Some glass cookware will break apart under extreme and sudden temperature changes. Here's how to tell the difference between PYREX and pyrex.
I clearly remember the very last time I used one of my large pyrex baking dishes. I was making a chicken dish, but had forgotten to add enough liquid to the pan. I took the hot pan out of the oven, and poured some cold chicken stock from the fridge into it. That's when my pyrex baking dish shattered. Three or four large segments lay on the stove, mingled with the now ruined chicken. While I was shocked, I realized what my mistake was—the glass was simply too hot to bear the sudden temperature change. But it made me wonder: wasn't pyrex supposed to perform more reliably under just these kinds of temperature fluctuations? When I started googling, I found that people have been complaining about their pyrex cookware exploding for years. Perhaps people just weren't reading the instructions. Then, I stumbled across a possible answer: there's pyrex, and then there's PYREX®. 🧑🍳 Up Your Kitchen Game How to Clean a Cast-Iron Pan 8 Best Outdoor Pizza Ovens 22 Best Gifts for Home or Pro Chefs The first experiment to use PYREX for cooking took place more than a century ago, in the kitchen of Corning Glass Works physicist Jesse T. Littleton, whose wife used a sawed-off glass battery jar to bake in the oven. Made of borosilicate—used today in cookware and lab equipment like beakers—Corning's "Nonex" glass was meant for hot railway lanterns that needed to stay intact when exposed to cold weather (as well as other industrial products). Corning went on to develop the borosilicate compound for scientific labs and then for cooking. First calling it fire-glass, the company later named it PYREX® , a play on the word "pyro," meaning "fire" in Greek, and "ex," from the label that identified its earlier product. Since then, PYREX has withstood the intense temperatures and harsh chemical onslaughts of laboratory work , as well as temperatures up to 425 degrees Fahrenheit in household kitchens. The secret to the original PYREX's heat resilience is its borosilicate composition, a…