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Why did my glass bakeware shatter to pieces?
Days ago, I bought a giant yam (about 5 lbs, easily). This morning, I set up my oven at 350ºF (relatively low temperature for baking), punched holes into my yam, wrapped it in Aluminum Foil, put it in the bakeware and then put the bakeware in the oven once the preheat light went off.
Initially, I let it cook for one hour, but by the end of that hour, it wasn't soft enough so I added another 45 minutes to the time.
Once the last 45 minutes of baking time was over, I took it out of the oven and put it on top of the stove. As I was trying to take the aluminum foil off the yam and proceeded to see how much it had softened at that point, suddenly the bakeware shattered all over the place (it was a miracle I wasn't hurt as I was standing right there and glass could have easily gone to my face or body).
I'm still at awe as to why something like this would happen. Can anyone explain? I consider myself knowledgeable enough about the basic laws of physics, this is mindboggling.
Differential expansion and contraction. When most materials are heated, they expand. By how much they expand is called the coefficient of thermal expansion. If one area of a brittle object like a glass Baking Dish is at a different temperature from other areas, it will have expanded by a different amount. This induces stresses in the material which if sufficiently large can cause it to shatter. By placing your glass dish on the stovetop, you cooled part if it more than the rest. Result: bang. You should have put it on something with lower thermal conductivity such as a Wooden Cutting board.
Oven-proof glassware is meant to have a low coefficient of thermal expansion to avoid precisely this scenario, but there are limits. You are indeed lucky not to have been injured.