This came from my friend: Be Careful When Cooking With Pyrex Because The Dish Can Explode -Truth! Subject: Pyrex dishes ... Public Safety Alert ... more Chinese garbage I had a Le Creuset ( ... expensive French....) porcelain dish fracture in the oven last week ... not Pyrex but it does happen. snopes.com: Exploding Pyrex Got any new Pyrex dishes in your cooking utensils? This is a must read. I Checked at Wall Mart and all the warnings are there. About 5:30 PM there was a loud bang from the oven. Sylvia opened the oven door and the Pyrex dish had shattered into a million pieces. The roast beef (our first in many months) was peppered with small shards of very sharp glass. Normally,I am quick to inform Sylvia she did something stupid. However,this time she was nowhere near the stove when it blew. I shoveled the glass and the now mashed potatoes into a bucket with two putty knives. I then sucked the remains with the shop vac. I let everything cool down and then scrubbed the oven with Simple Green and some hot soapy water. It took over an hour to clean up the goo. Upon completion I ran the oven empty to see if the temperature controller was working okay. I suspected the oven got too hot and the dish simply blew. This was not the case however. The oven came up to temperature and cycled normally. We threw a disgusting frozen pizza in the oven and it cooked okay. What is going on? I Googled exploding Pyrex dishes and got ten million hits. Exploding Pyrex is very common. Here is the story. A long, long time ago in a country we all know and love was a company named Corning . They made Pryex dishes. The material they used is called borosilicate glass. This stuff is indestructible. But like everything else, the Bottom Liners had a great idea: sell the technology to another company. The Chinese discovered that using soda lime glass was almost as good as borosilicate glass and a lot cheaper. Today, Wal-Mart is the largest distributor of Pryex products. Corning not only sold the technology to a company called World Kitchen, they also sold the rights to the original Pyrex logo. Seamless. The consumer will never know. Now it seems people are getting hurt using soda lime Pyrex. We were lucky because the dish broke while the oven was closed and the damage was limited to the oven cavity. Others have been less fortunate. Some dishes explode when they are lifted from the heating rack in the oven with devastating results. Some people are heavily scarred. World Kitchen is in denial. They say that the dishes are another brand, not theirs. Contrary to their denials the victims usually have more than one of these dishes and the Pryex logo is clearly visible. If you buy a Pryex dish beware. The label on the front says oven safe, freezer safe, microwave safe. The instructions on the back tell another story. You cannot move a soda lime Pyrex dish from the freezer to the oven and expect it to survive. The fine print goes on and on about what you are not allowed to do with the Pyrex dish. The fine print has prevented World Kitchen from being sued because e they have warned the consumer that their Pyrex dishes are junk from the get go. And they are the same price as the original Corning dishes. What a bunch of losers we all are for buying this crap. What to do? If you own borosilicate Pryex dishes no fear. They have to be more than 25 years old to be sure they are indeed Corning dishes. I am not sure if the old Pryex dishes have anything stamped in them that indicates they are made by Corning . You may continue to use the soda lime dishes for holding stuff. Just do not attempt to roast or microwave with them as the hazard is very clear. The reason the soda lime dishes let go is that over time they develop micro-cracks. Once a few micro-cracks are present and once some liquid finds its way into the cracks you have the bomb situation. The liquid is like shoving a crowbar in the dish and pulling it apart. Super heated liquids expand rapidly and it is the super heated liquids that force the soda lime glass to shatter into tens of thousands of shards. Since Corning no longer makes Pyrex and Sylvia proudly holds a large collection of the soda lime Pyrex, we decided that one bomb in the kitchen is enough. The Pyrex dishes will go bye-bye in this week's trash. I do not know what we will use for cake and pie dishes going forward . If you have some suggestions we are listening. I strongly urge you not to use the soda lime Pyrex for the oven, stove top or microwave. The slightest invisible crack is all it takes to have a mess and a possible injury. As to World Kitchen: them and their cheap dishes. In case you are wondering: World Kitchen is not a USA company. Our Pyrex is 20 years old. Better check yours.
This is a well known problem with many types of tempered glass, including car windshields. I think that the breathless tone of the post is unfortunate. http://maek.com.sg/Abstract_Spontaneous shattering.pdf Oldcastle Glass Design Criteria Spontaneous Breakage SpringerLink - Journal Article
My Pyrex baking dish says "Made in USA." I suppose that would be the mark to look for. I also have a larger white ceramic baking dish that says "Corningware." I know the latter is very old. Not certain about the former, but I think it is. I imagine the alternative would be stainless steel. Much harder to clean if anything burns, but it's safe. Or aluminum if you still use that.
If you actually click through to snopes.. Their research indicates the email is incorrect on several important points. While shattering Pyrex reports have been received, the reasons behind it are not as simple as described. World Kitchen says soda-lime glass started appearing in 1946. More importantly, World Kitchen IS an American company (the snopes research says nothing as to the country of manufacture, but the Pyrex website says it's Made in USA, since 1915).
I guess the only way to find out is if it blows up in your oven. Ours haven't for 20 years and it does say Corning Made in USA.
i have pyrex baking dishes, microwave thises and thats and i dont really treat them all that carefully. (the pyrex stuff is about an inch thick and weighs a TON) and have never had issues with breakage. those items, btw are the only things that have not been broken in my house in the past few years.
SPEEDEAMON ... i love that avatar well, pyrex exploding? maybe it's time to stop buying cookware at wal-mart i only use pyrex for mixing elixirs and potions, never for cooking meals
To me this post feels like a modern version of "the sky is falling!" People forward crazy emails warning of death and destruction and the end of the earth. Humans must have an innate need for the sensational. In this particular case, I don't doubt that there is a bit of truth behind the story. All glass can break, and tempered glass will shatter when it breaks. Likewise some glass is better than others. Still, I don't think it merits the giant font and hyperbole. Tom
I'd been heating tea water in a Pyrex measuring cup for months on an electric stove when my wife told me I shouldn't do that. As soon as she said that, the cup split...no more than 2 minutes tops !
The pan shattered while bbqing a turkey last Christmas for a large dinner party. Very stressful. Luckily it happened near the start of cooking and I was able to clean up and save the turkey.
The last two posters.. 1) Pyrex should not be used on a stovetop. 2) You said "bbqing a turkey". Do you mean you had a Pyrex on the grill?
As explained in the snopes article, lab glassware is borosilicate. Pyrex is tempered soda-lime. A grill is typically hotter than an oven, and in a grill, the food/cookware is usually closer to the heat source. The manufacturer recommends not using Pyrex on a grill.
Even if it wasn't hotter, a grill is a bad spot for glass cookware do to uneven heating. Glass is a poor conducter. A grill heats up the bottom of the glassware. Before that heat can transfer to the glassware's sides, the food absorbs it. The difference in temp, and expansion, between the sides and bottom becomes a weak spot for a break to occur. BAsicly, the bottom heats faster than the sides, and it's expansion causes a break. It could happen with any heat source, but open flames heat up faster. Labware is still made of a better glass, but it can still shatter. Don't know if schools have moved away from Bunsen burners for heating solutions, but at work we use electric hot plates. This is for solutions. The liquid spreads the heat up the sides. For non liquids, an oven is used, or a mantle that heats up the sides and bottom. Another concern is that the glass was bruised. We've all knocked over, or even dropped, a glass item and not have it break. It wasn't undamaged though. The bruised areas can lead to breakage and exploding later on.
I took a look at what snopes has to say about this... at snopes.com: Exploding Pyrex it has quite a bit of information about this!
