There is no shortage of Bon Appétit recipes that ask you to cook something to a particular temperature (165°F for chicken thighs or 130°F for medium-rare steak). And a lot of the recipes that don’t call for a specific temperature probably should. It is, without question, the most reliable way to ensure you don’t overcook or undercook your meal and nonnegotiable in our opinion if you have any BBQ aspirations at all. To pull this off, of course, you need a meat thermometer.
Our top picks
Best instant-read meat thermometer: Thermapen One
Best budget meat thermometer: Thermoworks Sizzle
Best leave-in meat thermometer: ThermoWorks RFX
An awesome predictive thermometer: Combustion Predicitive Thermometer
The first question you need to answer in your meat thermometer journey is whether you want a leave-in thermometer or an instant-read. Like the names suggest, a leave-in thermometer goes in whatever protein you’re cooking before you put it in the oven or on the grill and stays there throughout. Typically, they come equipped with alarms to let you know when your cook has hit the temperature you’re aiming for. An instant-read is what you use for spot-checks. It allows you to quickly check the temperature of different parts of the meat, like the breast and thigh of a roast chicken, which often cook at different rates. Both come in handy, and we think both are worth owning, but we’ve got a couple favorites in both categories below.
Best instant-read meat thermometer: ThermoWorks Thermapen One
Thermoworks Thermapen One
Pros:
- Fast read
- Automatically rotating display and backlight
Cons:
- A little pricey
- Probe length: 4.25″
- Temperature range: -58.0°F–572.0°F
- Features: Automatic on-off, automatic rotating display and backlight
- Warranty: 5 years
Instant-read thermometers do not come faster or easier to use than the ThermoWorks Thermapen One.
What we love: The two most important features of an instant-read thermometer are its accuracy and its speed, and the Thermapen One excels with both. It took one second to produce an accurate reading in our water boiling test and two seconds in our freezing water test. The focus on speed might seem excessive, but remember, whenever you go to check temperature, you’re opening the oven or grill and the longer it’s open the more the temperature inside will drop.
Besides its quick read capability, the Thermapen has a few other nice features. It turns on automatically when opened, goes to sleep if not used (you can set the sleep function to kick in anywhere between 10 seconds and three minutes), has an LCD display that rotates so you can read the thermometer easily at whatever angle you’re holding it. And while the battery life is not an issue (we used one for over a year without changing the battery), the Thermapen One has an easier to open battery compartment than the original Thermapen and uses a AAA battery instead of two of those annoying to find circular batteries.