Is your temp probe for cooking accurate???

Rob Keeble

Member
Messages
12,633
Location
GTA Ontario Canada
If you dont know check it out. How ? Well i had this concern after doing some smoking the other day and came across this method.
Boil 3 inches of water in a pan.
Determine the altitude and current air pressure of your location.
Plug into this calculator
http://thermoworks.com/software/bpcalc.html/
This will provide temp of boiling water where u are.
Then stick your probe in and it will give you an idea of how good your temp probe is.

After thinking my probe was out by at least 10 degrees and consequently taking my meat off too early i think, i discovered the digital probe i was using is only around 1 to 2 degrees out. Substantial difference. Peace of mind is well worth effort.

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For this past Christmas Eve dinner (party of 16) I was once again concerned about cooking an expensive rib eye roast on the grill. Previous years were always stressful in that I never had a good handle on the cooking time despite using different thermometers. Cooking times always varied from one year to the next and I was always late with the roast.

Well, I took the advice of Brent & purchased a couple of digital thermometers: the Maverick ET732 Long Range Wireless 2 Probe BBQ Smoker Meat Thermometer & the ThermoWorks Super-Fast Mini Thermometer. After receiving them I checked both out in ice water & boiling water. Right on the money, within 0.1°F !!!

I used both (to compare each other) to grill a 12 lb Rib Eye roast for our guests. After programming the thermometers, I felt comfortable grilling this roast. In the past, I’ve had to test cut up to three times to get the roast to med-rare. The older thermometers (1 digital & 1 analog) were unreliable, even when using both at the same time.

In fact, the new thermometers actually told me a lot about my Weber Gold gas grill.
1. The Weber thermometer that came with the grill (hood mounted) to monitor the “oven” temperature read, on average, about 120 °F low! How’s that for controlling cook time?
2. The meat temperature actually increased uniformly with time.
3. However, the BBQ oven temperature fluctuated much more than expected, as much as 40°F and these changes were very sudden. I can only attribute these fluctuations to a slight breeze @ 20°F while grilling & I suspect the propane gas flow may not be as consistent which would contribute towards changing the oven temperature.
4. Having the remote thermometer to monitor the temps allowed me to adjust the gas flow so that I could “average” a 350°F temp. Unfortunately this was required frequently.
5. I removed the roast at 125°F & after resting it came up to 130°F – perfect!
6. Delicious too!
7. Confidence is a good thing! ;)

Thanks again for the recommendation Brent!
 
Hey! I invented this method (for myself.) I've checked meat thermometers for a while now in a pan of boiling water. We're about 90m ASL here, so if it registers between 98 and 102ºC I reckon I'm close enough. Never had one fail the test yet.
 
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