An instant read cooking thermometer is a kitchen and outdoor grilling gadget that I now, wouldn’t be without.
If you’ve ever done any cooking in your home I’m sure you will have been presented with occasions when you need to know if your food is sufficiently hot or cooked enough. There’s nothing worse than an over cooked lasagna or even worse, an under cooked chicken!
Food poisoning is a very real and all too regular occurrence that can quite often be avoided if we take the usual food health advice. Re-heating leftovers or not keeping food in the refrigerator can result in food poisoning. But an equally and potentially more serious problems can arise when we consume under cooked food.
Most of the time we know how long to cook food for. There’s usually cooking instructions on the packet or we’ve cooked it so many times it’s not an issue. However, there are occasions every so often that mean we have to guess somewhat in deciding if food is cooked enough. Outdoor grilling is a perfect example of this.
What normally happens is we either overestimate the cooking time, cremating the sausages and burgers, or we under cook the food such as the middle of a chicken breast or leg. It is the later of these two scenarios that everyone dreads.
An instant read cooking thermometer removes the worry and guesswork out of such situations. By referring to a chart based on various foods, it is easy to tell if the middle of the food has reached a certain temperature and therefore cooked enough.
In the kitchen, timings are all important and you really need to know if food is ready ‘now’ or needs a little longer, especially if you are cooking for guests. An instant read thermometer gives you that near instant reading in just a few seconds and allows you to be more efficient and concentrate on all the other jobs that need attention.
Traditional thermometers, whilst doing an adequate job, always take far too long to provide a temperature reading. And it is this speed that makes all the difference.
There are some excellent models on the market today that will give you a near 100% accurate reading in seconds. The Thermapen instant read thermometer for example is one of the industry’s leading cooking thermometers that has received excellent reviews. It is small, wireless, exceptionally accurate and very fast!
I have been using it for quite some time now and it has worked perfectly for me, every time. It is not the cheapest cooking thermometer available, but it seems to be the best and I wouldn’t swap it for anything else.
