Simply Recipes / Sally Vargas
As preposterous as it sounds, exploding Pyrex is not an urban legend.
Under the right circumstances, the glassware will shatter dramatically or crack and split.
I know because Ive seen it happen three times.
Simply Recipes / Sally Vargas
To be fair, only one was an explosion.
The other two were merely breakages.
Still, they were bummers.
Alison Conklin
Welcome to my crusade to vanquish fear by sharing facts.
While exploding Pyrex is far from an everyday event, its not a rare occurrence.
Its entirely preventable if you follow a few simple guidelines.
Elise Bauer
How Pyrex Is Different From Other Glass
Dont blame Pyrex.
When used correctly, itll soldier on for years.
Pyrex and other similar glassware are not like everyday glass jars and bottles.
Irvin Lin
Thats because metal has some flexibility.
But all glass is brittle, and an impact like that might make it shatter.
But a full, tightly lidded glass jar in the freezer wont warp; it cracks.
The cookie sheet doesn’t crack, however; its shape is simply altered.
Thermal shock is when an object goes through drastic changes in temperature quickly enough to fracture it.
On a molecular level: heated material expands, while cooled material contracts.
Just show it some love.
While its true that borosilicate glass is more resistant to thermal shock, its not immune to it.
These microcracks make even best-quality glassware vulnerable to thermal shock.
Here are my sordid firsthand accounts of exploding Pyrex from the kitchen battlefield.
I decided to put a glass pie dish on the bottom rack instead.
When I poured boiling water into it, the pie plate cracked in half.
This was not a disaster, but my mom sure was not happy about her broken pie dish.
The Exploding Casserole!
After about half an hour, there was a spectacular loud shattering.
The dish had exploded in the oven!
Luckily the oven contained the glass shards, but bits of glass were everywhere, as were chicken juices.
What a sad mess, and the worst part was the loss of that amazing-smelling chicken.
The oven was set at 450F and perhaps the high heat expanded an existing microcrack.
This was clearly a case of thermal shock, but also its possible a pesky microcrack was lurking unseen.
Clearly I had not learned my lesson from that whole pie plate fiasco years before.
