I've tried just about every sub-$50 thermometer money can buy, and I had a bad time with all of them. They're either laughably inaccurate (to the point of being effectively useless) or crap out suddenly or sustain minimal battery life or have some other fatal usability flaw. And I haven't found one that can tolerate any amount of moisture, so cleaning is always a risk.

So I bought a thermapen. I knew about them because I used to work in kitchens, and it's pretty much exclusively what we used there. After my experience with other thermometers, I can appreciate why.

It's expensive, but it's super reliable, pleasant to use, and lets me focus on other concerns as I'm cooking. Compared to my experience with other cheap thermometers which, last Thanksgiving, went something like "fuck, it died on me again, let me dig out my backup... fucking hell, that one's dead too"

If you used to work in kitchens then you know that you should only buy digital thermometers that support calibration. Follow the manufacturers instructions on proper cleaning and don't submerge them.

I have at least 3 floating around that ran me $12ish dollars each on Amazon and use them daily.

It's super reliable until you get water in the hinge. I lost mine that way.

I'll probably get another one when the cheap ones that I'm using annoy me one too many times.

could you fill it w silicone?

I don't understand the downvotes. I have an $18 Amazon food thermometer which has read with identical speed and accuracy as my Thermapen for years. And I like it better because the Thermapen is a pain to switch between F and C whereas it's simply a face button on the cheap one.

https://www.amazon.com/Saferell-Thermometer-Backlight-Calibr...

Switching between F and C should be difficult. This is something you set once and pretty much never change. If it’s easily changed, it’s easily changed by accident.

If I’m ever cooking a recipe that is written in imperial units, I will convert them all to metric prior to starting. (This includes turning nearly all measures into grams—including and especially cups and spoons.)

Why should it be difficult? You might not change it, but other folks do.

My scale is easily changed. I pick it up, turn it over, and push a button. However, it is pretty difficult to change it by accident, and honestly, I just check the display before I weigh just to make sure.

And honestly, do you think that folks are sitting down with pen and paper if they need to convert? Nope. Google will do this work for you.

I'll also mention that it isn't worth it to weigh everything in the home kitchen. Small amounts - the ones you are using spoons for - are too light for the average kitchen scale, and the sensitive scales are expensive (and also have associations with dealing drugs, which turns some people off).

It's a tool designed for professionals. Professionals operate with standards, so in a professional kitchen in America, you will never, ever need or want to read a temperature in Celsius. In the rest of the world, nobody will ever use Fahrenheit.

Having a button that changes it with a single press is actually an impediment to working quickly, and only introduces uncertainty and anxiety about the tool. Measuring temperature isn't like measuring weight - seconds matter. A moment of confusion could be enough to ruin a process, and a failure to notice the change in settings could create a dangerous situation. Nobody wants a button to see the wrong number.

Think of it like compile-time config. It's there, you can change it if you want, and everyone will have a preference, but if you need to change it often, you're not the target market.

In the rare consumer case in which you may be using foreign measurements you can change it once at the beginning of the recipe.

This idea that because a commercial kitchen doesn't mix F and C and thus nobody else should ever have to is ridiculous and is a form of gatekeeping. I download recipes and measurements are sometimes F, sometimes C. Sometimes ounces, sometimes grams. Sometimes cups, sometimes mls.

I think if you could need to change it occasionally, you could easily be in situations where you change it frequently.

Shadow kitchens that make recipes for multiple different restaurants could have measurements in both.

To not have the button at all would make sense(compile time config), but if there are situations where you need to change it, those can come up as frequently as every time you use it

No.

Every commercial kitchen complies with and is inspected for compliance with food handling regulations.

Any recipe in commercial use is written specifically for the kitchen in which it is made. One might even consider them a complete vertical unit: if the recipe is designed as a chain or franchise standard, the kitchen standard is designed in tandem to match.

You will not find a commercial kitchen in America using Celsius for anything.

If you don't want professional tools don't buy them.

It shouldn't be difficult, but it should be foolproof. Someone not paying attention could mistakenly get a Fahrenheit reading expecting Celsius, and serve undercooked food to others.

In food applications, I should think that even the most hopeless cook can tell the difference between 75 degrees F and 75 degrees C. One is cooked and the other is room temperature.

I have very cheap 0.1g precision scales and reasonably cheap 0.01g precision scales.

Tablespoons (for example) are often equating to 10-25g which even the cheapest, nastiest 1g precision kitchen scales can handle with greater precision and repeatability than using an actual tablespoon

It’s only when measuring half teaspoon stuff where I’ll either just use a teaspoon or pull out precision scales—it all depends how important it is to be accurate with an ingredient.

Is density not a concern?

Yes, which is precisely why I eschew cups and spoons for grams. There are standard conversions for most common ingredients, I’ll tend to use those for ingredients with the potential for high variation in density, like plain flour.

Obviously, the main concern is with repeatability in baking. But for me the biggest benefit is being able to pour all ingredients directly into your bowl (sitting on scales) without dirtying up a pile of measuring cups and spoons.

To provide the correlate to @simondotau’s answer: in cooking, density hardly ever matters. All recipes should actually be solely in units of weight, never in units of volume. Professional chefs, and especially professional bakers, work solely in weights.

Liquid measures by volume are mostly ok, since liquids vary hardly at all in density (for a given liquid).

Solid measures by volume are a joke. It’s easy to be off by 10% or more, depending on how fluffy or packed down your ingredient is. When you’re baking a loaf of bread, this is the difference between a soggy mass and a dry pile of crumbs.

I have a 0.1g precision scale from AWS which ran me about $25 dollars, and it has been indispensable both for the small ingredients and also for weighing stuff like frozen berries, where the gaps can make it hard to determine how much you actually have.

AWS or Amazon?

"American Weigh Scales" is the manufacturer. It has nothing to do with Amazon Web Services.

> Switching between F and C should be difficult. This is something you set once and pretty much never change.

No, because my own experience says otherwise. And this idea of accidental changing is hogwash, again because I've used this for years. Experience is worth a thousand opinions.

Cups and spoons are volume measures; you can't trivially convert them to grammes.

I can't use recipes that use cups and spoons. I don't own measuring spoons or measuring cups, and drinking cups and spoons from the cutlery drawer don't cut the mustard.

In addition to a thermapen, I have an instant-read infra-red thermometer. I use this to check the temperature of my pizza oven, before launching a pizza - I launch at 450C, which is way too hot for any contact thermometer.

> is a pain to switch between F and C

Why would you ever switch it to F?

Feigned confusion aside, I love the absolute simplicity of the Thermapen. It does one thing, and does it good. Absolutely zero distractions, compared to the one you linked. You open it up, it switches on. You stick it into things, it tells you the temperature at the tip. What's not to love?

My Thermapen is fine, so is my one with the F/C button. Because I happen to need both and so this supposed distraction is a big benefit. Super simple is nice, except when it's too simple for a given user. Reminds me of how Apple stuck by their guns with single button mice for years but two button mice with scrollers won out because the one button was too simple.

> What's not to love?

The extra 80-90$, presumably...

Because not all things are written with Celcius temperatures. It is easier to push a button than to look up the conversion.

Probably because you never need to switch between F and C

Thermapen is an excellent thermometer. It's fast, nice ux, robust, and just works. The $10~ dollar thermometers I've used are too fragile, grossly inaccurate or annoying.

I suppose there's room in the market for a cheaper thermometer with the same features/performance as thermapen but it's probably not worth it to the manufacturers and re-sellers that could actually pull it off. The markup for the thermapen is not particularly shocking or worrisome. More importantly, the consumer is not getting "ripped off" at that price if it's a solid product that lasts for years and years.

I'm not sure what to think of their Amazon antics. They're aggressively keeping Amazon from selling thermapens so they can keep the price at a premium in the American market? It's not like I cam blame them. They just want to make a buck and not bend over for Amazon. Competitors, including Amazon Basics, are free to sell a product and eat Thermapen's lunch, but they don't. I expect because it's not worth it.

First, there is a difference between precision and accuracy. I’ve had cheap thermometers that are 10-20 degrees off. That does make a difference. Second, for the thermapen it’s really about very fast readings and durability more than accuracy or precision. It’s very valid to feel that it’s not worth the cost, but it is untrue that the difference isn’t noticeable.

a thermometer thats 10-20 degrees off is likely just broken.

Not necessarily. I have used cheap food thermometers that took upwards of 60 seconds to settle on a temperature. If you weren’t aware of this flaw you could easily read the temperature after 10-15 seconds when it seems to be settling down and end up way off from the real temperature.

I always have this conundrum when cooking a steak on a hot pan: Is the thermometer still settling down or is the internal temperature actually just rising quickly?

That's exactly why I got a Thermapen. I don't need to ask that question anymore.

more likely out of calibration

The thermapen pro-grade unit also detects temperature much faster than most other units. Many cooks (myself included) use a food thermometer every day, and it's totally worth paying more for a durable, accurate, and fast unit. My current one is over 5 years old, and shows no sign of wearing out.

Assuming you're actually asking, the appeal of the Thermapen for chefs is how fast it is - $10 thermometers are as (or more) accurate, but they'll take several seconds to stabilize on showing a certain temperature. Thermapens are crazy fast. That's very useful when your hand is near/in a hot oven or hovering over a hot stove.

The $20 knock-off I picked up on Amazon for a Christmas rib roast reads quite accurately based on a calibrated scientific thermometer I compared it to and stabilizes to a reading in about 1-3 seconds. I didn't realize it was a Thermapen knock off, just searched for a meat thermometer for a Christmas rib roast I wanted to turn out perfect (and it did).

The old digital thermometers did the awhile but I think some of the new ones are pretty fast (and accurate).

There are too many chefs that swear by them to so easily dismiss the value. The often quoted feature is more speed than precision. Like everything a big chunk is going to be marketing and paying for a little extra quality control on top of slightly higher tier components.

Couldn't it also be a perfect example of the bandwagon fallacy?

No. I’m not making absolute statements but casting doubt on one persons claims that a product is probably bad they have no experience with vs. a large number of professionals who use it as a tool every day including several organizations conducting comparative equipment tests.

Professionals are prone to confirmation bias.

Stanley, Black and Decker, Dewalt, Irwin, and Porter Cable are all tool brands made by the same company in the exact same factories. People have ran extensive "scientific" tests on job sites and on YouTube on the battery life between them. Everyone has a favorite that lasts the longest or is best under load. Aside from the metal contacts and plastic housing to make the batteries unique to each brand - they all contain batteries from the exact same two suppliers.

Serious question:

Do professionals use those brands? I'm sure passionate amateurs will use those brands (I have a drill from that list) - but pros?

I ask because I know a professional mechanic and I asked his favorite wrench brand, and he went off about various brands I didn't recognize.

Also, regarding your list, have you accounted for variability in quality within a product run?

I suspect consistency of product is part of the reason thermapen have their reputation and other brands mostly don't. You can often get cheap products that are good, but there might be a lot more variability.

Binning is a related topic.

I have worked in a position where I repaired all of these brands, and can say that at least in the last two decades Stanley Black and Decker Inc. has been very strategic with product positioning and continued support for all of their brands. DeWalt is supposed to be their professional (or probably prosumer) line that's built to last, or at least to be repaired. Black & Decker, which had been a higher-end brand before the 90s, is now pretty much all "happy homeowner" tools built out of less durable plastic and often without replacement parts available. Porter-Cable seems to fall in the middle, a bit closer to B&D.

There's a certain 20V compact leaf blower that I've seen branded as a DeWalt, Ryobi, and Milwaukee. I'm not sure about the motor or controller but the plastic casing is almost identical aside from the color and battery connector. It's also interesting to note that the B&D and the Porter-Cable 20V batteries are identical except for a plastic tab that prevents interoperability.

Same four* suppliers actually, just about every rechargeable embedded battery is made by Panasonic, Sanyo, LG, or Samsung.

Most common type/size is the 18650, used in everything from drills, powerbanks, to Teslas. Second most common type is the 21700.

A "scientific" test isn't even necessary, just tear down the battery pack, see what cell they put in there, and read the spec sheet. The big 4 battery makers will sell you a whole range of batteries in that size with varying mAh/Amp.

Googling teardowns, I found a Black & Decker 1.5A MAX Lithium simply uses a bunch of Sanyo UR18650W2 (1500mAh rated at 18A) cells, while a teardown of a Dewalt pack shows they used the more expensive LG HB4s (1500mAh rated at 30A).

There literally no reason they can't use the better cells in the Black & Decker, other than they're building it to a cheaper price point. The fact that they're built in the same factory is besides the point.

In candy making, the difference of a few degrees is the difference between a sticky unpleasant hard candies, hard brittle ones and caramel.

I've used shitty thermometers trying to make candy. It sucks. If you want it to come out consistent, you need a good thermometer. One that lasts longer than a few months is always nice too. I dunno if a $150+ one is reasonable. But a quality thermometer helps for sure.

What you spend on a thermometer, you save on cooking pans.

It’s not the accuracy (although that’s obviously table stakes). It’s the quality & reliability.

There are a ton of cooking thermometers on Amazon. A majority of them are awful. Either they’re woefully inaccurate, or they fail after only a few months of use. You only have to read the reviews (when they’re not completely gamed by the sellers) to see this.

So you can either a) buy cheap thermometers one after the other until you happen to hit on one that works or b) buy a quality product first time that professional chefs rave about.

Sure, you might get lucky with option a), but after two or three duds, option b) starts to look increasingly sane.

Thermopens just work. They do one thing & have been honed to do that one thing incredibly well. When you buy one, you know exactly what you’re getting & you know that the company will stand behind their product. WHat you’re buying is a combination of certainty & quality. Why shouldn’t they charge a premium for that?

I'm a medium experienced home chef, and I have a Thermapen, and really like it. It's a better thermometer than the $10 one, or even a $30 one. The accuracy doesn't matter very much, but the reading speed does matter, and Thermapen reads extremely quickly.

I bought my wife a Thermapen for Christmas and it’s revolutionized her cooking (and mine). She’s using it for everything except toast and boiling water. Chicken, steaks, roasts, fish, fudge, cakes, casseroles, anything where complete cooking can be determined by internal temperature. The margin between perfect and overcooked fish can be slim, and she likes steak as rare as possible. This thing lets her nail it every time with no fiddling around.

Yes, we have cheaper thermometers. The difference is night and day. More than anything, it’s the speed with which it settles, but the unit is also calibrated, which gives us confidence. (I spent some time looking for a cheap alternative, but didn't find anything with consistently great reviews. I decided it was worth the extra money to buy less hassle, and I went with Thermoworks. No regrets!)

If she likes her steaks as rare as possible you should look into buying here a sous vide setup. You can get the whole steak to whatever doneness you want and then just quickly sear the outside. It gives me consistently good results.

I’ve been finding that reverse searing does a pretty good job without the sound vide

sous vide. Means "under vacuum". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sous_vide

Edit: I read a bit more on this, and was mistaken. Here is my original explanation: Basically a vacuum pump to lower boiling temperature; this puts a ceiling on achievable temperature for water-rich foods.

Actually, nowadays it looks like it's just slow cooking vacuum-sealed food in a temperature-controlled water bath.

Even as someone who has a sous vide set up, and uses it a lot, I prefer the results of reverse searing for decent quality steaks.

I have a sous vide set up as well, and while I find that it works great for chicken and duck, I agree with you that sous vide does something weird to steak. It's something about the texture. I know Kenji has written a few articles about how meat changes over different sous vide cooking durations, but I also wonder if the length of time changes the way fat renders somehow. I don't think it's been well studied. Searching the internet reveals I'm not the only person who has noticed this, but some people do not notice it, so there's not really a consensus on what's going on.

Wouldn't "as rare as possible" mean getting the steak to room temperature and then just searing? I always assumed the sous vide was more useful for those who liked their steaks more cooked.

Pretty much. A bleu steak is around 30 degrees internal temperature and really doesn't gain much from sous vide. Sous vide really only comes it its own for internal temperatures above 41-42 deg c. The advantage (compared to just searing/grilling) is that you can hold the steak at that point for longer, giving the protein more time to denature.

> likes steak as rare as possible

For pan searing, a quick and accurate thermometer doesn't actually make this much easier. I also have a Thermapen, but pan searing to a certain level of doneness is still a bit of an art because the final interior temperature after resting can be quite a bit different than the pull temperature due to residual heat at the edges of the meat. Even trying to get a consistent interior temperature using the same pan temperature (using a Control Freak induction cooktop) is difficult because the shape, thickness, and moisture content of meat can vary significantly. There's a few new gadgets that attempt to resolve this (e.g., this predictive thermometer with 8 sensors https://combustion.inc), but honestly having a lot of cooking experience is probably the best way to get a feel for when to remove the meat from the pan under rapid cooking conditions.

Of course, sous vide and reverse sear are completely different and while you can indeed get a precise temperature, those methods have their own trade-offs (namely, it's difficult to get as thick of a crust).

She has her methods. Mostly grilling. I don't interfere. :-)

She loathes sous vide.

The nice thing about the Thermapen is that it reads so fast that it's easy to explore the temperature gradients in the food. It's a learning process, right? In my own cooking, I'm correlating the measurements with technique and results, and when I finally cook something well I can reliably repeat it.

(Full disclosure. I have the surface temperature version of the Thermapen and a 4-channel recording thermometer, and I've profiled the oven, the griddle, etc. :-) We now focus on improving other aspects of cooking, confident that temperature is handled.)

> it reads so fast that it's easy to explore the temperature gradients in the food.

I was amazed when I discovered this. If you have a thick steak on a pan, knowing what the temperature gradient looks like inside is very valuable, compared to just knowing the temperature in the middle. Just slide your thermapen out slowly, and you can get a good reading on the gradient.

You're not paying for the accuracy so much as the speed and reliability. The packaging matters a lot. A $10 knife and a $100 knife are fundamentally both just chunks of metal, but they definitely don't perform the same way. It's much, much better than a $10 thermometer.

There's a $30 Thermapen (the Thermopop), for what it's worth; it reads in 3 seconds, versus low hundred milliseconds.

I hope you are kidding. I have had Flukes that sell for twice the price and aren't as practically good and useful for cooking as is the Mk4 Thermapen. It is unmatched.

There is a nonzero percentage of people reading this that know that Fluke is a brand of scientific/industrial test and measuremnet gear. https://www.fluke.com/

It's like the Sam Vines theory of Economic Injustice: https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Sam_Vimes_Theory_of_Econom...

Pay for quality. It's cheaper in the long run.

The market adjusts. People pay for "quality" in an environment of information asymmetry - cheap stuff will be polished and given a high price tag. Products can do a better imitation of quality than people can discern it.

Even the value of "brand" is diminishing: decent corps are bought and gutted all the time.

It's not about accuracy, it's about speed of reading, and simply not breaking. Yes, the price is ridiculous, but anecdotally, I've bought six other thermometers, including a couple expensive ones, and they were all awful on one or both counts. But maybe I'm just bad at research.

The new model thermapen has features I want but I won't upgrade as long as my existing one keeps working. It's been many years so far and there's no sign of it degrading at all.

Yep. I had an older thermometer (now tossed) that would tick up in 2-3 degree C increments. It'd take 30 seconds or so to reach the ballpark of cooked meat from room temperature. That's a lot of oven heat lost unless I close the door and leave it in. Which I did, so it melted, hence the "now tossed". I got a cheaper probe one which seems much better.

It's really about the speed here. I have one that takes ~6 seconds to stabilize, which is by no means bad but is still a noticeable pause.

The Thermapen is rated at 3 seconds, which I imagine feels much better when you quickly want to get the temperature of a steak or something while preparing other components at the same time.

Digital thermometers are mostly a perfected technology by now. There's less than $10 worth of parts in these regardless of how much they are selling them for. You can buy a $5 multimeter with a type K thermocouple probe and it will have the same accuracy as any other, since it's intrinsic to the material itself. Hence the propaganda campaigns by companies who stand the most to lose from it.

...and downvoted for speaking the truth. Yes, it's all marketing BS, a tiny "bead" type thermocouple probe has next to no thermal mass and reads as instantly as you'll ever need for cooking purposes. Go buy a cheap one yourself if you don't believe me.

Did you not read the other replies? Many people's experience is that the difference is in the speed of reading, not the accuracy. This is borne out by buying many cheaper thermometers.

Regardless, I don't think the self-righteousness is called for. "Downvoted for speaking the truth"? We're talking about thermometers.

No doubt there are cheap ones that are utter crap; what I'm saying is that a fast settling and accurate thermometer is not some ultra-difficult thing that only a single company can make for a ridiculous price.

Can you recommend a competing thermometer of similar quality, speed, and accuracy?

Yet no one else makes them.

Is "speed of reading" a function of the probe, or the silicon?

Agreed. Hence the shock on people paying the markup. It’s not like this comes with some costly certification. There’s likely 1000s of products that offer the exact same capabilities at a 1/10 the price.

If you can find the cheapest ones that are just as durable, accurate, and fast you can replace the market leader amongst pros and serious hobbyists. That's worth a lot of money.

Get the right influencer/review site on your side and it's all downhill from there.

ETA: the thermapen isn't the Wirecutter recommendation. They recommend the entry level, $35 thermoworks option. So that's the price point to compete with and the $100 thermapen is the quality mark to hit.

The thermoworks dot option is also manufactured and sold by ETI in the UK. Thermoworks just slapped a different name in it.

It sounds like you're just making a seemingly reasonable assumption about something you don't know a lot about. There actually are not a lot of different kinds of good quality fast-reading thermometers out there.

You speak as if $100 is a lot of money when it's not.

Well it's true that you may be able to get something of equal quality for less, paying $100 for a high quality thermometer then I can always return and have replaced for years on end isn't that bad of a deal.

I have alwaysp been bothered by this. There's the strange masculine trait of pointing out how cheap you got something or how much something costs as if it Is a significant amount of money when it's not.

We get it! You're cheap and you would rather buy a mountain of disposable crap than spend money on something handmade to last! You're so cool and thrifty!

>"as if it matters when I'm making 150k+/yr"

Who gives a fuck how much you make. There are many people making way less and not because they are in any way inferior.

>"You're so cool and thrifty!"

I do not even want to say in public what I think about this.

Wow, this is out of touch. Even without the weird implication that everybody makes 150k, the implication that "if you can afford it, it's not overpriced" is ridiculous.

I was saying the lifetime warranty and time saved paying $40 more for a product that I don't have to research as heavily is worth i.

Honestly, I was using speech to text while having a drink so my comment came off as kinda stupid.

> There's the strange masculine trait of pointing out how cheap you got something or how much something costs as if it Is a significant amount of money when it's not.

On the other hand, there's a group of people who have fallen for the classic car salesman logic of "I'm actually SAVING money by spending more!" As if there's this epidemic of devices constantly failing, and they're the smartest people in the world for having come up with this novel idea about "spending more on quality." But being able to signal on social media about the nice things you have is an added bonus, so maybe there's something to it.

>fallen for the classic car salesman logic of "I'm actually SAVING money by spending more!"

The vast majority of people admit they are spending more to get more - not to save money.

>As if there's this epidemic of devices constantly failing

As far as I've experienced: There is. Maybe not "epidemic", and maybe not "constantly", but you appear to be using exaggeration for effect.

>they're the smartest people in the world for having come up with this novel idea about "spending more on quality."

What's with the hostility toward these people you're envisioning? I've never seen this group of people who think spending more to get a higher quality product is genius and novel.

So all things are of the same quality and the only reason someone would purchase a more expensive item is to signal their wealth on social media?