9 ms·

I thought you were joking about the price. But nope it’s actually a $100+ thermometer. Like I get paying that much for lab or industrial use if it’s highly acc

I thought you were joking about the price. But nope it’s actually a $100+ thermometer. Like I get paying that much for lab or industrial use if it’s highly accurate/precise. But for cooking…nobody will taste the difference between 0.1 degrees. And I’m not even sure it’s that accurate. It looks like a 10$ thermometer and I doubt it’s much better than one for cooking.

secabeen 5y ago
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.
sjm-lbm 5y ago
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.
- Frost1x 5y ago
  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).
lincolnq 5y ago
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.
colechristensen 5y ago
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.
- InvertedRhodium 5y ago
  Couldn't it also be a perfect example of the bandwagon fallacy?
  - colechristensen 5y ago
    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.
    - mike_d 5y ago
      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.
      - geoduck14 5y ago
        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?
happytoexplain 5y ago
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.
- kevinmchugh 5y ago
  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.
- hnick 5y ago
  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.
zippergz 5y ago
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.
- LegitShady 5y ago
  a thermometer thats 10-20 degrees off is likely just broken.
  - ska 5y ago
    more likely out of calibration
  - sgerenser 5y ago
    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.
    - jakemoshenko 5y ago
      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?
      - ziml77 5y ago
        That's exactly why I got a Thermapen. I don't need to ask that question anymore.
userbinator 5y ago
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.
- bushbaba 5y ago
  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.
  - kevinmchugh 5y ago
    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.
    - jjeaff 5y ago
      The thermoworks dot option is also manufactured and sold by ETI in the UK. Thermoworks just slapped a different name in it.
  - lifeformed 5y ago
    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.
honkycat 5y ago
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!
- happytoexplain 5y ago
  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.
  - honkycat 5y ago
    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.
- FpUser 5y ago
  >"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.
  - deleted 5y ago
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  - deleted 5y ago
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- jturpin 5y ago
  > 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.
TwoBit 5y ago
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-Calibration-Foldable/dp/B087GLK8GB https://www.amazon.com/Saferell-Thermometer-Backlight-Calibr...
- shaklee3 5y ago
  Probably because you never need to switch between F and C
- simondotau 5y ago
  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.)
  - Broken_Hippo 5y ago
    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).
    - somebodythere 5y ago
      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.
Wistar 5y ago
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.
- mixologic 5y ago
  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/ https://www.fluke.com/
rtikulit 5y ago
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!)
- fredophile 5y ago
  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.
  - katbyte 5y ago
    I’ve been finding that reverse searing does a pretty good job without the sound vide
    - dagw 5y ago
      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.
      - Xcelerate 5y ago
        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.
grawprog 5y ago
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.
- lazyasciiart 5y ago
  What you spend on a thermometer, you save on cooking pans.
ulber 5y ago
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.
tptacek 5y ago
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.
vector_spaces 5y ago
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"
- wiredfool 5y ago
  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.
  - Chris2048 5y ago
    could you fill it w silicone?
- mike_d 5y ago
  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.
deleted 5y ago
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pja 5y ago
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?
wiredfool 5y ago
It's like the Sam Vines theory of Economic Injustice: https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Sam_Vimes_Theory_of_Economic_Injustice https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Sam_Vimes_Theory_of_Econom... Pay for quality. It's cheaper in the long run.
- Chris2048 5y ago
  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.
crispyambulance 5y ago
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.

secabeen 5y ago

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.

sjm-lbm 5y ago

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.

Frost1x 5y ago
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).

lincolnq 5y ago

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.

colechristensen 5y ago

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.

InvertedRhodium 5y ago
Couldn't it also be a perfect example of the bandwagon fallacy?
- colechristensen 5y ago
  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.
  - mike_d 5y ago
    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.
    - geoduck14 5y ago
      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?

happytoexplain 5y ago

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.

kevinmchugh 5y ago
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.
hnick 5y ago
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.

zippergz 5y ago

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.

LegitShady 5y ago
a thermometer thats 10-20 degrees off is likely just broken.
- ska 5y ago
  more likely out of calibration
- sgerenser 5y ago
  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.
  - jakemoshenko 5y ago
    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?
    - ziml77 5y ago
      That's exactly why I got a Thermapen. I don't need to ask that question anymore.

userbinator 5y ago

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.

bushbaba 5y ago
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.
- kevinmchugh 5y ago
  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.
  - jjeaff 5y ago
    The thermoworks dot option is also manufactured and sold by ETI in the UK. Thermoworks just slapped a different name in it.
- lifeformed 5y ago
  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.

honkycat 5y ago

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!

happytoexplain 5y ago
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.
- honkycat 5y ago
  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.
FpUser 5y ago
>"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.
- deleted 5y ago
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- deleted 5y ago
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jturpin 5y ago
> 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.

TwoBit 5y ago

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-Calibration-Foldable/dp/B087GLK8GB https://www.amazon.com/Saferell-Thermometer-Backlight-Calibr...

shaklee3 5y ago
Probably because you never need to switch between F and C
simondotau 5y ago
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.)
- Broken_Hippo 5y ago
  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).
  - somebodythere 5y ago
    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.

Wistar 5y ago

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.

mixologic 5y ago
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/ https://www.fluke.com/

rtikulit 5y ago

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!)

fredophile 5y ago
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.
- katbyte 5y ago
  I’ve been finding that reverse searing does a pretty good job without the sound vide
  - dagw 5y ago
    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.
    - Xcelerate 5y ago
      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.

grawprog 5y ago

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.

lazyasciiart 5y ago
What you spend on a thermometer, you save on cooking pans.

ulber 5y ago

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.

tptacek 5y ago

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.

vector_spaces 5y ago

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"

wiredfool 5y ago
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.
- Chris2048 5y ago
  could you fill it w silicone?
mike_d 5y ago
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.

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pja 5y ago

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?

wiredfool 5y ago

It's like the Sam Vines theory of Economic Injustice: https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Sam_Vimes_Theory_of_Economic_Injustice https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Sam_Vimes_Theory_of_Econom... Pay for quality. It's cheaper in the long run.

Chris2048 5y ago
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.

crispyambulance 5y ago

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.