Tonight we had to go out to dinner because the Pyrex dish in the microwave detonated like a small bomb. It did NOT just fall apart like they claim, I heard the noise 3 rooms away when the dish went >BANG!< in the microwave and rocked it.
OK, I'll grant you that this occurance was possibly a rapid temperature change caused by cooking in the microwave.
However, a couple of years ago we had a Pyrex 11"x17" 6-month old baking dish sitting in a cabinet that hadn't been used in many days and it just exploded with such force that the door to the cabinet was blown open, shards of glass flew across the room and there was glass even on the shelf ABOVE where this dish was sitting.
The fine people of World Kitchen (scroll down to Pyrex Responds) would like to have you believe that these dishes don't explode, so perhaps they would like to explain why I had to empty a shelf above the dish that didn't explode to clean up the shards of glass, or how glass landed in the carpet almost 8' away, or sprayed across our kitchen.
For my part, I'm done with Pyrex as 2 exploding dishes in a couple of years is just too dangerous to deal with.
We'll be replacing them with metal for baking or some alternative for the microwave in every case possible.
In the meantime, we're immediately moving all of our Pyrex to lower shelves by the floor as a safety precaution as I'd rather have glass in my foot instead of glass in my face from this volatile cookware.
[Update]
After doing some research we found this tidbit:
"Pyrex kitchen products produced by World Kitchen are no longer made from borosilicate glass, and their packaging indicates that they must never be used over a flame, on stove tops, under a broiler, or in a toaster oven. Hence the exploding glassware. Pre-1998 Pyrex tends to crack into large pieces rather than shattering. Keep your pre-1998 Pyrex and treat it nicely so it will last. Anything you buy now may blow up in your face! "The 11x17 baking dish was post-1998 but obviously because of it's size wouldn't fit in the toaster over or even the microwave, and we NEVER use these for stove top cooking.
The smaller dish that cracked up in the microwave last night we've had since about '91 so it was the old-style Pryex and did crack into larger pieces, but did so quite loudly.
I'm just glad it broke in the closed microwave and not when my wife opened the door or was removing it from the microwave, that would've been a bad situation.
No more Pyrex for us, it's gone.
