11 Tips You Need When Cooking With Glassware

Nothing beats the feeling that comes from pulling a deep-dish casserole recipe or lasagna from the oven, covered with melted cheese and creamy sauce, knowing that soon you'll be taking a big bite of the noodley goodness that has your whole kitchen smelling irresistible. Oven-baked dishes are beloved for being both tasty to eat and easy to make, which is why they tend to be such staples for busy households. Assuming you're going to be making more than one casserole in your lifetime, it only stands to reason that you'll want to find an ideal pan. Yet, with so many oven-friendly options, which one to choose?

Cooking your oven-baked dishes in glassware has a lot of distinct advantages, such as easier clean-up and no lingering aftertaste from the pan, as glass is a non-reactive material unlike other dishes often used for baking. There are plenty of upsides, but glassware isn't ideal for every oven-friendly dish, and glass dishes aren't always the most intuitive cookware. Cooking with glass can easily go awry, with shattered pans and burnt meals rating high on the list of potential hazards. 

However, plenty of cooks swear by glassware, and if you've got the time and the patience to learn, you might come to rely on that easy-to-clean casserole dish just as much as any other tool in your kitchen arsenal.

Anytime you bake, preheating the oven is a crucial step, preventing your dish from cooking unevenly and making certain that the temperature remains the same. This goes double for glassware, which tends to take a little extra time to heat up but is able to keep consistent heat for longer.  A preheated oven and glass dish are a perfect combo for cooking things like enchilada dishes to excellence. The gradual process can be magic if timed well, and preheating is going to play a major role in that.

Preheating is extra important when cooking things with strict safety guidelines like chicken, which requires being cooked at a certain temperature for a specific time. It's an implicitly practical thing to do, with the time saved by skipping this step often eaten up by the lengthier cooking time that comes from not doing it. Aviv Service Today suggests preheating at 75 degrees Fahrenheit above the cooking temperature and then lowering it to the recommended number due to the fact that your oven immediately loses some heat any time it's opened.

Depending on what you're making, you could also use materials like butter, ghee, or vegetable shortening, but the most important thing to remember is that regardless of whether the recipe calls for it, you're going to want to oil the pan before you get to baking. This prevents burnt edges as well as makes the inevitable cleaning process easier. Much like preheating, it's a crucial step when cooking anything in the oven, especially when using glassware. This goes double for any kind of cake, which will benefit from buttering the pan and then flouring it as well, and even using parchment paper on top of that to prevent sticking.

The material you use for greasing the pan can change with whatever dish you're making. For instance, if you're baking a cake, chances are you're going to want to use something flavorful like softened butter. That isn't necessarily going to work for something like enchiladas, which would likely benefit from vegetable shortening or oil. Dishes like lasagna do great with oil, while baked macaroni and cheese might have you reaching for the margarine instead. It's a subtle part of the baking process, but it can make a world of difference when it comes time to sit down at the table and eat.

You're definitely going to want to use oven mitts when handling the pan. Sure, this sounds like common sense, but even the most by-the-book person has likely found themselves attempting to substitute a towel for a proper oven mitt at some point in their lives. You're also going to want to make sure that those gloves are bone dry before pulling that pan out of the oven.

Avoiding using damp or wet oven mitts is good all-around advice considering that non-dry oven mitts lose their protective value and can cause scalding or burns. This is not a chance you want to take, so it's for the best to make sure that your oven mitts are stored in the same easy-to-find place and are ready for use well before you even get started preheating the oven. Nothing shatters a glass pan faster than dropping it on the floor when you realize it's way too hot to handle. 

We've hinted at this before but now it's time to be direct; don't pour liquid into a hot dish. This may not end in disaster every single time, but it's always inviting disaster, and it's easy to avoid with just a little preplanning. While the dish is room temperature, it's absolutely fine to add a bit of room temperature water to the bottom in order to cook things like meat, which you wouldn't necessarily want to cook in glass without some kind of base liquid.

One of the fastest ways to shatter a glass pan is by pouring cold water into a hot pan or hot water into a cold pan, so it's important to always follow instructions and make sure you're being very careful when adding liquid to the dish. As part of our advice to avoid extremes of temperature, that only goes double when adding any kind of liquid to a glass pan. Glass needs time to adjust, and overwhelming it is always a bad move, and one that can cost you a lot of time and money if you're not careful.

Now that you know what not to set your glassware on, where should you place a hot pan? Cooling racks are made exactly for situations like this, and they'll give your dinner ample time and airflow to even out temperature-wise. Likewise, a wooden cutting board could do the trick, and the wood won't react badly to the hot glass like a plastic cutting board might. Most of the tips used for heating apply equally to cooling, so, just because the pan is out of the oven, don't throw out what you've learned.

As with any meal, avoid diving right in without giving a little extra time to cool off. Likewise, before digging in with a room-temperature spoon, give it a minute to even out. The hardest part with glass is the extra waiting time, but it'll feel worth it when you're finally taking a bite of an exceptionally well-baked meal.