Can I use a glass bowl in my air fryer?

Welcome back to another session with the Air Fryer Bro! As the air fryer is a relatively new kitchen appliance, I am sure that a lot of you air fryer early adopters are looking around your kitchen and wondering about the possibilities! For example, looking at your nice shiny pyrex bowls or glass oven cookware and wondering whether it will work in your air fryer. They work in a microwave or an oven, so why not an air fryer? Can you use a glass bowl in an air fryer? We hope to give you an answer to that today!

In short, as long as your Pyrex bowl or cookware is oven proof, it should be safe to use in your air fryer. However, an air fryer changes temperature a lot faster than a regular or traditional oven. These rapid temperature changes may fracture your glass cookware. Therefore, if your cookware is oven safe, we would recommend you try it in your air fryer at maximum temperature a few times without food first. Basically, this type of glassware is not specifically designed for air fryers, so caution is needed.

Now that we have answered the basic question, we now want to look at all the other important questions that go with it.

Before we go on, I want to also tell you that we have a similar article about steel bowls in air fryers over HERE. If you also have metal bowls you want to try in your air fryer, you might want to read that one too 🙂

How to check if my glass cookware is oven safe?

The best and most simple way to check is when the manufacturer stamps an oven-safe symbol, or writes the words “oven safe” straight onto the glass cookware itself to denote this type of cookware. Usually, this can be found on the base of the product, and denotes the use of oven-safe glass rather than ordinary glass. Oven safe glassware should be made with borosilicate glass (known to you as tempered glass) and is much more heat resistant than regular glass.

If you know the manufacturer of your glass cookware, you can look on their website for information as to whether their product is oven-safe. Also, search for the company on social media, such as Facebook and Twitter. If they have a profile, you can simply ask the question on there, and you are pretty much guaranteed a swift response. Most companies want to have a good image on social media, so will often go out of their way to be helpful on there!

Other than that, you could consider that most oven-safe glass cookware is made at temperatures of up to 600 degrees Celsius, which is equivalent to over 1000 degrees Fahrenheit. An air fryer is not likely to get close to this temperature, so you should be fine. However, you should test your glass cookware in your air fryer a few times first (at the highest temperature and without food), to help you decide whether it will be usable and won’t shatter or breakdown in any way. Be warned, if the manufacturer doesn’t specifically say their product is oven safe, you use it in an air fryer at your own risk. Never put food straight into an un-tested glass bowl, even if you think it is an oven-safe glass bowl!

Even with an oven-proof glass bowl, do not put it from your fridge or freezer straight into your air fryer (or vice versa). The rapid change in temperature will probably compromise the most oven-safe glass and cause it to shatter ot splinter!! Thermal shock is real and will bite you in the **** if you are not careful 🙂

Please Note: We are talking about glass bowls that are intended for oven use, not glass containers. These glass containers are often used as lunch boxes or to store food in your fridge. They are rarely designed to be oven-safe. A high temperature from an air fryer will probably lead to it breaking down in some way!

Does glass cookware work well in an air fryer?

Anyone that has had their air fryer for any length of time will have probably realized the number one important factor for air fryers – air flow! As an air fryer relies on the circulation of hot air around the cooking compartment to cook well, we quickly learn to never block this in any way.

If I wanted to write an air fryer 101 book, a commandment of air fryer rules, my number one would be “Though shalt not block air flow!”

This is why the traditional and primary part of an air fryer is the cooking basket. It has big holes to allow air to easily pass through and around your food. If you want your food to come out crispy, this is an essential element. Even the extra grill pan that we bought for our Philips air fryer has many holes in it, for the same reason.

Therefore, it might not be such a good idea to use a glass bowl or some kind of glass cookware that doesn’t have holes in it. You are blocking the air flow around your food, and it can take a much longer time to cook the food at the base of a glass bowl (for example), leading to uneven cooking, and probably frustration.

So, you should not really be asking yourself whether a glass bowl is OK in an air fryer, but more about if you should be using it in an air fryer in the first place!!

Are there any exceptions?

Actually, yes there are. Cooking certain types of food in an air fryer does require some kind of solid cookware, which defies the usual advice of letting the air flow freely around your food in an air fryer.

The most obvious one is cooking a cake. Of course, cake mixture needs to be held in place by a solid object as it is baking. In the video below, an Indian (Youtube) celebrity chef is baking a cake in this exact way. He puts a small cake pan into his airfryer (which has no holes to let the air flow) and it comes out fine.

If you do decide that your recipe needs some kind of solid cooking pan, whether it be glass or not, you should still remember the air flow factor. Although you cannot get air flow around the food itself, you should still make sure you get good airflow around the cookware you are using.

Don’t use cookware that totally fills up your air fryers cooking compartment. If you do this, there will be very little air circulation in your air fryer and the results won’t be good.

You still need to place the cookware within your air fryer’s basket, or in some way lift it up off of the bottom of your air fryer. Also, make sure there is ample room at the sides for the air to flow around easily.

These are the essential tips when using solid cookware in your air fryer. 

What are the alternatives?

We assume that one of the reasons you are thinking of using a glass bowl is to cook a lot of items in your air fryer together (unless you are cooking liquid recipe such as cakes). Or maybe it is just for the sake of convenience? If you have other reasons, please let us know in the comments section below! 

The best alternative to this is to use metal wire racks inside your air fryer. They will still let the airflow around the food well, but they will also allow you to add a second level or layer to your cooking. 

The most optimal way to do this is to find a rack that would fit inside the dimensions of your air fryer’s basket snuggly (as you don’t want it to move around). This would still allow the optimal amount of airflow and most even cooking.

Some manufacturers offer their own such official wire rack accessories. Failing that, measure up your air fryer’s basket and look on places such as Amazon to find wire racks that would fit. Below, you will see one example of a generic wire rack available on Amazon. Click the image to go and view it over there.

The end is near….

Thank you for reading our article on using glass cookware in your air fryer. It’s a perfectly natural thing for any budding chef or home cook to look around their kitchen and wonder what can work with their air fryer. Hopefully, we have cleared up some of those questions when it comes to glass cookware.

I wish there were a wider range of cooking accessories for air fryers, but unfortunately they are relatively new kitchen appliances. Hopefully, with more time, they will start to get a wider selection. Then, the need for using glass cookware in our air fryers would be a lot less.

If you have your own experiences with glass cookware in an air fryer, we would love to hear all about it in the comments section below. Did it work well or did you have a disaster on your hands? Did you find other good alternatives to glass cookware in your air fryer?