CCE
(Keyrock the unfrozen caveman lawyer; your world frightens & confuses me)
1
My old Habor “instant” read thermometer takes about 4-5 seconds to go from ambient to final at about 140°F (my morning tea temp) and as long as 8 seconds to read out above 200°F or so for bread or brisket.
I saw this one on Amazon and got it for $17, including tax, with a “clip the coupon” kind of deal. It claims to read in 1 second, which I thought might be puffery given that seems to be the province of much more expensive thermometers.
It hits my tea temp from ambient (mid-60s in my kitchen in the mornings) in about 0.5 second. It took right at 1 second for a temp over 200. Seems accurate enough as it agrees with all my other thermometers at freezing/boiling points.
Edit - in this older thread (2016) the consensus seemed to be that 4-10 seconds was sufficient. But I lose a lot of heat from my smoker/grill in that time frame. it’ll drop to 200 ambient chamber temp and take nearly 10 minutes to crawl back up to 275.
I also like the LED readout as opposed to the black LCD on my older one which can be hard to read in the evenings.
That’s why you need a wired probe and an outside base unit.
1 Like
CCE
(Keyrock the unfrozen caveman lawyer; your world frightens & confuses me)
3
I do have a wired multiprobe thermometer. For large pieces of meat when I’m offset roasting/smoking, I’ll put 2 in the cabinet at about food-height (one nearer each end), one in a thinner part of the meat and one in a thicker part of the meat.
But if I’m doing 6 or 8 steaks on direct heat, I like to be able to check each steak individually and move them around as needed.
Sure, but then why worry about the heat dropping inside the appliance if you’re using direct heat?
CCE
(Keyrock the unfrozen caveman lawyer; your world frightens & confuses me)
5
Mainly because it’s getting weak, but also because I wasn’t complete with my response. Weak: I tried to refurb the burner tubes a couple of years ago and it seemed okay for at least the first year or 18 months, but lately there’s not much difference in terms of flame height between low and high heat. Maybe I’ll try a new regulator. Anyway I’m thinking trapping some heat can help. But maybe not.
The incomplete part of my response should have mentioned that fairly often, I grill sear first, then move to an offset tray to roast with just a little smoke. I don’t do this as often as I used to, though, because I’m getting more into reverse searing in a pan and no one in the family cares about grill marks anyway. Or the smoke, although I like it.
These are 2 of 4 ribeyes (right at 2.5 pounds each) that I did in the oven last Sunday, using leave-in probes in all 4. Once they all(*) hit 123°F, I took them out of the oven, let them rest a few minutes, and seared them in a CS pan on the side burner with the butter-garlic-thyme routine. So in this case, no need for an instant read (fast or slow) because I wasn’t concerned about what was happening inside.
Unfortunately I had already started slicing before I grabbed the photo.
(*) I was a little surprised at the time spread given their similarity to each other and rotating the pan in the oven, but when the first hit 123 the laggard was still around 110, with the other 2 spread between.
