do glass cookware burn stuff more?

i have a pyrex 1.5 quart cooking pan and i burn my rice or macoroni everytime i use the darn thing is it cause its glass?or cause its smaller the instructions say 2 quarts mostly i get so mad when i burn food cause it cost money opps what in the world did i post this here for lol please move mods sorry about that

Actually, glass is a very poor conductor of heat... So, folks tend to turn the oven heat up high---or on a stove top---parts of the dish/pot get hot and others are still cool. So, you get uneven cooking and can get burned areas while other parts are still not yet cooked.

Copper pots are used in candy cooking because sugar is very prone to burning and the copper pans spread the heat out evenly--even if the source is not even.

Aluminum, steel, stainless steel (in order of heat conduction--from better to worst--IIRC), are better at cooking. You will also find pots with SS interiors and aluminum exteriors, etc...

Different materials have different problems too... Cooking with salt, acidic foods, etc. can pit, etch, stain, affect materials differently too. Blacking the outside of an oven pan can make it cook better, etc.

There is a whole science behind cookware--not a silly question at all.

How to stop your mac and cheese from burning?--try different pans, temperatures, covered/uncovered, etc. to get what you like. Or find a good cook book that discusses these things in the library. I am not the best guy to answer this question though…

-Bill

What kind of burner?

I would think the burners that use halogen emitters might directly heat the food rather than heating the food by heating the pan. Any burner would have SOME of this effect, assuming that the Visions (or whatever) cookware is transparent to thermal IR.

And, of course, the eddy current 'burners' wouldn't work at all, unless your food was metallic.

Jim

What Bill said... actually glass distributes heat so poorly that food will burn in the shape of an electric burner coil in the pan! Works fine in the oven though.

My favorite nonstick pans are stainless with a thick aluminum pad on the bottom (copper is so expensive that most manufacturers just electroplate it so thinly that it's only useful for decoration). The aluminum distributes the heat and nonstick coatings stick a lot better to stainless than aluminum. America's Test Kitchens found the multilayer All-Clad type pans don't necessarily work better than those, but always cost more. Consumer Reports managed to melt Emeril's pans apart, too.

But you need some pans that are not nonstick if you are cooking meat and need to make sauce.

bfg9000 said:

What Bill said... actually glass distributes heat so poorly that food will burn in the shape of an electric burner coil in the pan! Works fine in the oven though.

Click to expand...

Wow! That's pretty interesting. Actually... that's pretty crazy!
In that case... the only time i'd use glass is in the oven then. I'm sure even then it's uneven.

Not in my experince, pyrex works great but then I've only used it in the oven.

I seem to recall an episode of America's Test Kitchen where pyrex performed as well as very expensive alternatives for cooking pies.

In the oven, the AIR evenly distributes the heat, which the glass conducts fine. I bought the Pyrex due to the "freezer to stovetop" claim, but was rewarded with nice spiral shaped burns in my food when used that way

It'll boil liquids just fine on the stovetop, but thick stuff like rice will burn more easily. Pyrex works fine wherever you'd use a cast-iron dutch oven, except it's easier to burn the sauce when browning meat on the stovetop. I've got porcelainized cast-iron now and like it much better.

take a look at the cheaper professional cookware... It's cost you a bit more than the average set of pots and pans, but even with heavy household use it'll last you a lifetime.

As a rough rule of thumb, electrical conductivity and heat cunductivity are pretty closely related... Yes, a solid gold frying pan would be the ultimate (IIRC, a National Geographic Mag. writer actually used a gold frying pan to fry an egg--said it was very nice--but that pan was probably too heavy for day to day use).

Here is a link on all of the basic pan constructions (excluding Pyrex/glass/ceramics) and their properties:

Cooking for Engineers

-Bill

Strange that this showed up as a new thread for some reason...2006?!

I heard Pyrex had to change something years back because people were using them to cook meth. Not as good as they once were, unless you get the laboratory stuff they make.