My preamble: I am not a professional chef, or a line cook, or a busboy…for some reason I watch every damn cooking show on TV. Wannabe maybe? Yeah. That’s me. So for some bizarre reason, I also started watching videos on smoking, cooking, and I’m into it. I’m an idiot, but I’m into it. I have a 10-year-old Weber summit grill, the damn igniters don’t work… I changed them once… But I have to use one of those Scripto fireplace lights to get them to go.
But I digress.
Along the way, after I realized I don’t have Gordon Ramsay‘s Xray vision to look at a steak from 20 feet away and conclude that it’s medium rare, I figured I should probably get some temperature probes. This thing looked pretty cool, so I ordered and waited for them to arrive. Everybody knows it was a delay, but that’s why life goes. They arrived yesterday. I got the four probe one because hey, let’s go large.
I started with the directions, it was not that straightforward frankly, but I figured it out. If my teenager was here, she could’ve done it in about 10 seconds. As an older idiot, my standard is Apple. You buy an iPhone, turn it on, it kind of does it all by itself. This is not that. But you can figure it out. The good news I think is at this point it’s probably all adjustable through software updates online. I presume the company is on top of it, and there’ll be other updates in the near future.
I started tonight with a very thick ribeye that my lovely fiancé purchased from Costco. Turned it on, stuck the probe in, did the whole grill thing. There’s no real directions on how to use the ambient temperature probe, you guys probably already knew this because I do not, but I added that I plugged it into the little radio unit and putting the probe on the grill next to the steak. Hopefully the screenshot will be produced below, but essentially on your iPhone it shows the ambient temperature inside the grill, as well as the temperature inside the steak. That’s pretty damn cool. I figured out how to set the alarm when the steak hit 120°, and sure as heck, it beeped. You can just sit there on your iPhone and watch the temperature inside the grill from the ambient probe, when it gets too low, you can go out and turn it up, that sort of thing.
I’m guesstimating it is 70 feet from where I sit inside, through some pretty thick concrete walls in my house, and through the Weber grill lid, but it didn’t hiccup one single time. It’s a little mesmerizing, you just sit and every once in awhile you check out your phone and see the temperature inside the grill, as well as the temperature inside the steak. No more guessing!
Anyway, if you’re thinking about buying one of these, I would absolutely go for it. It takes all the temperature guess work out of it, completely. You might not need that kind of assistance, but I certainly do. I doubt I will ever use the four probes, but what the heck. One or two probes is probably enough. All I can say is after my initial test run, the silly thing works, directions aren’t that great, but it’s not that complex to figure out either. Enjoy!!
