Should I be able to make a tarte tatin in a glass dish?

soup_sam

I saw a question about meatloaf in a pyrex dish, and one of the answers said that glass gets hotter than the metal when in the oven, which got me wondering. I made a tarte tatin but didn't have a metal dish, so I used a glass dish and it came out terribly, mainly because the sugar didn't seem to have gone caramely enough. I put it down to the glass (I'd made it in a cast iron griddle pan before and the caramel was much better, but had different...

Originally asked by Sam Holder on Stack Exchange (cooking) (CC BY-SA 2.5).

uphilltech

Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:

Technically you should be able to make almost anything you'd be able to make in a metal dish, in a glass dish, but if the preparation calls for one then you can't simply substitute the other willy-nilly. It will likely require a good deal of fine-tuning. Glass is an insulator. It absorbs heat. That's why solar panels are glass and why having a window in your home is not like having a gaping hole in your wall. As a consequence of this, (a) it will take a longer time for the dish itself to come up to oven temperature, (b) it will cook much more consistently and evenly, even if you have an oven that turns the element on and off to maintain temperature, and (c) it will continue cooking the food...

Full answer by Aaronut: https://cooking.stackexchange.com/a/7694 (CC BY-SA 2.5).

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