Hm this reminds me of reading Salt Fat Acid Heat, and the buttermilk chicken recipe, which has only 3 ingredients (chicken, buttermilk, salt). She says you hav

Hm this reminds me of reading Salt Fat Acid Heat, and the buttermilk chicken recipe, which has only 3 ingredients (chicken, buttermilk, salt). She says you have to orient the chicken a specific way in the oven because the corners of the oven are the hottest and the different parts of the chicken will cook evenly that way (?) Not quite sure since I didn't try it. But my friend made it and it was fantastic. So the way I look at it (without much experience) is that a thermometer measures one dimension, while a chicken is a 3D thing. And an expert chef noticed that enough to put the detail in her recipe. i.e. "reality is complicated". Not sure if that's the problem with sausages (since they're not that 3D) but there's a reason that specific foods are cooked in specific ovens. i.e. why do people obsess over pizza ovens and import them from Italy? Why is clay pot cooking different than metal pot cooking, etc.? Because temperature / heat aren't just one-dimensional. She says that good cooks look at the food and not at the thermometer. They're looking for signs in the food which stay constant across environments rather than measuring one aspect of the environment. tl;dr Samin Nosrat rejects the use of a thermometer because it doesn't measure enough reality to cook well.