The Best Remote-Probe Thermometers

Right out of the box the base paired automatically with the receiver, making it ready to use in seconds. Both base and receiver had bright, clear displays that could be read easily in both bright and dim light; both also have backlights for operating in the dark. The unit maintains a connection for up to 300 feet and alerts you when you go out of range. When you go back into range, it automatically reconnects, and its alarms were loud and easy to set. While we used it primarily for grilling, this thermometer can read up to 572 degrees and transmits temperature data from the probe to the base in 8 seconds, which also makes it useful for candy making and deep frying. It can be made to work with a smartphone by purchasing the Smoke Gateway ($89); however, we found it difficult to set up and the app glitchy.

A cult favorite among home barbecue aficionados, this Wi-Fi-connected data logger has six channels for either ambient or food probes, making it a great upgrade for cooks who regularly roast or smoke more than one piece of food at a time or for those who want to track the air temperatures in different areas of their smokers, ovens, or grills. It’s pricey but durable and well designed, and as long as the base is in a Wi-Fi zone, you’ll never have to worry about losing connection—we drove miles away from the base and still got readouts. You’ll need to download an app to use it, but the app itself is intuitive and easy to read and use; we loved that we could set multiple alerts for each probe and that we could also use the app to take notes. Best of all, the app graphs the temperatures as they’re registered, giving you a sense of how your food and smoker/grill/oven are progressing. This is especially useful if you’re just learning how to use a smoker, for example, or if you want to track your fridge’s temperature over time. (We just wish we could customize the view so that we could choose to see only certain probes at a time.) The food probe took longer than other models to register the temperature of an ice bath accurately, but once inserted in food, it registered temperature changes every 5 seconds. You can use the base with a power cord or just rely on its chargeable battery; when fully charged, it worked for more than 14 hours and still had plenty of juice left.

This probe doesn’t have wires. Instead, the probe transmits temperature information directly to your phone via Bluetooth. However, you have to keep the charging base near both the probe and your phone, as it contains the Bluetooth transmitter. Pairing was relatively easy, though instructions were minimal and the device has to be charged for at least 4 hours before you can use it. Because it relies on Bluetooth (not Wi-Fi), we found the connection range was fairly limited—only about 165 feet. It did occasionally unpair with our phone when we went out of range, but it was easy enough to reconnect when we were back in range (though it was not always automatic). Overall we found the wireless design incredibly easy to use, and it’s a good option if you don’t want to deal with replacing wires that get pinched in an oven or come in contact with a heat source and get fried.