Borosilicate dutch oven is magic!


 
J

Jonas-Switzerland

TVWBB Fan
I was looking for a cheap dutch oven to buy for my smoker. Found some products from a local Brand "Kuhn Rikon" on sale.

They are known for their iron and steel cook wares.

As it is with family life, I did not really have any time to take a proper look, my partner and I just grabbed the dutch oven and went home for lunch. Turned out the dutch oven was not made out of metal, but glass. I was grumpy.

My partner took out the new glass dutch oven for some potatoe gratin and...

Man...

Borosilicate is truly non stick. You always get a rim of burned cheesy starch which takes elbow grease to clean off. Here, I just wiped it off with the side of a finger. Did the cleanup in less than five minutes. It was kind of magic.

Its still comes with all the usual properties of glass baking ware. It insulates the product from the heat somewhat. You will get less crust on the bottom than any metal baking ware, which sometimes is a good thing, and sometimes a bad thing.

I still have some old glass ware from ikea for baking gratins. I now consider throwing them out and replacing them with the borosilicate stuff.
 
I googled it and pyrex came up. I guess the borosilicate is the glass itself, and not the non-stick surface. I held some pyrex lab glass in my hands. And it was just glass. But this stuff feels slick to the touch...


Ah, THERE we go. It has a Xylan coating!

Looks like its a PTFE-like coating. The packaging made it sound like the coating was "borosilicate". There was a sub-sub section on their website which mentioned the coating.
 
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Timothy F. Lewis said:
Yes, Pyrex is Borosilicate but, not all borosilicate is Pyrex. Never heard of nonstick Pyrex though. This is interesting.
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I believe was, not is, borosilicate. The manufacturer claims that the current soda-lime formula has better physical properties and is yet cheaper to manufacture. Popular, possibly apocryphal, evidence might suggest that the borosilicate PYREX was superior.

As Jonas has noted, his Kuhn-Rikon does have a coating. As far as I know, neither Pyrex (in either formulation,) or Corningware are coated, but purely ceramic cookware. I've had good luck with my Pyrex and Corningware pieces for clean-up, but I'll use PBW (Powdered Brewery Wash) in a pinch for difficult jobs.
 
Timothy F. Lewis said:
Yes, Pyrex is Borosilicate but, not all borosilicate is Pyrex. Never heard of nonstick Pyrex though. This is interesting.
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Sadly, it is not. I fell for some marketing text. It claimed stuff like "No need to butter the surface thanks to borosilicate glass!". It sounded like it was made out of glass, and had a very special kind of non-stick glass coating. Similar to enamel for metal.

Well, no. It has a PTFE non-stick coating.

Now that I read up a bit on borosilicate glass, I have a hunch that my old ikea baking ware is also a borosilicate.

There probably is some interesting material science in this dutch oven. I haven't seen any glass ware with a PTFE surface. But I wanted to slowly phase out my PTFE ware. Now that I have it, I'll keep using it until broken. But I won't buy more of it.
 
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In general, no. The glassware i am familiar with is only rated for the oven. They are rated for about 230C-260C max, can't go on induction for obvious reasons.

You could try it anyways, but at that point you are fighting against the cookware. The point of using glass instead of metal is having only part of your cook exposed to the hot air, while the rest is insulated by the glass. Cooking something through the glass is like blowing through a windbreaker.
 
timothy said:
DO usually go from burner to oven. Can a glass DO made out of that stuff handle that?
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Personally, I don't like using any sort of ceramic on a burner. Oven, counter, fridge, freezer. Borosilicate I think can take the extreme temp change from freezer to oven, I don't think that the new soda-lime Pyrex formulation can really safely do that (read multiple reports of the new product shattering spontaneously and catastrophically in the oven.)
 
DO usually go from burner to oven. Can a glass DO made out of that stuff handle that?

DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!!!!!!!!!!

Several Thanksgivings ago, we were running low on pots. So I put turkey drippings in an oven safe Pyrex glass roasting pan on the gas stovetop to make gravy. Kept the flame at a very low simmer.

One minute later --- BANG! Literally a bomb of gravy and glass shards. Very lucky no one was injured. I hear about it now every TG from my wife and kids.

Oven safe does not mean stovetop safe. I think some specialized glass types are rated for stove top, but not many. So be very sure.
 
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Jim C in Denver said:
DO usually go from burner to oven. Can a glass DO made out of that stuff handle that?

DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!!!!!!!!!!

Several Thanksgivings ago, we were running low on pots. So I put turkey drippings in an oven safe Pyrex glass roasting pan on the gas stovetop to make gravy. Kept the flame at a very low simmer.

One minute later --- BANG! Literally a bomb of gravy and glass shards. Very lucky no one was injured. I hear about it now every TG from my wife and kids.

Oven safe does not mean stovetop safe. I think some specialized glass types are rated for stove top, but not many. So be very sure.
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I found that out the hard way myself.
 
I did that with some thanksgiving leftovers with either corning ware or Pyrex casseroles.
Put them on the gasser on one side and turned the opposite burners to low.
It was cold outside taking forever so I bumped up the temp and snap crackle pop.
 

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Per that page, Pyrex is explicitly *NOT* safe for direct stove top use.

It also indicates that the new soda-lime formulation is more impact resistant while borosilicate is more resistant to extreme thermal shock.
 
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