Last night, as I was preparing dinner, I – very intelligently, as you will find out shortly – sat the baking dish to hold the casserole on the range. I likely wouldn’t have done this previously, since we didn’t have a flat range, and the range that we did have wouldn’t have had the room. So I guess you could consider that a strike against both a flat range surface and replacing a smaller range top with a larger one.
That alone probably wouldn’t have been an issue. Then I turned on the pan to start cooking the chicken when it came out of the microwave. Unfortunately, I turned on the burner underneath the baking dish. That was probably the problem, though it may have simply been bad enough that it was ‘soaking up’ some heat from adjacent burners.
Alas, I didn’t realize the wrong one was on until some time later, as I was chopping the onions and heard a sudden crash. Actually, a crash isn’t quite the right description. It really sounded like an explosion. I thought surely that the kids had tipped over the TV or the computer monitor or something.
Then I realized it was there in the kitchen with me, so I thought something had fallen out of the cabinet and onto the range, shattering it. Only then did I realize I was standing in a sea of cobalt blue glass. Literally – it was spread all over the floor. Then I thought a bottle of lotion or oil or something had somehow shattered, until I realized that was the color of the baking dish I was using, and started putting the pieces together.
Uh, that is the pieces of the puzzle – not the pieces of the dish. Those were gradually cleaned up and thrown away. And when I say gradually, I mean gradually. It took a long time to clean it up. I suspect there are still some pieces of glass in the kitchen that we haven’t found yet, but I think that we did a pretty decent job of getting it all.
So what did we learn? Don’t place a baking dish on the range? Check. Though it doesn’t make sense – shouldn’t a baking dish be able to take some heat? I won’t do it again, just wondering. Don’t buy a cobalt blue baking dish, but instead stick to a different material (Pyrex)? Sounds good, though I don’t know why it matters. Maybe we just ought to stay away from glass entirely. Perhaps stay away from the cooking entirely, and let my wife do it? Now we’re talking, though there are bound to be pluses and minuses to this approach.
Comments
31 responses to “The Exploding Baking Dish”
I took a glass (Pyrex type) baking dish out of the cupboard in a warm kitchen and began washing it in hot water. It exploded into about a hundred pieces. This was not an extreme temperature change. The water was not so hot that I couldn’t put my hands into it. And the dish was definitely not cold. I will never use a glass baking dish again. This is not an urban myth. This happened to me. There is, without a doubt, something defective with this product.
my dish just exploded. It was a baking dish my husband left in the oven. I had preheated the oven, so i figured there was no point in taking it out at the time I put in dinner, but as my dinner was cooking – an explosion occurred and it was the dish in hundred of pieces. AND to top it off, as I was checking it out, I discovered a piece managed to make it out of the oven onto the floor, which I stepped on because it was clear.
I was baking chicken in a glass Anchor dish last night. I was taking the pan out of the oven, sat it on a potholder on my counter and it shattered. It sounded like an explosion. Glass went everywhere in my kitchen. Luckily my small children were not in the kitchen at the time. I had some glass on my leg and a couple of small scrapes. It could have been much worse. Needless to say, I cleaned up the mess and went out to eat dinner!
So, I just spent hours cooking these yummy authentic Italian breadsticks. I put them in the oven in my glass 9×13 pan, and what do you know? A few minutes later, it sounds like the sky is falling. I go and check through the oven window…yep there’s been an explosion. But here’s the funniest part. I have two glass pans in the oven and only one exploded. I don’t know what caused it, but needless to say, it made me a little ticked. Both pans are nicely garnished with glass now, so I won’t be eating either pan. I guess the breadsticks just weren’t meant to be. Also, when I say exploded, I mean that there are no sides left on the pan, it’s just a cracked base. I’m not sure what happened. Woof. I don’t like that at all!
I had a pyrex dish blow out in the oven it had been in there aprox one hour with plenty of liquid with the chicken pieces.The dish was about six months old and had been used many times before. There was a huge crash, on opening the oven i was faced with a terrible mess the whole side had blown out! On cleaning it up i sustained a very bad slice to my hand that needed stitches, i will never cook with pyrex again this has scared me right off. Furthermore i feel if this product is capable of this extreme reaction it should be withdrawn from the market and people warned of the possibility of danger.
We just had a pyrex dish explode in my mom’s hands (not sitting on anything). What would cause this? We’ve had this dish for years, and cooked in it many times. It was Hawaiian Chicken, swimming in its own juices. I was thinking the thermal shock of the hot oven to the cold air, but the room was 72 degrees Farenheit. Could the sweet-and-sour sauce have super-heated?
I was making a chicken tonight. While I was opening the oven (my hand on the Anchor glass) it exploded.
My husband was in the other room and thought that I had just exploded something in the kitchen!
The amount of glass was amazing.
I was not hurt. But as well scared to death.
I will not use glass in the oven ever again!
Exploding Pyrex Dishes at Snopes.com
I had a “Pyrex” brand dish explode myself. It was the meatloaf dish, it was clear. I took it our of the oven and set it on top of the stove. I had just turned around and walked about a foot to turn my oven off. Just then the dish exploded. Hot glass and hot juices from my meat went everywhere. Pieces literally went flying by my face. Some hit my body and arms. Luckily I did not get cut or burned where a mark was left, but I was scared to death. I vowed to never again use a Pyrex dish. If I use them it is for marinating meats in the fridge only. My best friends mother also had a Pyrex dish explode and the glass did cut the back of her arms good enough to make her bleed. Stay away from Pyrex.
I googled exploding baking dish to see if I could find anything about why I also, as it turned out, had this hppen. This happened to me about 3 weeks ago. I was using a 9×13 clear “glass” dish, don’t know the brand. I’ve had this dish, literally, MANY years. I was cooking pork tenderloin in a 400 F oven. About halfway through, I heard a loug bang, and thought that something had fallen into the sink. After reaching the kitchen and finding nothing, I looked in the oven and saw what was to be dinner was then my dish in hundreds of pieces. It blew everywhere. Thank goodness it was enclosed in the oven. The meat wasn’t frozen, the dish was room temp and I didn’t sit it on a hot burner. I know I’ve had this dish well before 1998. What I could find of a pattern, I noticed that the glass had shattered outward from underneath the meat. Looked like a shattered windshield. As the above comment suggested, could it have been a lack of liquid that caused this?