We've Tested Nearly 50 Meat Thermometers, Including the Newest From Ninja and Meater — These Came Out on Top (2025)

When grilling and roasting, knowledge of the exact temperature of your food prevents you from serving overcooked steaks, dry fish, or undercooked holiday turkey. This is where a meat thermometer can save face and your meal. Sure, there are extremely analog means of testing meat, like pressing and prodding, inserting a meat fork or cake tester and holding it against a tender area of your body, or observing the color of the juices running out. But these techniques, as time-honored as they are, leave room for interpretation.

Firmness, perceived temperature, or the clarity of juices just aren’t the same from person to person. But using a meat thermometer, provided it’s accurate, leaves no question about the current state of your food. In my professional kitchens, we considered no steak, poultry, or even hamburger ready until a thermometer confirmed it.

Meat thermometers take different forms for different tasks. Instant-read thermometers give you a snapshot of the meat's current state, while leave-in or wireless thermometers allow you to observe the rise or fall of temperatures over time. We’ll come back to these differences. But first, we’ll review six meat thermometers that stood out to us after we tested 22 digital probes and 25 quick-read models.

How We Tested Meat Thermometers

Our editors have tested many meat thermometers over the past few years. We’ve put them through structured evaluations in our lab and then continued using them at home for several months to see if we would still recommend and use them.

For our most recent tests, we tested the meat thermometers for accuracy and responsiveness against ice water, an immersion circulator-controlled water bath, and boiling water. Then we tested them with a grilled pork loin, using a previous winner as a control thermometer, to verify their accuracy in cooked meat. Leave-in thermometers remained in the meat for the entire cooking time, and we tested instant-read thermometers at the point the leave-in models reported the meat was done, noting any discrepancies. We evaluated the the new test population and the legacy winners on the following points.

• Accuracy: The entire point of a thermometer is to know the temperature of the material or environment you’re testing, so accuracy was a key feature in our ratings. Many manufacturers rate their thermometers’ accuracy by degrees of variance by temperature range. Because of this we tested the thermometers at low and high ranges in addition to the middle temperatures that most people cook their food.
• Ease of Use: Most cooks don’t need or want lab-quality thermometers that require thick manuals and substantial setup time. They want something that’s easy to use. Straightforward directions, easy setup, and a clear display all matter in this cate. Instant-read thermometers should also be easy to hold and read the display simultaneously, while leave-in thermometers should have probes that are easy to insert. Both types should be easy to clean.
• Design: The two biggest considerations in this area are how easy or comfortable the thermometers and probes are to hold, and how easy it is to read the results. Other factors we considered were durability, quality of construction, and storing the thermometers.
• Features: Additional features beyond quickly and accurately reporting temperatures were mainly in the purview of leave-in thermometers. We judged apps and connectivity in how easy they were to connect, configure, and use. We also considered app features like timers, presets, historical data, and knowledge bases. High/low threshold alarms, historical highs/lows, and target temperature tracking were key features in thermometers that didn’t have app connectivity. We also looked at the distance from the base sending unit a user could get without dropping connectivity for those thermometers that featured Bluetooth or RF connectivity.

Other Meat Thermometers We Tested

Strong Contenders

Meater Pro XL ($350 at Amazon)
I tested the Meater Pro as well as the four-probe Meater Pro XL, and either could hold our spot as Best Overall. The probes are the same, each with five internal sensors, so the choice comes down to whether you want multiple probes or one. This upgraded version, however, also connects to WiFi and lets you program each probe through a small screen built into the bamboo base, which I appreciated in testing.

OXO Good Grips Thermocouple Thermometer ($71 at Amazon)
This is a very accurate, somewhat fast-registering instant-read thermometer. We found it accurate within 1°F and register in two to three seconds in our testing. However, given the price, we found it lacked the construction quality of the Thermpen ONE.

Typhur InstaProbe ($120 at Amazon)
The Typhur InstaProbe is another fold-out instant-read thermometer with a digital readout that displays to the tenth of a degree Fahrenheit. The display took a little damage during testing that comparable models withstood. The damage didn’t restrict its functionality, only the display.

ThermoPro TP25 ($60 at Amazon)
The TP25 was a previous winner in our testing, and we monitored it for six months afterward. We saw the same results in long-term testing as we did in our original round. Unfortunately, innovation happens, and newer multi-probe thermometers surpass the technology.

Cuisinart CSG-200 Infrared and Folding Thermometer ($32 at Amazon)
In addition to being an instant-read, this is a point-and-shoot infrared thermometer, which you can use to assess the surface temperature of your grill or skillet before cooking. As an infrared, it’s not as easy to aim as its dedicated competitors, and we found the display more difficult to read than other instant-reads. Still, we like getting two heat-measuring needs met in one device.

ThermoWorks ChefAlarm ($65 at ThermoWorks)
The ChefAlarm is a simple, compact, single-probe thermometer with high, low, and finished temperature alarms that also tracks current temperature and historic high and low temperatures during the cook. It’s operated just as well after six months as it did on day one.

ThermoWorks DOT ($45 at ThermoWorks)
The DOT is a great, compact, wired thermometer for those who don’t need large sets of data in their cooking. The simple display lists the current temperature and the target temperature. Six months of continued testing have shown no degradation in performance or accuracy.

What Didn't Make the List

A handful of thermometers we expected to perform well didn’t for various reasons and fell off the recommendations list. It could be that the instructions were too limited or the alarm too low to be useful, like the Weber iGrill2 ($103 at Amazon). Or the thermometer could be slow to register and have limited accuracy. Others had design issues that made it difficult to read the displays. Our long-term tests also knocked thermometers off our original list. We really liked the ThermoPro TempSpike ($100 at Amazon) when we first tested it, and we found its app easy to navigate, but it didn't last. The probes need to sync to a dock, but the connection between the devices gave out after a few months.

Factors to Consider

Digital Probe vs. Instant-Read

Choose a thermometer based on your need for one. A digital probe is intended to be left in a piece of food or your oven, smoker, or grill to monitor the temperature over time. This may be the overview you want from long cooking, or you might want more immediate results. An instant-read thermometer is just that. Say you have a piece of chicken in the oven and want to know if it's done. Insert the thermometer, and it tells you the current temperature within a few seconds. Think of the use as quick cooking versus slow cooking and make your decision from there.

Wired vs. Wireless

Wired thermometers aren’t necessarily more accurate than wireless, but you’re not dependent on as much technology with a wired model. Wireless models provide more freedom, especially should you want to monitor food on a rotisserie, where wires would be tangled in short order, but in those cases, the probes require charging before use to maintain a connection.

Probe Length

Base this decision on two factors: the height of your grill lid and the thickness of the food you’ll usually cook. In testing one of the models, the probe was too long to close the grill lid when inserted into a piece of meat. Monitoring chicken wings with a five-inch probe may be excessive, as the probes tend to be top-heavy, but a shorter probe may not be sufficient for monitoring the internal temperature of a pork butt.

Temperature Range

Temperature range is another factor that you should base on your intended use. If you’re roasting, grilling, or smoking meats, some wireless thermometers have an upper limit of 212°F, which is perfectly in range for this task. If you’re doing something like making candy and need to monitor the temperature closely, you’ll need a higher limit.

Speed and Accuracy

If you want to cook meat or vegetables, a couple of degrees of variation can be fine. If you’re working with modernist techniques, preserving, or doing confectionary work, that variation can be the difference between success and failure. Along with accuracy, the speed of the reading can be quite important when you're in the middle of a cook. You'll want a thermometer that can quickly give you a steady reading of your food's internal temperature rather than one that takes a minute or two to rise. For the fastest results, you'll want an instant-read thermometer, although standard probe thermometers are usually only a few seconds behind.

Interface

Some of the models we tested are completely app-dependent, while others have a display on the base or thermometer themselves. Find something that suits you in those areas, and then look for a model that displays the information you consider most important at a size you find comfortable reading. If you prefer not to be completely dependent on an app or wireless connectivity, then you'll want to find a model that comes with a native display.

Our Expertise

Greg Bakeris an award-winning chef, restaurateur, and food writer with four decades of experience in the food industry. His written work appears in Food & Wine, Food Republic, and other publications. In addition to writing over 30 articles on grilling and barbecuing, he’s testedwireless thermometers,cutting boards, wood-burning and gaspizza ovens, akamado grill, and more.