Corelle Bowl EXPLODED

Beware of Corelle!

Put rice in a bowl and it EXPLODED!

SHOT GLASS SHARDS ALL OVER AND CUT ME!

I don’t own a microwave have never dropped or abused this bowl. Anyway be careful.

You mean the room temp bowl exploded when adding hot food to the bowl? Was the bowl cold? As in, colder than normal?

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My house is 70 degrees F… with few exceptions. I keep my bowls in a Standard kitchen Cabinet. So to answer your question bluntly… NO it wasn’t cold.

How terrifying. Hope you are not too badly hurt.

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Not too badly they came out easy enough. But ruined my dinner not worth chancing eating glass.

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Maybe an imperfection/tiny crack in the bowl you couldn’t see. Glad you’re ok.

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Scary when that happens. Ouch.

Some years ago, I had a Pyrex casserole dish explode the moment I put it into a preheated oven. Cold food was in the dish.

No one was hurt but everyone in the room learned what was possible under the right circumstances. I suspect that casserole dish had an internal flaw or crack.

Glad you were unhurt - how frightening!

I’ve heard of pyrex bakeware exploding due to temperature differentials (hot bowl, wet counter or cold surface) and the like, but never Corelle.

Would you mind describing what happened in a bit more detail, so we might avoid it? I have a ton of Corelle.

I made rice and stir fry… Stir fry was perfect so I shut off the stove then stired the Rice just to fluff it up a bit… Reached for two bowls, scooped the rice into the first, set it down on my stove but not near a burner or anything. Was scooping the second bowl of rice when crash the first bowl exploded. I like corelle grew up with it and have never had problems.
Supposed to be unbreakable in reputation.
I didn’t do anything anyone should avoid… It is simply plating food.

So strange - and scary.

With Pyrex I’ve read that it’s often a temperature differential or moisture (hot dish to damp/wet counter or towel).

Never heard or seen anything like it for Corelle.

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Nothing is indestructible, everything can fail somehow. Corelle and Corning Ware don’t fail very often, but when they do fail it can be in a pretty bad way, sort of exploding with lots of very sharp pieces flying. Pyrex seems to sometimes have the decency to just crack in half.

Sometimes it’s easy to point out a human error that caused them to break, but other times it’s really hard to show that anyone did anything wrong. Maybe one was defective from the start, maybe one had new damage that was hard to see… who knows.

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The basic two things are temperature gradient and prior damage.

Temperature: They are fine with heat, and fine with cold too, but not fine with being forced to be two temperatures at once. So (extreme example) if you put a frozen roast on a large rectangular dish and put it straight into a preheated oven, the glass will now be freezing cold in the middle and very hot at the corners. It will probably break. Any use that causes something like “simultaneous heating and cooling” has this problem. Setting a hot dish from the oven onto a dry towel or a dry wooden counter is fine, but setting it on a wet towel or wet counter is dangerous because it’s now heated from the top and cooled from the bottom. (It’s not the moisture, it’s the cooling ability - if you want something to cool you off, a dry towel won’t help but a damp one will.)

Damage: If you’re preparing for hard mountain climbing, you discard any rope that has a nick in it, because that rope now has a weak spot and you can’t count on it anymore. It’s the same for Corelle, Pyrex, and Corning Ware - any significant scratch becomes “the weakest link”.
(You’re fine to eat from a scratched Corelle dish, but it’s no longer suitable for cooking something in the microwave. It’s the stress from heating and cooling plus the scratch that causes trouble.)

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The damage explanation is probably the reason behind why a glass mug I’ve had for years and years broke suddenly when my wife put hot water (for tea) in it yesterday.

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This isn’t the first glass mystery… ha ha

About 3 years ago We were on vacation and our glass break alarm went off, summoning the cops… Who reported no broken windows, when we got home we didn’t find anything for a week or so… Turns out our Decorative glass plate that just sits around and looks pretty had shattered… Ha ha

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  1. Glass can have internal defects from the way it was made.

  2. Poltergeist. :smile:

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I recently had two mugs (ordinary ones, not glass) both break in the same way: the handle tore a chunk out of the side of the mug. Both were old, and just gave out from being picked up one time too many.

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I had a big glass bowl explode once. It was empty at room temperature, sitting on the counter and nobody was in the kitchen. It just exploded into a million little square pieces.

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Like teeny tiny ice cubes? Whatever type that is, it’s much safer when broken than the Corning stuff, which makes thin pointed shards sharp enough to be serious weapons.

It’s amazing how glass can “just break” like that.

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Seems not so uncommon. Google shows many incidents.

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Another pyrex story - in the last 6 months or so. I did not realize you couldn’t put it in above 400. I cooked some type of casserole-y thing in a 425. When it was done, I took it out with mits and put it on top of the stove (not lit, not hot, room temp about 68). About 1/2 second after I put it down, the whole pyrex shattered into 100 pieces. Scared the crap out of us, but no one was hurt.

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