The Best Meat Thermometers for Flawless Grilling Results Every Time

If you’re doing any kind of large-scale roasting or grilling of meat, you’ve probably paid a hefty price for your protein, so the last thing you want to do is to rely on guesswork or a nebulous range of cook times in a recipe (that don’t factor in your oven’s quirks, your grill’s cold spots, or their temperature faults) to determine when it’s done. If ever there’s a moment for precision, it’s now.

Enter the instant-read thermometer—a cook’s versatile best friend for roasts, steaks, poultry, and so much more. The best digital meat thermometer can be used to pinpoint the doneness of a turkey, pull your salmon off the grill before it gets tough, help you with deep-frying at the desired temperature for a crisp and golden result, avoid burned caramel, even test your baked goods for doneness.

We tested eight instant-read cooking thermometers to find the one that will ensure consistent results every day, whether you’re preparing for Thanksgiving or grilling on Sunday.

In this piece we’re covering instant-read thermometers. If you’re looking for bluetooth and Wi-Fi connected thermometers like the Combustion, the Meater, or the Thermopro Temp Spike, we cover those in this piece on the best wireless meat thermometers. Those are devices that, in addition to serving as instant-read thermometers, can do things like predict how long the cooking process will take, read ambient temperature to tell you if your grill is hot enough, and sound alarm thermometers when your food is ready. They are incredibly useful little gadgets, but do have so many different functions that we didn’t think it would be fair to compare them to the thermometers here.

The Thermapen One is the updated design of our previous winner, the Thermapen MK4. The design is largely the same, with the same auxiliary features we appreciate about the older model but with superior performance and accuracy. According to Thermoworks, the Thermapen One is faster and more accurate than its predecessor, promising accurate readings within a single second. When we put it to the test, we found that the claims held up nicely.

Often when you’re testing food for doneness, you’re doing it on a hot stove or with an open oven door. That’s when the “instant read” part of a thermometer becomes important—the quicker it works, the less likely you are to get burned and the less time your oven spends losing heat. When we placed this model’s stainless-steel probe in a pot of boiling water, its display read 212º F in a single second. When we stuck the thermometer into a bowl of ice water, it read 32° F in just under 2 seconds.

This food thermometer has well-designed features you won’t even realize you needed until you try them. First, it’s ridiculously simple to use: Turn it on and off by unfolding and refolding the long probe. If you happen to accidentally leave it unfolded, it goes into sleep mode to save battery life. It’s preset to do this after 30 seconds, but you can manually change it to anywhere between 10 seconds and 3 minutes. All you have to do to wake it back up is move it. The thermometer can sense low light and automatically turns on the backlit display. (You can also activate the display light by touching the window.) The rotating LCD display shifts as you turn the thermometer, which is handy for lefty cooks, testing in multiple spots, and for reading the thermometer when you have to insert it into a hard-to-reach item on the grill. Don’t like sleep mode and/or the display moving around? You can disable these features with a button inside the battery compartment (where you also can switch from degrees Fahrenheit to Celsius or vice versa). The Thermapen uses a AAA battery, which is easy to find and replace. It is also water-resistant and can read a temperature range of -58.0–572.0° F. This thermometer is an investment at $109—but its ease of use, accuracy, speed, and incomparable extra features mean it’s well worth the money.

There is almost nothing not to like about Thermoworks’ flagship thermometer. If we had to pick on one thing, the screen of the Thermapen One is slightly harder to read compared to the Typhur Instaprobe that we cover below, even when the backlight turns on. But that’s a small quibble and we only make it in comparison to one other thermometer we tested. The Thermapen One isn’t just a good meat thermometer. It’s a great meat thermometer.

Specs

This is the rare category where we here at Epicurious can’t pick a single winner of a product test. When Typhur, the company behind the enormous and excellent Typhur Dome air fryer, launched its futuristic looking Instaprobe thermometer in 2024, it became an immediate competitor to Thermoworks. That’s because it does almost all the same things the Thermapen One can do. First, the basic functionality: It read the temperature of boiling water in less than one second and the temperature of water in one second flat, to the tenth of a degree. Typhur makes the claim that it reads faster than any thermometer on the market. That might be true in a laboratory setting, but both it and the Thermapen One had response times that weren’t distinguishable in any way that seemed meaningful in our at-home testing.

Speed and accuracy are the most important features of any instant-read thermometer, but the Typhur also has all the extras the Thermapen One does. It is waterproof, puts itself to sleep after 30 seconds, can read temperatures in Celsius or Fahrenheit, and has a rotating display.

The Typhur does not have a backlight the way the Thermapens do, but it’s actually a little easier to read at all times because of the way its bright white OLED readout pops from its black background. It too uses easy-to-find AAA batteries and its battery compartment uses a relatively large screw that is easy to remove and replace.

It also has a magnet built into the probe, which means you can keep it out, stuck to the side of the fridge—another small convenience for an item you should get regular use from. Ultimately, both the Typhur Instaprobe and the Thermapen One are incredibly high-quality thermometers and we fully back them both.

The two advantages the Thermapen One has over the Instaprobe are the ease with which we could switch between Fahrenheit and Celsius and the full rotation its display offers. In order to change temperature scales on the Typhur you need to open the battery case, where there is a toggle switch. It’s a hassle to unscrew, but is unlikely to prevent too many issues because users will probably be dedicated to using only one of the settings. In terms of its display, the Typhur can only rotate 180° at a time. That means that if you’re standing the thermometer straight up in order to, say, dip it into a hot liquid, you’ll have to read the thermometer sideways, which is not the case with the Thermapen One.

Specs

This is a lot of thermometer for the price. The Kizen lacks many of the fancy features of the Thermapen or the Typhur, but it’s an inexpensive option and it works. It accurately read 212º F in boiling water in 4 seconds.

Out of the box, the Kizen requires a little bit more getting-to-know-you time—it doesn’t have quite the intuitive design of either of our top picks. Similar to the Thermapen, it starts when you unfold the probe and turns off when you fold it back. It shuts off automatically after 10 minutes if you put it down unfolded. But while the Thermapen offers both automatic and manual backlighting, the Kizen has a button to activate it (so there’s no tapping it with a knuckle if you have greasy hands, as is possible with the Thermapen). The Kizen’s display doesn’t rotate, and you have to touch one of the buttons to turn it back on when it turns off automatically, whereas the Thermapen and Instaprobe both come back to life automatically when moved and shut off quicker, saving battery life.

There are some useful features, though: A button on the front allows you to toggle between Fahrenheit and Celsius. Another button allows you to hold the temperature reading and display the minimum and/or maximum recorded temperature (this is a feature we don’t see ourselves using, but it’s there if you want it). There’s a chart thoughtfully printed on the front of the thermometer with the safe internal temps for poultry and ground meats as well as medium, medium-rare, and well-done temperatures for steaks. And, like the Typhur, it has a magnet so you can stick it handily on a knife block or the refrigerator instead of frantically rummaging through your kitchen drawers when you need it. It comes loaded with a battery and has an extra for later, though it’s a CR2032 3V lithium cell battery, which isn’t as as simple to replace as the AAAs in the our other two picks (and you may not have extras of in your junk drawer). Still, if owning the sleekest gadget isn’t important or worth the price tag for you, you’ll be happy with this accurate thermometer.

The slower read time is the kind of compromise you have to make if you’re looking for a budget choice—the precision equipment that produce those truly instant readouts is just more expensive—but as we noted, if you’re using it over an incredibly hot stove or oven, you may feel it if you don’t wear an heat resistant glove.

The benefits of digital instant-read thermometers over analog thermometers

There are a lot of advantages to choosing a digital probe thermometer over a conventional analog thermometer. Digital thermometers provide a faster read with far greater accuracy. That sort of speed and accuracy are important, for example, in making sure that the meat temperature reaches an appropriate level for food safety reasons, and accurate readings from an easy-to-read digital display offer a nice sense of security, especially if you happen to be cooking for a crowd. Nobody wants overcooked or undercooked cuts of meat. At least nobody we’re eating with.

In order to ensure the thermometers’ accuracy, we tested their ability to detect temperatures we already knew. We dipped them in boiling water to see if they detected an accurate 212°F, then inserted them into an ice bath to see if they quickly registered 32°F. For more about why an ice bath and boiling water are appropriate ways to test the accuracy of a thermometer, read here.

What we looked for

Was it simple and intuitive out of the box?

All the models came with instructions, which we read, of course. But we also evaluated whether you could take it out of the box and get started without reading a manual first.

How accurate is it?

This is the most important factor, since a thermometer that’s off by a degree or two (or more) can really make a difference in the quality of your food, depending on what you’re cooking. By using boiling water and an ice bath, we knew what the thermometers should read, so we made sure they did.

How fast is it?

Once you’ve established accuracy, speed is another factor to consider. If you tend to have several things cooking at once that require attention, it’s nice to get a temperature read as fast as possible. Though they’re called “instant-read” thermometers, they do take a few seconds, and some were faster than others. In boiling water, the reading times ranged from less than 3 seconds to 8 seconds. The difference for the ice bath was less pronounced, landing between 7 and 10 seconds.

Does it have any additional useful features?

All we really want out of a thermometer is accuracy and simplicity. But we did take into account any extra features the thermometers might have that made them easier or more convenient to use.

The ThermoWorks Thermapen MK4 is an excellent kitchen thermometer; it just so happens that theres a newer, faster model—the Thermapen One—that has improved on its already great design. This one will save you some money, though, as it’s been discounted thanks to the release of the new model.

ThermoWorks ThermoPop: This model is far less expensive than its winning cousin at $34 and still offers some good features. It’s fast and accurate (it hit 212º F in the boiling water in 5 seconds); the display changes direction in two ways at the touch of a button; the thermometer turns off automatically after 10 minutes; and it comes in nine colors. It doesn’t fold up, but rather has a sleeve to cover the probe, and you use an on/off button to start and stop. This would have been our choice for best on a budget, but for $8 less, the Kizen offered a fold-up design, automatic on/off upon unfolding, a magnet for easy-to-grab storage, and temperatures for medium-rare, medium, and well-done on the display.

The Lavatools Javelin Pro duo is impressive. It has a lot of the features we love (the display rotates automatically in two directions; a touchpad or a shake activates backlighting; there’s an autosleep feature; and you can reawaken the thermometer by shaking it). The Javelin Pro also had one of the largest display of any of the models we tested, making it super easy to read. It’s a good higher-end option that’s less costly than the Thermapen or Typhur. Still, our two winners edged out the Javelin for their extra features.

The Taylor Dual Temp Infrared Theracouple Thermometer: Though the probe on this thermometer was fast and accurate, the scan feature—designed to read the surface temperature of items instead of the internal temperature—was off by several degrees. This model is also more complicated than the others we tested. It took several reads of the instructions to understand how to use the buttons and features properly. This seems aimed at a professional kitchen environment rather than the home cook—and at $85 we wanted it to be more intuitive.

The Harbor Digital Cooking Thermometer took a bit longer to get the temps and was off a bit (it took nearly 8 seconds in boiling water and only reached 211.4ºF), and it has an on/off switch you have to remember to flip so you don’t kill the batteries.

Why should you trust Epicurious?

We’re home cooks just like you—and we bring a home cook’s perspective to all of our rigorous testing. But unlike you, we have an extra 10 hours a day to spend geeking out over kitchen tools because it is literally our job. We don’t only use our recommended products in controlled settings, we bring the best ones into our own kitchens to help us put dinner on the table on a Wednesday night for our families, or to throw a dinner party for 12. When we recommend a product, you should trust that we’ve used it—a lot—just like you will. Read more about our testing process and philosophy here.

Additional testing by Noah Kaufman and Beth Lipton