The very best leave-in smart meat thermometer

When it comes to cooking meat, precision means perfection. If you’ve discovered the joys of sous vide cooking, or upgraded to a high-end smart oven and want to extend that level of accuracy to your grilling, the Meater is what you want. And, if you haven’t, the Meater is a great place to start, too.

For a metal stick that’s stored in a block of wood, the Meater smart thermometer is an amazingly capable device. At its most basic, the Meater is a wireless meat thermometer. Leave the probe inside a piece of meat while it cooks, and the accompanying app on your smartphone will tell you when to stop cooking. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

The Meater is actually two thermometers: one to measure the internal temperature of your food, up to 212 degrees, and one to measure the ambient temperature of the cooking area, up to 527 degrees. While that upper range disqualifies it for use in powerful pizza ovens, the Meater is safe for most cooking methods, and it will send a notification if it’s approaching the danger zone. The Meater also functions in a sous vide bag (though it’s not officially sanctioned for it) and is dishwasher safe.

The Meater app provides cooking guidance, time-until-done estimations and rest time recommendations, including notifications. By untethering you from your grill or appliance, the Meater affords you time to relax or prepare other parts of the meal. Understanding the Meater lineup is confusing, but the differences mostly concern operational distance. The original Meater ($70) uses Bluetooth with a range of up to 33 feet, but that range can be extended if you have multiple smart devices running the app. The Meater Plus, for $30 more, puts a Bluetooth repeater in the charging block, which can be used to extend the effective range to up to 165 feet.

The Meater Block ($230-$300) is much more than just multiple probes in a single charger. A built-in WiFi repeater and OLED display allow for smartphone-free use, to say nothing of being able to monitor up to four cooks at once. The Meater Block also brings the option of USB charging, which is woefully missing on the single Meaters.

Unless I’m just doing a finishing sear, my Meater is always in tow for cooks on my Traegar pellet grill, gas grill, BioLite or oven. It’s most useful when dealing with larger cuts (or just anything you’re not an old hand at cooking), but even with a menu as simple as hotdogs and burgers, the Meater is invaluable as a failsafe to prevent overcooking. Most amateur grillers look for visual doneness, have a set amount of time they trust, go with “better safe than sorry” or just wing it when deciding when to pull the meat. For those reasons, the Meater makes an incredible gift for the backyard chefs in your life.

Salon Food writes about stuff we think you’ll like. Salon has affiliate partnerships, so we may get a share of the revenue from your purchase.