MEATER® Smart Meat Thermometer

I’ve recently gone down the rabbit hole of barbecue and smoking. This thing has been my right hand tool through the journey. They say the journey is the reward but that’s an understatement. A lot of the comments I’ve read say that it disconnects, it has not disconnected one time for me (20+ cooks). I do keep the probe clean and scrub it down after each use like the directions say. Other than that my only suggestion would be to keep the notes synced across devices. If I start a cook and add notes on my iPad, I cannot see or add to the same notes on my iPhone. UPDATE*** At first, I thought it was my grill’s probe, but after a smoke with 1 meater probe in the brisket and the other resting on a pan (2” up from grill surface) , the temperature fluctuations are ridiculous. Initially I will set my grill to 200° and the meter would only read the ambient as 150°. It will have this wide gradient for most of the cook. The closer to the stall and subsequently after, the ambient reading from the meater and the setpoint for the grill start to align. I can trust the meter only for an internal temperature. Other than that the timing and ambient are not anything I can trust. I realize that initially there’s not a good predictive estimate on timing for large blocks of meat because of the stall but this is like that across all cooks, whether it be a steak, fish, etc..

How can a company possibly make a thermometer look sexy? I didn’t know it was possible but damnit they did it. This thing is amazing. Honestly amazong is an understatement- more like revolutionary. I’m actually taken aback. I have had several “digital thermometers” in the last but this ….this is in a completely different league. Besides being a conversation piece and is on display in our kitchen, when used with the app, it’s a complete powerhouse of metrics delivered instantly to you when you need it: ambient temp, target temp, internal temp, alarms for notifications, when to pull it off the heat for resting periods…it’s also filled with features. It has been 100% accurate so far and I’ve used it about a dozen times. It completely takes the guess work out of cooking. Firstly, no wires. That’s huge. Secondly, you can choose from pre-determined meat temp settings or do your own! There are presets for all kinds of meat amd fish. A countdown helps you gauge time and timers alert you when you’re not actively watching your phone. I could go on and on but the app itself is ROCK SOLID!

I’ve tried a number of “wireless” thermometers that nonetheless used wired probes to connect to a transmitter connected wirelessly to its own receiver. Not only did the braided metal wires of the probe always end up fraying, but the receiver simply reported the current temperature. The exception were units with dual wired probes to read both meat and ambient temps. The probes would fail, but not before the broken braid would puncture my fingers a few times. MEATER changed all that. No wires of any kind at all. Just a smooth spike that contains both internal and ambient probes in a single unit. The real clincher is the MEATER app. It does so much more than simply report the current temps. You tell the app the kind of meat you are cooking and how well you want to cook it. It tracks the internal and ambient temps, calculates how long the cooking will take, fine tuning as the cook progresses, warns you five minutes before final doneness is reached, and alerts you to remove from heat to let the meat rest. Finally, it tracks the resting period and tells you the final temp and doneness after the meat’s internal temp starts to fall instead of rise. My results have been great every time, so far. I’ve used MEATER with briskets, steaks, turkeys, whole chickens, chicken breasts, and pork chops. Nothing else has come close to the ease of use and the perfect guidance that the MEATER probe and app provide. I won’t recommend any other type or brand. MEATER has fully won me over.