If you’re doing any kind of large-scale roasting or grilling of meat, you’ve probably paid a hefty price for your protein, so the last thing you want to do is to rely on guesswork or a nebulous range of cook times in a recipe (that don’t factor in your oven’s quirks, your grill’s cold spots, or their temperature faults) to determine when it’s done. If ever there’s a moment for precision, it’s now.
The best instant-read thermometers
Enter the instant-read thermometer—a cook’s versatile best friend for roasts, steaks, poultry, and so much more. The best digital meat thermometer can be used to pinpoint the doneness of a turkey, pull your salmon off the grill before it gets tough, help you with deep-frying at the desired temperature for a crisp and golden result, avoid burned caramel, even test your baked goods for doneness.
We tested eight instant-read cooking thermometers to find the one that will ensure consistent results every day, whether you’re preparing for Thanksgiving or grilling on Sunday.
A note on leave-in thermometers
In this piece we’re covering instant-read thermometers. If you’re looking for bluetooth and WiFi connected thermometers like the Combustion, the Meater, or the Thermopro Temp Spike, we cover those in this piece on the best wireless meat thermometers. Those are devices that, in addition to serving as instant-read thermometers, can do things like predict how long the cooking process will take, read ambient temperature to tell you if your grill is hot enough, and sound alarm thermometers when your food is ready. They are incredibly useful little gadgets, but do have so many different functions that we didn’t think it would be fair to compare them to the thermometers here.
The Best Instant-Read Thermometer Overall: ThermoWorks Thermapen One
The Thermapen One is the updated design of our previous winner, the Thermapen MK4. The design is largely the same, with the same auxiliary features we appreciate about the older model but with superior performance and accuracy. According to Thermoworks, the Thermapen One is faster and more accurate than its predecessor, promising accurate readings within a single second. When we put it to the test, we found that the claims held up nicely.
Often when you’re testing food for doneness, you’re doing it on a hot stove or with an open oven door. That’s when the “instant read” part of a thermometer becomes important—the quicker it works, the less likely you are to get burned and the less time your oven spends losing heat. When we placed this model’s stainless-steel probe in a pot of boiling water, its display read 212º F in a single second. When we stuck the thermometer into a bowl of ice water, it read 32° F in just under 2 seconds.
This food thermometer has well-designed features you won’t even realize you needed until you try them. First, it’s ridiculously simple to use: Turn it on and off by unfolding and refolding the long probe. If you happen to accidentally leave it unfolded, it goes into sleep mode to save battery life. It’s preset to do this after 30 seconds, but you can manually change it to anywhere between 10 seconds and 3 minutes. All you have to do to wake it back up is move it. The thermometer can sense low light and automatically turns on the backlit display. (You can also activate the display light by touching the window.) The rotating LCD display shifts as you turn the thermometer, which is handy for lefty cooks, testing in multiple spots, and for reading the thermometer when you have to insert it into a hard-to-reach item on the grill. Don’t like sleep mode and/or the display moving around? You can disable these features with a button inside the battery compartment (where you also can switch from degrees Fahrenheit to Celsius or vice versa). The Thermapen uses a AAA battery, which is easy to find and replace. It is also water-resistant and can read a temperature range of -58.0 to 572.0° F. This thermometer is an investment at $109—but its ease of use, accuracy, speed, and incomparable extra features mean it’s well worth the money.
What we didn’t love about the Thermapen One
There is almost nothing not to like about Thermoworks’ flagship thermometer. If we had to pick on one thing, the screen of the Thermapen One is slightly harder to read compared to the Typhur Instaprobe that we cover below, even when the backlight turns on. But that’s a small quibble and we only make it in comparison to one other thermometer we tested. The Thermapen One isn’t just a good meat thermometer. It’s a great meat thermometer.