For instance, should your guests prefer their meat to be cooked rare or well-done, you can cater to their needs.

The best meat thermometers help you to avoid plating up undercooked meat that could be unsafe to eat. The angled baster has an angled tip for easy and safe drawing in of basting juices, a stand to prevent rolling and drips and is made of high-heat safe materials. Only the tip of the probe needs inserting to get a reading, making it good for burgers and sausages. Instant-read thermometers take the temperature of an item as soon as you insert the probe, and are not meant to be left inserted for a long period of time. You don’t get everything you do with the pricier model — you’re limited to full degrees, not tenths (ThermoWorks claims a ±2.

But, apps that allow long-term temperature tracking and have presets for certain kinds or cuts of meat may help take some of the guesswork out of the process. The other alternative would be to use an analog thermometer, but as we mentioned before, those are slower and harder to read.

The OXO Digital Thermometer is a perfect tool for cooking nine different types of meat, poultry, and fish. Other features that are great to have include Bluetooth capability, ports for multiple probes, and an assortment of presets to take the guesswork of how to achieve the perfect roast. These are used both for precision measurements of the highest accuracy and for routine industrial work. Thanks to the thermometer’s long probe, you can be confident you’re getting readings from deep within your food.

Engineered for precision and accuracy, the Chef’s Precision line of thermometers offers professional-grade results with at-home ease. This gave us an insight of how each would perform for everyday recipes, and helped us assess the design as well as ease of use. Thanks to its clever design, it’s as handy for sitting in a joint of meat as it cooks in the oven, as it is for jam-making, barbecuing, grilling and even deep frying.

We judged the thermometers on how easy it was to insert and remove the probes into the various meats. Home thermometers measure in either whole degrees or tenths of a degree; make sure you know how much detail you want, as not every thermometer does both — and those that do should make it easy to switch between the resolutions. There’s a little loop at the end of the cover, to let you slide the probe at right angles over a pan, which makes it much safer when testing boiling sugar, for example.

It is equipped with four probes that can be individually monitored through your phone, making it easy to cook multiple cuts of meats at once.

The probe itself is among the smallest we saw, at just 3 inches of usable length, so larger chunks of meat or poultry might pose problems.Meat Thermometers by OXO are essential kitchen tools for any home cook or professional chef looking to achieve perfect cooking results. These devices use a metal probe—left inserted during the cooking process—to keep tabs on when you've reached doneness. Our recommendation: root through your couch cushions, find that extra penny, and get the Thermapen One instead. Being able to manage multiple pieces of meat, while also juggling different cooking times and temperatures (this group likes their beef medium rare, that group is having roast chicken, and so on), gives you more flexibility in the kitchen or at the grill than most other models we’ve covered.