PYREX vs. pyrex: What's the difference?
corning.com
corning.com
Mind you, most of our oven proof glass is decent enough to be put in the oven and then dumped on a cold surface.
It's available in the US under the "Arcuisine" brand.
> has some pride
Money has no smell nor pride.
I’ve been in the room a few times where they broke down the math for me.
Lowercase pyrex bought the naming rights and gets to benefit off selling cheap products at a premium price, while uppercase PYREX maintains their brand image for them by selling genuinely good glassware.
Eg, imagine if mazzerati also made a mid-market vehicle. It would lose some cachet, and also wouldn’t make much profit off the midmarket item. In the other side, if Walmart stocks premium goods, they won’t sell because they’ll be perceived as too expensive by the Walmart audience.
Edit: anecdotally, I once used the weaker variety, the dish exploded on me, and I luckily was not maimed. The floor was not so lucky, it is still pockmarked. The lesson I learned is: only use metal in the oven, no matter what.
With that spelling it sounds much worse that mid-market :-)
I would have thought that is a pretty minimal requirement. Where else would you put something you take out of the oven.
I assume anything that can go in the oven can go from oven to table and fridge (but maybe not freezer) to hot oven.
I understand the appeal of free. It’s the idea of someone else controlling it that gives me anxiety.
A room-temperature surface. The only cold surfaces in my house are in my freezer and refrigerator.
You can't visually tell borosilicate and soda-lime apart easily. There is no difference in color (the green vs blue difference is because of other impurities). There is no significant different in refractive index. The only reliable test you can do at home is density (soda-lime 2.52, whereas borosilicate ~2.23, unit g/cm^3).
I measured my "borosilicate" cookwares and all of them are in the ~2.5 range. Turns out they just false advertise. A couple "made in China" beakers I got on Amazon turned out to be borosilicate though. Take that however you will.
I'd be more concerned about some assumptions made. For instance I found that some alumino-borosilicate glass has densities that can reach above 2.5 g/cm³. I have no idea if you'd make cookware from that, but it's also a borosilicate glass...
I don't think he's got a solid block of glass.
The video does also show off a cool "mineral oil test" to tell the difference, but probably is only effective if you had something to compare it against.
My takeaway though was that I need to thrift some Corningware, though!
It's a non destructive test. Quote from the video (with funny youtube transcription spelling errors):
"Without getting too technical, the gist is if you put the mineral oil in a vessel made of boroilic and then dip another glass made of boroilicate into it, that glass will seem to disappear while others will not. So I filled a vintage what I think is made of borosilicate Pyrex vessel with mineral oil. Then it dipped in a vintage what I think is made of boro silicut loaf pan and it seemed to disappear right before my eyes. Eureka I thought the experiment works well until I dipped a new Pyrex piece lowercase that I know is not made of borocyic and it disappeared too. Once again, another spokesman at the Cording Museum of Glass that I reached out to said that even the mineral test isn't a sure thing. According to Brady Spalling, he says in order for glass to quote unquote disappear in oil, the glass being submerged must have a similar refractory index, which allows light to pass through both without significantly bending. Mineral oil and borosyic do have similar refractory indexes. So what you've heard is correct. This method is often used to quickly ascertain whether a glass object is borosyicate. However, variability of glass recipes makes it difficult to rely solely upon this method. In short, it may work and it may not."
Also, its refractive index not refractory.
Pyrex doesn't have a maximum temperature limit in a kitchen environment if you are careful. Preheating the oven is the #1 way to prevent issues. If you put a piece of glassware in an electric oven without preheating it, you can create massive temperature deltas between top/bottom. I can get an iron skillet beyond 700F in my electric oven if I leave it in there while it's preheating for a set point of just 450F. If the heating element has direct line-of-sight to the cookware, you always need to be wary of radiative heating effects.
Not being able to put it under a broiler is a huge disadvantage for nicely finishing dishes like a lasagna.
Unless your mac&cheese was premade, put into the fridge, then directly into the oven at cook time?
I think my oven might cycle the bottom element even when pre-heating, possibly to prevent this.
people say that, but from side by side comparisons of breaking both kinds, it really didn't seem to make a difference.
Its not like car window "glass" that just pebbles.
Source: bleeding fingers picking up the pieces after a car break-in
Turned out that distinction isn't too reliable when it comes to determining whether a product used soda lime glass or borosilicate glass instead.
Speaking of "very exothermic" ... decades ago a lab colleague of mine once entirely blew out both (glass) sides of his fume cupboard while attempting to melt "ice" with a heat gun. Of course the "ice" that had formed in his flask during the previous reaction turned out not to be ice. The flask itself was later found in lots of very very tiny pieces.
It was the loudest bang I've ever heard, happily he sustained only very minor injuries, with hindsight a minor miracle.
The all-caps name, PYREX, is the de jure, natural bakeware, created of the land (borosilicate). It has inherent, unalienable rights to withstand thermal shock. It is a true vessel.
The lowercase name, Pyrex, is the corporate fiction, the STRAWMAN created under the maritime law of commerce. It is a mere vessel in name only, subject to the whims and defects of its corporate creators. By purchasing it, you are unknowingly consenting to be governed by their rules of catastrophic failure.
Do not be deceived by their fraudulent conveyance. I do not consent to being a party to this contract. I am a free man, traveling upon the land with my original, common-law PYREX.
Also, I'm told that IKEA's "MIXTUR" line of glassware is more Pyrex-like than actual Pyrex. Is that true?
Some marketing geniuses somewhere concluded that consumers wouldn't notice, and created the line of products that carry the confusing "pyrex" branding but aren't borosilicate based but just thicker or something.
And now they have to have this page to explain the differences.
I would like to live in a world where deceptive trade practices did not exist.
Imagine selling a "full-self driving auto-pilot hands-free car!" And then arguing all the letters are lower case in the brand name so all those dead drivers should have known better and should have bought the capital F version.
They reference events out of order, etc.
The article is atrocious.
This sort of thing subverts the usefulness of trademarks. You buy from a traditionally upright company, but they just bait-and-switch you on the strength of their trademark and you might as well have bought any product labelled as pyrex.
This is why I like the concept of an "origin mark" that links to a full record of the whole supply chain for the product. Companies already have that information, exposing it makes buyers able to make [more] rational decisions and then capitalism can actually work to improve products.
That said, using the same trademark for different products in this way should invalidate the trademark (maybe UK TMA1994 S3 can be used in this way??).
- Company is fully acquired as-is, nothing changes to the product.
- Business division is spun off as-is, nothing changes to the product.
- Company closes current factory, outsources production as-is to another factory in a different country, nothing changes to the product.
- Company makes minor changes to recipe, nothing substantial changes.
- Company uses different recipe in current factory using current tooling, product is substantially different.
- Same factory is used, production line is completely retooled, product is essentially unrelated.
- Original factory is closed, original company now buys imitation product from a 3rd party factory and still uses the original trademark.
- Trademark is sold, slapped on completely unrelated product.
Clearly it isn't as simple as bait-and-switch. There are plenty of scenarios where a lot can change while the product stays the same, and there are a plenty of scenarios where almost nothing changes and the product is completely different.
It gets even murkier when you look at product lines instead of individual products: at what point do you revoke the trademark when they sloowly switch to the cheaper recipe as part of the regular replacement cycle, with all new products only using the budget option and all the legacy premium products getting retired? And how is it going to work for anything more complicated than glassware - where the quality difference isn't a plain "borosilicate glass or not"?
The product has ingredients, the product gets a label, the product label links to the ingredients; each ingredient had a label, that tree of labels links back ... this already happens, when an ingredient (which child itself be a product) is found to be inferior or spoiled the manufacturer can check their own products made with that batch of ingredient. 'All' we would be doing is exposing this data.
Change suppliers, there code on the product changes (that could be by keeping a table of product UUID matched to batch number).
Someone mixed peanuts in with the macadamia nuts and supplied 100 different manufacturers, now the public can look up those products that were affected just as much as the suppliers can.
Someone bought a cheaper metal, for their bicycle frames, that shows in the product information linked from the origin mark.
Someone changed the recipe of their chocolate bar to have more filler ingredients ... that should already show on the ingredients list.
A company change their GPU, say, to use slower RAM, that shows in the product info as an ingredient. Binning? Not much help for that. Different manufacturer or different factory, that would show.
It would expose a lot of information considered currently try to hide.
Doesn't really do anything for fraud except that if you claim someone is your supplier (still) and financials don't show continuing payments then it's clear there is fraud there.
Any further thoughts, very happy to discuss. I'm keen to work this up into a feasible system.
pbhj AT alicious , com
[0]: https://www.oxo.com/glass-3-qt-baking-dish-with-lid.html
https://artsandculture.google.com/story/a-century-of-pyrex-i...
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DKasz4xFC0
He references this FAQ from the Corning Museum of Glass (CMOG):
> The short answer is that the change from upper to lower case signified a re-branding of the trademark Pyrex® in the late 1970s but is not a conclusive way to determine, historically, what type of glass formulation the product is made from.
Was Corning's borosilicate cookware tempered? Tempered soda-lime class is more resistant to breaking from rough handling than borosilicate, so there's a real tradeoff between the two.
I won't lie. This is shitty marketing.
Some pretty strong bullshit vibes from this section. Feels a lot more like they decided to make the product worse because they knew the brand name would be enough. I doubt price is a significant factor compared to durability for the average home cook.
Since the article is discussing the branding, this is relevant, as they use “Pyrex” in the article, to refer to “PYREX.”