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The Pyrex Glass Controversy That Won't Die
- ars 8y agoIs it possible to buy new aluminosilicate glass dishware commercially? For some reason I really want to try cooking directly over a flame with a glass pot.
- nate_meurer 8y agoNo you don't. Glass is nearly the worst possible material for stovetop cooking. With thermal conductivity roughly 1/70 that of cast iron, it's impossible to cook on a range without burning the food, and that combined with a relatively low heat capacity makes it useless even for searing. On top of that, glass seems to be a uniquely sticky cooking surface. It's far stickier than unseasoned steel or aluminum. I have several pieces of Visions. I would never, ever use them on a range. I use them exclusively in the oven, where the IR transmittance of the glass is useful, and the uniform surrounding temperature makes the poor thermal conductivity a non-issue.
- dasil003 8y agoHow does lower thermal connectivity cause the food to burn easier? FWIW, when I was a kid we had pyrex bowls with clip-on handles for stovetop heating. Yes, you wouldn't cook with it, but great for re-heating food.
- baddox 8y agoPresumably it causes food to burn easier because the areas directly touching the flame/heating element become the temperature of the heating element, rather than spreading the heat out across the surface of the container.
- code_duck 8y agoI would think the dense mass of the pan slowly becomes hot and holds a fair bit of heat. This should be a fairly gentle way to cook, but have the same disadvantages of an electric stove top versus gas - slower to respond to range setting changes. When you turn the stove down the glass would take longer to radiate the heat it absorbed into the food than metal would. Not sure about the mass of typical pans of each material, or heat retention potential of glass vs steel/copper. Slower response to lowering heat could cause food to be burnt. I haven’t used glass cookware, though I always thought it looked cool as a kid. I do have 20 years of glassblowing experience though.
- nate_meurer 8y ago> I would think the dense mass of the pan slowly becomes hot and holds a fair bit of heat. It doesn't work that way. The thermal conductivity of glass is so low, the heat doesn't have a chance to spread before being lost to radiation and conduction to the contents of the pan. Glass has high emissivity, and it's at least somewhat transparent, so heat rapidly radiates from the whole bulk of the material. The result is scorching hot spots directly over the flames or coils, while the rest of the pan remains too cool to cook. Glass also has relatively low volumetric heat capacity, meaning a layer of glass holds much less heat than the same thickness of steel or aluminum. Glass really has the worst combination of characteristics for stovetop cooking. There's a reason nobody uses it.
- code_duck 8y agoMakes sense that it would be hottest directly near the flame source - the low conductivity assures that. I’m sure this would be clear if I tried it. Some in the glass community cook in 110 mm tubes of Pyrex at parties. This is also a commercial product (baking cylindrical loaves!). The tubes are rotated like a rotisserie, and the glass is very thin. It works quite well, but we don’t tend to do this outside of glassblowing camp. As far as the thickness, the glass pans are much thicker than typical metal pans, probably for that reason as well as many others. I have some metal pans that are maybe 2mm and they are awful about hot spots. I think the glass pans are about twice as thick as my cast iron Dutch oven, but we’d have to measure. I think the worst aspect is chipping - one chip and the whole thing should be thrown away (one could flamepolish and anneal it, but that’s unlikely for consumers).
- mymythisisthis 8y agoGently stirring with your new hammer shaped ladle?
- leemailll 8y agotry VISIONS or Luminarc
- jaclaz 8y agoHere (Italy) it is common enough to use "Pirex" (actually "Luminarc", however "real borosilicate") glassware normally on gas (methane) stoves, you need to use a small net like this one (example): https://www.aviliahome.it/casa-e-cucina/speciale-casa-e-cucina/retina-rompifiamma-per-piani-cottura-20cm.html https://www.aviliahome.it/casa-e-cucina/speciale-casa-e-cuci... or (a more recent/new design) like this one: https://www.kasanova.it/casalinghi/diffusore-spargi-fiamma-mpt000451noc.html https://www.kasanova.it/casalinghi/diffusore-spargi-fiamma-m...
- Treblemaker 8y ago"Based on reports made to the company and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, less than one tenth of one percent of the millions of Pyrex products sold each year experience thermal breakage" So, that's potentially thousands of people experiencing this each year? Not a record I would be proud of....
- CamperBob2 8y agoAlso, how many people bother to report a broken baking dish or whatever? Figure the reality is at least 10x worse.
- ams6110 8y agoI had a Pyrex baking pan crack in the oven once. I was baking some chicken breasts that I hadn't thawed, they were still frozen solid. The pan didn't explode though, just cracked into a couple of large pieces.
- jrootabega 8y agoI recently bought a set of pyrex containers. The temperature safety procedures are irritatingly complex. Frozen chicken in a hot oven doesn't surprise me that much, but you can't even use it to put room temperature ingredients in the oven while it's preheating.
- sfilargi 8y agoI had a Pyrex pan shatter. Didn’t bother reporting of course.
- sethherr 8y agoI also had a Pyrex bowl shatter and didn’t report. I bought a new one and am careful about how I heat it now.
- calciphus 8y agoThis is my small batch, artisanal data: As an avid baker and engineer, over the last decade I've had two pieces of cast iron catastrophically fail vs one piece of borosilicate. I'm not sure if that makes metal twice as dangerous, or if people maybe report things breaking disproportionately to the manufactured volume... I will say feeding my future father in law a glass casarole was not a strong move.
- PorterDuff 8y agoThanks for the article. I was looking to replace a chipped old Pyrex measuring cup about a month ago and found myself going down this same rathole of research. It all makes perfect sense as I just naturally assume that all old-school US consumer goods go through the same sequence of events: 1) sell the company, close US factory 2) license the name to a manufacturer in China 3) cost reduce, cost reduce, cost reduce 4) profit! You could make a good BOLTR-like youtube channel by weighing and measuring changes over time in common products. The KitchenAid mixer would be a good one.
- gh02t 8y agoAvE has one video on the KitchenAid, if I recall correctly he was actually surprised that it was still pretty well-built. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qKp-0h9P18 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qKp-0h9P18
- eikenberry 8y agoMost of them are still made in a factory in Greenville, Ohio.
- pfranz 8y agoIn the early 2000s there was a lot of talk about KitchenAid switching to plastic gear housings. They switched back after a few years either due to backlash or warranty issues. Here's a cool comparison of wahl hair clippers from 50 years ago and a modern pair: http://grathio.com/2016/08/teardown-same-product-fifty-years-apart/ http://grathio.com/2016/08/teardown-same-product-fifty-years...
- sokoloff 8y ago> due to backlash or warranty issues. I see what you did there. I suspect it was unintentional, but it’s quite pleasing nonetheless.
- gibba999 8y agoI had one. It broke just outside of its warranty period. I opened it up. Plastic gears and complete junk inside of a tough-looking metal housing. Same with their blender; broke pretty fast, with relatively mild use.
- propter_hoc 8y agoIt's true that borosilicate Pyrex is better than the newer stuff, but honestly both are inferior to stoneware, cast iron or stainless steel. You will not find any professional kitchen cooking in glassware.
- oh_sigh 8y agoDepends...if it is just you and your partner, cooking a couple of meals per week but also eating out a lot and not cooking for children/other housemates? Go for the glassware if you like the looks. If you're cooking frequently or intensely, go for the steel options for durability plus ultimately versatility
- gordaco 8y agoBut glassware can be used in microwaves, and metal can not. I don't cook in glassware, but I very frequently heat food in glassware.
- black-tea 8y agoMicrowaves might convenient but are inferior to conventional ovens. You won't find one in a professional (high end) kitchen.
- vostok 8y agoDo you happen to have a source for this? One can find articles that seem to imply the opposite. > A few of Mr. Myhrvold’s microwave recipes — an eggplant Parmesan, which purports to turn the vegetable creamy instead of rubbery, and a steamed chocolate sponge cake — echoed ones I had seen before. (Mark Bittman has written in The New York Times about using the microwave to make several dishes, and “Eleven Madison Park: The Cookbook” includes a recipe for microwaved pistachio spongecake.) https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/09/dining/microwave-cooking-is-more-than-just-reheating-your-coffee.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/09/dining/microwave-cooking-...
- black-tea 8y ago
- NeedMoreTea 8y agoIf you want proper Pyrex, just go to ebay or a European site, and find British (second hand) or French Pyrex. It's all still borosilicate glass. Helpfully the brand logos are slightly different for the different countries, so it should be easy to spot. It seems daft to me to take away the main selling point of the stuff by starting to make it with cheap glass. EDIT: Infographic with dates and the different logos: http://www.biggreenpurse.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Pyrex-infographic_optimized.png http://www.biggreenpurse.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Pyre...
- crocigator 8y agoIf you want proper borosilicate glass, just go to a company that has been honest with their branding. I've found SIMAX (https://www.kavalier.cz/en/simax-home.html https://www.kavalier.cz/en/simax-home.html) to be a good one personally. Made in the Czech Republic by a glass company that still makes labware, and as best I can tell, everything they make out of glass is borosilicate. Even the flower vases.
- omnimus 8y agoHow can you tell? It says made in czech rep but nothing about type of glass.
- phonon 8y agohttps://www.kavalier.cz/en/simax-professional/simax-glass.html https://www.kavalier.cz/en/simax-professional/simax-glass.ht... "Simax glass ranks among the types of glass of the group of clear „hard“ borosilicate glass „3.3“, which excel in a high heat and chemical resistance and which are defined by international ČSN ISO 3585 Standard. It complies to the full with the properties prescribed by these standards."
- Youden 8y agoOr go to any store when you happen to be in Europe. My local department store has an extensive range of bakeware and there are ~50% cheaper brands using borosilicate glass that have performed well for me. They're easily identifiable as they label themselves for thermal shock resistance.
- e40 8y agoMore interesting to me is the same issue with CorningWare[1]. I've used this for microwaving food for decades and I've bought a lot of it off ebay. In fact, that's all I've used ebay for in the last 10+ years. According to the wikipedia page, it suffers from the same borosilicate vs soda-lime issue. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CorningWare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CorningWare
- msds 8y agoJohn C. Mauro does some really cool work, if you're interested in the underlying statistic mechanics of glass, and how to use computers to design better glass.
- evan_ 8y ago> Corning employee Jessie Littleton discovered a new use for the material after his wife Bessie used a sawed-off borosilicate glass battery jar for baking. Sounds more like Bessie discovered the new use, not Jessie. EDIT: The Corning Museum of Glass credits them both- while noting that it was Jesse’s idea to try it. https://pyrex.cmog.org/content/littletons https://pyrex.cmog.org/content/littletons Incidentally the Corning Museum of Glass has an a YouTube channel worth checking out. They have a bunch of long, well-shot glass artists doing some incredible work, start to finish- good videos to play in the background while working on other things.
- ChrisFoster 8y agoI second that, the CMOG channel is great. They have high production quality (especially consider the constraints of the glass shop) and really talented artists / craftspeople. Bill Gudenrath's series on Venetian glassware is particularly fun because he's such a craftsman but also a fascinating teacher.
- MagicPropmaker 8y agoThis is very timely because I had a Pyrex-type glass lid explode on me today. It was a lid to a Calphalon frying pan,and I was grilling a veggie burger and some onions. I put the lid on and set told Alexa to remind me in 2 minutes. Just before the alarm sounded: "BOOM" and there were a thousand little pieces of glass everywhere. I've had this happen when I've heated it unevenly, or when I accidentally put cold water on a hot container, but never in normal use. I'm wondering if Pyrex hasn't changed, but if cook tops have. Are they hotter or less even than cook tops of the past?
- colanderman 8y agoPyrex has changed; it's not a conjecture. Modern Pyrex is physically and verifiably a different material than traditional Pyrex.
- makomk 8y agoPyrex has definitely changed, in the US at least. Pyrex-branded cookware is no longer made out of Pyrex (borosilicate glass). Which is particularly shameless because the whole reason for Pyrex is that ordinary soda-lime glass, which they're making it from now, isn't suitable for this purpose because its high coefficient of thermal expansion makes it shatter.
- pjungwir 8y agoOh interesting. We've lost several pyrex dishes. The first was nine or ten years ago. My wife was baking a raspberry crisp thing (or some red fruit), and the dish cracked into hundreds of little bits before we took it out of the oven. Each bit had sides maybe half a centimeter long. It certainly wasn't caused by a drastic temperature change, unless you count opening the oven. It is very unnerving for your dessert to turn into shards of broken glass. I hope this article gets a wide audience, and business goes to a more deserving company.
- supernova87a 8y agoIt happens to a lot of brands. Private equity investors sniff out a name brand that has a lot of customer trust, but management that's probably weak after years of profit and not paying attention. They buy out the company and strip out all the costly materials, fire staff, sell off inventory. The brand changes, but customers don't know it until your Breyer's ice cream has a label that says it's "frozen dairy dessert product", or your Twinkies are 10% smaller, or your Pyrex glass pans start shattering. Then you wonder what happened to your beloved childhood / family brand you trusted. Capitalism is what happened. But things come and go, and hopefully newer, better things will take their place. (By the way, the story of what happened to Twinkies is more interesting, and not just the negative story of a company cheapening out its product for profit's sake. There was a lot of dysfunction/waste in that product line.)
- zaroth 8y agoA few flavors of Breyer’s (vanilla, chocolate, mint chip) I believe are still labeled “ice cream” and have ingredient labels to back it up.
- iamshs 8y agoBought Corelle dining set which had ‘Made in USA’ printed on the box. Opened the box and the white color of the mugs doesn’t match white color of the rest of the set because they were Made in China. One of the miniscule and still very irritating thing. World Kitchen is the owner of both Pyrex and Corelle.
- rahimnathwani 8y agoIn my sets, the mugs are just regular ceramic mugs, whereas the bowls and plates are vitrelle (thermally bonded layers of glass). (This was clearly written on the product description, so I knew I was getting mugs I didn't want/need as part of the set.) We're down to the last few mugs. They seem to break more easily than our other mugs.
- iamshs 8y agoJust went and checked the box out, there is absolutely nothing about ceramic mugs, and lots of yada yada about Vitrelle. Not a hint that mugs are ceramic either, though you are right they are in fact ceramic. The box also has United Steel Workers (USW) logo. Deceiving is all I can say.
- pg_is_a_butt 8y agoThe only reason this is coming up again is because Instant Pot was just bought by the Pyrex parent company, and everyone is worried they will reduce product quality in the Instant Pot the same way they did for Pyrex. Pyrex was changed to stop people from making meth. Instant Pot will be changed to stop people from making bombs.
- colanderman 8y agoProtip: You can tell soda-lime from borosilicate by using a homemade polarimeter. [1] Get a pair of polarizing sunglasses, and hold them in front of a computer monitor at such an angle that the screen looks black. Hold the cookware in between the glasses and the screen. You should now be able to see the screen (see my synchronicitous comment [2] yesterday about the link here to quantum mechanics). If you see a checkerboard pattern, you are holding tempered soda-lime. (The pattern is due to the tempering process.) Soda-lime also has a distinctive greenish tinge when viewed edgewise. Borosilicate is clear. [1] https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=2746878#p2746878 https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=2746878#p27468... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19406122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19406122
- Camillo 8y agoStep-by-step instructions: 1. Buy some sunglasses. Make sure they have polarizing lenses. 2. Get a computer monitor. 3. Holding the glasses in front of the screen, rotate them until the angle is such that the screen appears black when looking through the lenses. 4. Make a note of the angle. In this configuration, the combination of the glasses and the screen serves as a homemade polarimeter. 5. Throw all that shit in the garbage. 6. Just look at the glassware edgewise, if it's greenish it's soda-lime.
- colanderman 8y agoBut using a homemade polarimeter is way cooler.
- loco5niner 8y agoYou're missing the point. It's fun and is a great way to see an example of polarization in the real world.
- jrootabega 8y agoThat's wild, thanks! I tried with a couple of my pieces (although they do say "not polarimeter safe") and they did have some noticeable brightness gradients, though I hesitate to call them patterns. What DID stand out looked like brown scorch marks or stellar jets/magnetic poles. I don't think they were really scorch marks, but it was striking just how brown that tiny area was. Edit: got a picture but it's more of a red and blue interplay than just brown. http://imgur.com/a/0xRlg9D http://imgur.com/a/0xRlg9D Maybe it's the rgb of the monitor. And I have seen similar colors in windshield polarization. It makes more sense if you rotate the glasses and watch the brown and blue flow through the patterns
- PhantomGremlin 8y agoWishful thinking in the article. They say: Amazon Basics sells a pair of borosilicate glass pans for $15. But clicking on the link to those glass pans finds review comments like this: "These are not borosilicate" "glass will crack after minimal use" "Broke first use" I've never bought an AmazonBasics product, and I don't think I'm going to start any time soon. In my mind Amazon now stands for "cheap" and "counterfeit". Not a brand name I want to trust any more.
- jrootabega 8y agoThe internet is about 50/50 lying companies and idiot users. Amazon likes to consolidate reviews for different products, versions, and sellers together, which makes it impossible to know what you're gonna get without actually ordering it.
- toyg 8y agoThe link to safety instructions goes to a geofenced 404 for me in UK. Who puts safety instructions behind a geofence? Somebody scared of European consumer laws, that’s who. Not a good look...
- geggam 8y agoAs an American spending the last several months in the EU this is infuriating. So much so I setup a VPN simply to read the news. It seems the default method of dealing with GDPR is to simply geofence.
- benj111 8y agoThe European product is different to the American product, so it does make some sense.
- Reason077 8y agoMy brother once cut his hand badly when an IKEA glass shattered in his hand while washing it. (Either he was washing a cold glass in hot water, or a hot glass in cold - I forget which). It resulted in a trip to the hospital for stitches and his still has the scar. I think they've improved these days, but there was a period where certain IKEA glasswear was very prone to thermal shock.
- fraudsyndrome 8y agoI've had this happen to a friend except it was stacked on top of each other. Trying to pull it apart when stuck ended up breaking the glass with the shard going into their hand.
- geggam 8y agoI was doing the melt pepto bismol into bismuth experiment and using a rosebud oxy acetylene tip and found some of the soda lime kind. Also demonstrated why safety glasses are important. That much temperature caused a pretty good boom with shrapnel when the glass exploded
- pfdietz 8y agoThe lawsuit against those researchers was particularly shameless, in my opinion. Will avoid products from this company in the future.
- phasetransition 8y agoReminds me of an experiment in my undergraduate glass lab. Take soda-lime stirring rods and break 50 or so under 4 point bend test. Record strength. Take another batch and simply log-roll them along the lab bench for half a meter. Repeat break test. Note the reduction in strength signficant at p=0.05 . Fracture toughness is a bear.
- tomohawk 8y agoYet another casualty of moving production to China. I knew one of the Corning execs who headed up moving everything to China and setting up the factories over there. At the time, regulatory costs in US were crazy, so plenty of motivation. For example, if an accident occurred in a single factory, OSHA would make all Corning employees everywhere go through training about it, even though the accident involved equipment and processes that only existed at the one plant.
- robertAngst 8y ago>parent company of Pyrex among others, is planning to merge with Instant Brands, maker of the very popular Instant Pot. Talk about a highly advertised product. Before Instant Brands starts spamming 'Mom posts', about how great Pyrex is, expect it to be heavy and burn your hands if it gets hot. My tupperware isnt like this.
- code_duck 8y agoAdvantage I see for glass is that it’s rather inert, so you never have to worry about BPA or whatever else leaching into your foods, or it catching on fire or melting. Harder to abrade Pericles into your food. Also, glass can be scrubbed entirely clean, unlike plastic. When I was diagnosed with celiac disease, I had to throw away most of my dishes that were not glass or metal. Disadvantages of glass clearly include fragility.
- Causality1 8y agoFrankly you could go through life assuming any company that sues for "defamation" is the bad guy and me right 95% of the time.
- based2 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence https://www.activesustainability.com/sustainable-development/battle-against-planned-obsolescence/ https://www.activesustainability.com/sustainable-development...
- ecopoesis 8y agoThe “pleasing heft” the article mentions is a sign that you have soda-lime glass instead of borosilicate. A few years ago after having a 2-cup soda-lime Pyrex measuring cup explode I order the equivalent from Arcuisine in borosilicate and I was amazed at how much lighter it was.
- sitkack 8y agoThat sucks, I bought Pyrex specifically because I thought it was borosilicate. Never another Pyrex for me. I assume my Pyrex labware is ok.