By admin 
You know those people who claim they can tell when a steak is perfectly cooked by touching it? I am not one of those people. It’s not even a skill I care to possess, especially when I have other party tricks to wow my dinner guests (for example, I can turn a bottle of bad rosé into something bubbly and palatable at the push of a button). More importantly, I see no point in relying on a system of touchy-feely approximation when I could just as easily get a precise reading at any point in the cooking process.
Currently, my go-to precision thermometer is the Meater Pro XL, the latest release from an early player in the smart thermometer game.
I’ve been a fan of Meater since I used the very first model nearly a decade ago. The Original Meater’s Bluetooth-enabled stainless-steel probe made it possible to consistently monitor a cook on your phone without ever opening the grill or oven to poke it with an instant-read thermometer (and in turn, instantly dropping the temp inside).
The Meater app not only displayed the real-time internal temperature of whatever I was cooking or smoking, it also monitored the oven or grill’s ambient temperature, and used both to predict when my food would reach the target temperature. Then it loudly pinged my phone to let me know when it did—well, as long as my phone remained within Bluetooth range of the probe’s charging box, which doubled as a Bluetooth signal repeater.
In the years since, I’ve tried other Meater devices, and while each one was an improvement on earlier models, the finicky Bluetooth situation remained. The signal issue was my biggest gripe about the Meater because I live in an old home with thick plaster walls, and more than once my phone lost contact with the probe right as my dinner approached its target temp.
There’s now a Wi-Fi workaround for this but it requires using two mobile devices. And Meater did eventually eliminate the pesky bluetooth signal drop with the four-probe Meater Block, which has a small Wi-Fi enabled control panel that lets you monitor your Meater from anywhere if you use Meater’s cloud feature. (The control panel also makes it possible to monitor a cook without using the app, but then you have to stay really close to the device and that kind of defeats the whole purpose of the integrated Wi-Fi.)
Like the Block, the newer W-Fi-enabled Meater Pro XL has four probes, which means you can remotely monitor four separate cooks at the same time. But the Pro XL also has a handful of other upgrades that make it worth considering if you cook a lot of meat—indoors or outside.
For starters, the Pro line probes have a smaller diameter than those on earlier models so they can go into slimmer cuts like flank and hanger steaks more easily. And near the tip of each Meater Pro probe are five sensors that will measure the internal temperature, up to 221ºF, throughout a protein.