Thoughts on food thermometers?

I messed with one for a while, but how did you get around it's inaccuracy? Different materials radiate heat at different levels. Cheap infared guns just assume they're all the same. Better ones might have a "high vs low" switch or "high medium low" setting. But it's a big pain to know what setting to use for what.

To give an example, I once had a pot of water boiling. When I shot the side of the pot it read only 60C even though it was a full rolling boil. Shooting the surface of the water yielded 95C on the same setting, even though they were both obviously the same temp.

And I was using a fairly expensive thermometer too-- a Fluke--not some cheapo import.

At first I thought they were necessary to prevent food poisoning. Then I got more experienced and knew how to check for doneness.

Now, as a fairly experienced cook, I understand how incredibly important they are. Not to prevent undercooking, but to ensure you never overcook anything, and that your food is the precise temperature required for a superior texture and flavor.

A food thermometer is one of the #1 things I cannot live without in the kitchen, and it's one of the first things I buy if my house gets destroyed by faggot flood brought about by a dumbshit hurricane.

i have several for homebrewing. mash times and temps are critical for good beer

cornish game hen?

This
>useful if you haven't really cooked meat
>but you should eventually not rely on it

It's obviously a photoshopped image. The hand + thermometer was combined with a pic of the roasted bird. The thermometer isn't even being inserted in the correct place.

Note the size of the grapes on the board with the bird....that's clearly no cornish hen, quail, etc.

no way that's shopped, man. i can tell by the pixels. i've seen a lot of photoshops in my day

Cool story bro

does the food thermometer turn your food into a toothsome treat? If not, I want no part of it.

>does the food thermometer turn your food into a toothsome treat?
It certainly can, considering that the alternative is, at best, an educated guess as to the doneness of your meat.

Not using one is just being lazy.

learning what it was calibrated for (it's usually oil/water because those are similar and the most common uses) and sampling from that. i don't expect to be able to ping it off the side of a pot just like i don't really ever plan on holding my old candy thermometer there; the only place where this has really mattered are covered roasts and foil-wrapped things where a probe is ideal anyway.

they're useful as fuck especially if you're cooking an unfamiliar dish or in an unfamiliar oven.

i recently started relying maybe a little too heavily on them so i overcooked a roast pretty badly because my probe turned out to be busted. you shouldn't rely on them. but i don't think there's any reason you should avoid them, it's not like they prevent you exercising your judgement.

They helped me with meatloaf a lot.

The only way to cook food safely in the past was by overcooking it or by trial and error and finding out that a certain doneness didn't make you sick. Thermometers are important, but like others have said, once you learn what firmness to look for based on the safe temperature, you don't need to check every time, although it's still recommended due to variations in meat.

Sickness was never the bar, our modern standards don't even have much to do with it and of course tartare and tataki are still things. Cooking was about prechewing/predigesting to improve the energy economy of a given piece of meat, with the "luxury" preparation almost invariably settling in at "just flame-touched enough to fool the tastebuds into thinking it's cooked".

Thermometers are for justification to pull out early, not for reasons to stay in.

when you prepare herbs that will lose their taste at a certain degree, specifically marry jane, you will find it useful. for anything else it's more or less irrelevant. if you have enough experience in the kitchen you don't need it for regular food

*taste and effect

>to ensure you never overcook anything
This. Pork and white meat chicken can go from juicy and delicious to dried out in a matter of 10 degrees or so. I always use a thermometer for these meats.

I used them for THICC cuts
and pork
if you let the pork get past 160 you've ruined it

I use it as Christmas for the turkey because turkey is so lean, easy to overcook and there a bunch of people expecting a good meal.
I don't use it for anything else.
The rest I can just gauge by touch and I guess sense.

A thermometer is 100% necessary for many recipes if you want to make them the best they can be. There are many factors that can affect temperature especially when cooking at home.

Its funny seeing retards on here pretending you don't need one which just shows you that they don't know what they are talking about.

Some recipes call for sugar or water at a certain temp. Meats need to be checked with a thermometer because ovens and timings are not accurate and can fluctuate easily. If you cook blind your final product might turn out great sometimes, but you will never be as consistent as when you use a probe thermometer.

If you are serious about cooking you will have multiple good thermometers for different purposes. You need an instant read and a probe style for sure. Infrared not super necessary.

For turkeys

It is a brazen act of chauvinism to even pretend you’re half as good as a thermometer
T. Bestunitasker

how does it even help people that have never cooked meat?

oven temp matters more than internal meat temp.

you can put a chicken in an oven that's too hot and ruin it way before the thermometer comes up to an acceptable temp.

common sense and visual cues help the most, for perfecting the line between under/perfect/over the thermometer is important.

>one of the first things I buy if my house gets destroyed by faggot flood brought about by a dumbshit hurricane.

have you thought about not living in a disaster zone?

Sounds like something someone from LA or NYC would say.

>NYC
You mean the place that got crippled by a hurricane?

4u

yes NYC "crippled" by a hurricane in the same sense that New Orleans or Houston was crippled by a hurricane? I think not. inb4 muh hurricane sandy. fuck off.

it was out here on long island that got hit more so than the city
during that storm the water rose above the fire hydrants and was rushing down the street like a river, houses were blowing up because of broken gas lines, rescue teams had to use aquatic vehicles to evacuate people from what used to be a suburb but was now venice
water took almost 3 days to recede and we were without power for over 2 weeks during a particularly cold november
gasoline was like gold as people tried to power generators to stay warm

honestly it's probably what people in russia feel like every day

I made a fuck ton of money during all that. I was charging people $400 to rip out their water damaged floors. was able to hit 2-3 houses a day and scrap all the metal I was taking out. I made about 40 grand in a month

nope, living in place that's waiting for the "one big one" which is either not going to happen or half the state and tens of thousands of people will be immediately killed.

feel pretty good not living in a place that has yearly FEMA disasters.

streamable.com/z49z2

>implying your home kitchen is a fast paced michelin starred one where time is money and you should know your shit because you've cooked thousands of steaks just to get there

absolutely essential for some stuff like deep frying

>Different materials radiate heat at different levels. Cheap infared guns just assume they're all the same
>To give an example, I once had a pot of water boiling. When I shot the side of the pot it read only 60C even though it was a full rolling boil. Shooting the surface of the water yielded 95C on the same setting, even though they were both obviously the same temp.
You do realize you literally just gave an example of the thermometer giving different readings because of different emissivity, contradicting your first statement, right? And in the case of cooking, this is what you want to actually measure - the amount of energy that will transfer to the food, not just how much energy is in the material.

Nothing matters more than internal temp.
It helps noobs to bring the internal temp to the right temperature range without having to judge by time or appearance. As they continue to use it they will learn to judge by time or appearance. Isn’t that obvious?

If you're concerned about food safety and don't want to cook it any more than it needs to be for safety reasons, then yes. The people talking about doneness using texture, firmness, color, juices, etc. are all wrong as far as food safety is concerned as those have been shown to be inaccurate approximators of temperature.
If food safety isn't your concern then, it's not really needed and texture, firmness, color, etc. are better indicators for tastier food.

>literally just gave an example of the thermometer giving different readings because of different emissivity
Yes, that's exactly what I meant.
I didn't mean literal inaccuracy in the thermometer itself. I meant it is practically inaccurate because of the problem of different materials having different emissivities. Sure, a decent thermometer will come with a manual that tells us examples of what materials should be measured with what setting. But that seems very broad to begin with, and food items don't appear in that list of materials.

>>And in the case of cooking, this is what you want to actually measure
Not really. Emissivity is only relevant for radiant heat cooking, like inside an oven. And even then knowing the temp of the surface alone is meaningless without also knowing the humidity of the oven. (i.e. wet bulb temp vs. dry bulb temp). In the case of cooking food in a pan or simmering it in a liquid emissivity is irrelevant, except for the fact that it makes it complicated to get a trustworthy measurement with an infrared thermometer.

>texture, firmness, color, etc. are better indicators for tastier food.

That's all well and good for thin foods that cook fairly quickly but it's completely useless for things like roasts or slow-cooked BBQ. The external appearance and texture you'd get from poking at the food has nothing to do with the interior temperature. It's also a useless concept for the temperature of a poaching bath or hot oil for frying.

...

Not 'necessary' in the sense that it's completely possible to cook without them if you're experienced enough to judge cooking time intuitively. Be honest with yourself though and use one if you don't think that's the case. There's no shame in it. The only shame is in fucking up your cooking.

>hurt durr good for noobs but when you're a master chef like me you can just eyeball it

wouldn't a master chef want precise temperatures?
I bet you guys think measuring cups are for noobs too

Useful for a new recipe otherwise past experience should tell you how much time is right.

>measuring cups are for noobs too

That's right. Masters use scales, plebe.

>Necessary or just an accessory?

It's the only way you can be certain that a roast has been cooked to a safe temperature. Without measuring the internal temperature of the meat, you are simply guessing at whether or not the food is safe to eat.

That said, for steaks, chops, and filets, a thermometer is kind of impractical. There are legitimate ways to gauge doneness of those thinner cuts of meat without a thermometer, but they do take some practice and experience to get good at.

tl;dr thermometers are necessary for roasts & larger cuts of meat, unless you like gambling with food poisoning

It's only way to know for sure how done meat is. The prodding it for firmness is a meme. Any chef worth his salt has a Thermapen in his jacket for this very reason.