Major cleanup

It is amazing how unrelated events come together and cause an almost disaster. Two days ago I went into our room off the main house to get something. I saw on the table a whole bunch of tomatoes that I had brought in during the last cold snap to ripen. I forgot about them but they were all ripe. My wife is tomatoed out, we have put up so many that we are almost out of room so I volunteered to make sauce to freeze. She said great. I have never made tomato sauce because my wife does such a good job but I did and she said it was good and said lets freeze half and have spaghetti. I said how about spaghetti squash. She mumbled something and said OK. Last night I went out and picked a nice small squash and brought it in. We put it in a glass dish, poked holes in it and were going to put it in the microwave. Then we decided to change from Italian sausage to turkey meatballs so we put the squash into the oven so we could put the meatballs in later. She looked at it after some time and said that we should have some liquid in the pan. It was pirex so I said it should be OK to add hot water to the pan. She did and it exploded throwing glass everywhere and even embedding glass into the island cabinets. I got the dogs out so they wouldn't step on the shards and cleaned up the floor but the glass in the oven is really bad. I took needle nose pliers  to get shards out of the door so we could close the oven door. This morning I will get the shop vac to get the rest of the glass out and try to figure out how to get the bottom off to get the glass out of the burners. The warming drawer under the oven is also full of glass. Amazingly the squash was not touched so we finished it in the microwave and had dinner.

LOL< good story. I have had a pyrex dish explode only once and it was certainly impressive. Congrats on the squash!

Wo you guys were lucky to not be the recipients of the explosion!  You could have had eyesight and other organs damaged.  Your story will help us all learn.  I wouldn't have expected those results but probably the pyrex dish was still a lot hotter than the water.  Good luck on cleaning the rest up!

Thanks for this!  Whatta a surprise!  Glad the oven, cabinets & floor were the only recipients of the shards.  Was the water cold?

As the result of your experience, I sloshed tepid water around in the just emptied hot coffee pot before filling it with cold water from the bubbler to make the coffee here at work.

CC

CapeCoddess wrote:  Glad the oven, cabinets & floor were the only recipients of the shards. CC

+1

No, it was the hottest tap water and when we poured it in it seemed OK for about 10 sec. and then the explosion. Funny thing was the bottom stayed in one piece and since the squash was not struck it looked like the sides of the pan exploded outward all at once. People much smarter than me may know the reason but I have read somewhere about super heated steam or something that happens in the microwave so I wonder if that could be a reason.

My 2 pennies about Pyrex. You can add boiling water to a room temp Pyrex, but not cool (relatively) water to an oven-hot Pyrex. Tap water is only 115-140*F, depending on what the hot water heater is set. In the oven, the Pyrex gets directly hot, as hot as the oven is set. In the microwave, the Pyrex only gets indirectly hot because the food gets hot.

If you read the reviews of pyrex bakeware on Amazon, often brought up is that the pyrex made lately isn't the same stuff as it used to be, but one more vulnerable to temperature shifts. You'll probably run across a number of stories of people who had the same thing happen.

From http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/ConsumerNews/holiday-cooking-hazards-glass-bakeware-spontaneously-shatter/story?id=12328800

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission estimates that nearly 12,000 people were injured by glass bakeware over a decade-long period.

...

Pyrex and Anchor Hocking -- say decades ago they switched to a different type of glass that's more environmentally friendly to produce.

"They're using something called soda lime which is a less expensive glass and it's more prone to this sudden fracturing that you're seeing," Mays said.

To compare the two, researchers put European bakeware, which is still make of the old type of glass, in a 400-degree oven, then set it on a damp counter to cool. Nothing happened. But when they did the same experiment with U.S. bakeware made from the new type of glass, the glass shattered every time.

From Snopes http://www.snopes.com/food/warnings/pyrex.asp:

TRUE: Pyrex, like all brands of glass bakeware, is subject to breakage due to thermal shock.

TRUE: Pyrex glass bakeware was originally made from borosilicate glass and is now made from tempered soda lime glass.

...

FALSE: The Consumer Product Safety Commission has determined that Pyrex glass bakeware products are unsafe.
...

all glass bakeware is susceptible to breakage. All users of glass bakeware (regardless of brand) should follow some basic steps to minimize the possibility of such an occurrence:

Read the instructions packaged with the product to make sure your intended use is within the guidelines. Some brands of bakeware, for example, may not be recommended for uses above a specified temperature, even though other brands are.

In general, glass bakeware should be used only with conventional ovens, not on stove tops or with toaster ovens or broilers.

Always use (dry) potholders or oven mitts to handle glass bakeware that has been heated.

Avoid subjecting glass bakeware to sudden, extreme changes in temperature, such as submerging still-hot pans in water or transferring them to a freezer. Instead, allow the pans to sit until they have returned to close to room temperature first.

Whenever I use pyrex, I always take it from the oven to a thick wooden cutting board rather than put it on our stone countertop. If I take it directly to the table, I put it on top of table protectors that have quadruple-folded dish towels on top of them to help insulate the dish from sudden temperature change. (And to protect the table and its finish from all that concentrated heat.) I never put water into it until it has cooled enough to be at most merely slightly warm to the touch.

I do the same with most glass. We used to use beer mugs in a restaurant I worked in which would often shatter when you put ice in them and poured soda in them. Some glass is vulnerable, but it's hard for the layman to know or guess which.

Thanks for the articles, Marc.  I have cool tile counter tops and always set the oven heated Pyrex ware on wood trivets or dry pot holders.

Pyrex and other "glass" products are wonderful, but when they shatter, they redefine the word shatter!    The cleanup is tedious.

sanderson wrote:Thanks for the articles, Marc.  I have cool tile counter tops and always set the oven heated Pyrex ware on wood trivets or dry pot holders.

Pyrex and other "glass" products are wonderful, but when they shatter, they redefine the word shatter!    The cleanup is tedious.

I've never had them shatter on me, but I'm scared they might, so I'm always extra careful.

Sometimes I use oven mitts and cloth pot holders when I set pyrex down on towels, too. Gambling with that kind of thing is kind of like Russian roulette -- the odds are tremendously in your favor, far more than a gambler needs to quickly become rich. But a bankroll can be replaced, and your head cannot. When you can't afford to lose, it's worth being extremely cautious even if the odds against getting hurt are very small.

It exploded due to thermal shock.
http://www.snopes.com/food/warnings/pyrex.asp
http://consumerist.com/2007/01/30/why-pyrex-bowls-explode/

When my children were young (many yrs ago) we did a lot of tent camping on weekends with a large group of relatives and friends. Often I would make a pyrex glass tray of baked beans. One evening as I was carrying the hot beans in the pyrex glass, the glass suddenly burst! Needless to say, all was ruined, luckily no injuries and I never made baked beans in the pyrex again!

When I was a young Mom back in the 80's I was in a hurry for a boiling pot of soup to cool off for supper.  So I became creative and put the pot right outside the door on a mid winter frigidly bitter cold day. The brand name is Revere Ware, tough stuff with a copper bottom but the  lid permanently changed its shape to remind me forever to Never put it outside on a cold day again...
sucked it right down - forever-