In which she wails at kitchenware

[zeborah]

My new Pyrex glassware says that it must be used in a preheated oven only.

My new Marinex glassware says that it must not be used in a preheated oven under any circumstances.

a) How on earth am I going to remember which is which, and
b) WHY?


[In shinier news, the New Zealand government has agreed to delay the implementation of guilt-upon-accusation in the new Copyright Amendment Act. "[T]he Creative Freedom Foundation's high-volume "blackout" campaign [...] will now go down in history as the first viral internet campaign to stop - or at least delay - a law." This is rocksome on many levels.]

Comments

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

The warning about the Marinex glassware makes sense because the sudden shock of a hot oven is a traditional way of cracking glass or pottery dishes. Likewise the sudden cooling caused by taking a hot dish and putting it into cold water or onto a cold work top can do the same thing.

The warning that doesn't make sense to me is the instructions re the Pyrex to only put it into a pre-heated oven.

I would have thought that the safe option was to treat both as though they couldn't stand sudden heat. I can't imagine the Pyrex dish coming to any harm by more gentle heating.

I've had two Pyrex dishes for more than 30 years and I've put them into cold, warm and hot ovens without any mishap. I can't imagine that they'd "improve" Pyrex dishes to make them less versatile.

[zeborah]

Yeah, the Pyrex instructions did seem weird. But they were very clear. They used underlines and everything.

I'm trying to remember a cookbook I had which said one must never put food into a cold oven. My reaction was roughly "??? Meh, whatever." I guess they're either worried about broken glass or about how it would screw up one's terribly precise reckoning of how long it's been exposed to what amount of heat, but as I cook by "Yeah, that's a nice shade of brown anyhow" it doesn't make much difference to me.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I know there are cakes that have to go straight into a hot oven, but I'm not really a cake baker.

I do pre-heat the oven for roasts, but other things, like frozen pizzas, go into a cold oven, despite the instructions on the packet to pre-heat. Our oven is a fan oven and even using a lower temperature and less time, I always burn things if I put them straight into a hot oven. It heats up pretty quickly anyway.