straight lip, which makes pouring more difficult, and which also means the exposed aluminum at the top edge of the pan rests against the lid, where water can condense and run back into the food. Kitchenaid has a flared lip, which makes pouring easier, and which keeps the exposed aluminum on the outside of the pan.

My only complaint with my kitchenaid cookware is that the rivets are hard to clean around (which makes this pan less than perfect for crepes), and that the stay-cool handles stay cool enough to drag the pan around on the stovetop, but not cool enough to lift a very hot pan and flip it. The handle also heats up quite thoroughly in the dishwasher (yowch!), and while the instructions with the pan specifically warn about the handles heating up in the oven, the folks at the factory apparently never thought about the dishwasher problem. (All-clad has the same issue).