Page 10 - Barbecue News April 2020 Issue

thermometers
Meathead, AmazingRibs.com
I am often asked, “What is the single most important piece of advice you can give a barbecue cook?” My answer, without hes- itation, is “Get good digital thermometers.” In 2014, Con- sumer Reports tested hundreds of chicken breasts from around the nation and found that 90% were contaminated with pathogens—about half of which were antibiotic resistant. As scary as this sounds, pathogens are destroyed and chicken is safe to eat if you cook it to 160°F or higher.
Gauging doneness accurately is
not possible without a digital thermometer. You cannot tell when chicken is safe by looking at the color of the juices. Poking with your finger or cutting the meat to determine doneness is just plain guessing. A filet mignon is much softer than a sirloin, plus the color of meat is vastly different under sunlight, incandescent, fluorescent, or LED light. And it changes when exposed to oxygen.
Don't worry, poking meat with a thermometer will not dry it out! Meat is about 70% water. A 12 ounce steak is about 8 ounces of water. The few drops that might escape after you take its temper- ature will never be missed.
Dial thermometers use a technology created in the 1800s and they are slow and inaccurate. Even high-end grill manufacturers install cheapo heat indicators. (I hate calling them thermometers.) These junky dials have ruined more meals than flies on potato salad. You absolutely cannot rely on them. They are often off by 50°F or more. Most manufacturers mount the thermometer in the lid sev- eral inches above the cooking surface, useful only if you plan to eat the lid. If you have a two-zone cooking setup with the left side hot and the right side off, the dial thermometer rests in the center where it averages the temperature of the two zones, giving you a meaningless number. Even with direct-heat cooking just below the thermometer, the air above a piece of meat exists in a heat shadow, and its temperature will be a lot cooler than the tempera- ture on the underside of the meat that sits directly above the flame. For an accurate measurement, you need a probe clipped to the cooking surface a few inches from the food you are cooking. Please, buy a good digital thermometer with a probe that can be placed on the cooking surface near the food. It will make a mas- sive difference in your food quality and on-time delivery.
Cooking without a good digital thermometer is like driving without a speedometer, building furniture without a tape meas- ure, or filling your tires without a pressure gauge. Invest in good thermometers. They’re inexpensive, fast, and accurate. They will pay for themselves. Nothing will improve your cooking more.
At AmazingRibs.com we have an electrical engineer who loves to cook, Bill McGrath, equipped with fancy bench testing equip- ment to test how fast and accurate a thermometer is, and, sur- prise, the info on the manufacturer’s box is not always correct. He has tested and reviewed and rated more than 150 thermome- ters. We don’t sell any of them but we link to where you can buy them.
Once you have a good thermometer or three, check out Amazin- gRibs.com to get details on where to stick it for accurate read- ings, a food temperature guide for perfect meat doneness, and simple info on how to calibrate your therm in case you drop it. You want these things to work properly because, as with all cooking, great barbecue is all about temperature control.
Ideally, You Need Two Thermometers
Cooking is all about temperature control, and you must measure it accurately in two different places: your cooker and your food.
Grill/smoker/oven thermometer. Can you imagine cooking indoors if your oven did not have a thermometer? Then why try to cook outdoors without a good oven thermometer? (A grill or smoker really is just an outdoor oven.) To be king of the grill, you’ve got to know what your cooker temperature really is. The Ther- moworks Chef Alarm is a good choice for $59. It has a probe that can be used to measure the temperature of the food or the oven (and a grill or smoker are just outdoor ovens).
The Maverick XR-50 has four probes so you can measure the oven and three pieces of meat simultaneously. It includes a radio fre- quency transmitter and a wireless remote meter so you can cut the lawn or watch the game while keeping an eye on the pit.
At the top end is the Fireboard. It is tiny, about the size of a deck of cards, manages 6 probes accurately, and sends its data to your smartphone, tablet, or computer where it records the info so you can view and save a chart of the progress of the cook.
Instant-read food thermometer. The difference between juicy chicken breasts and cardboard can be as little as 10°F. And two pork chops sitting side by side can cook at different rates. Minutes matter. I recommend that you also have an instant-read digital that can read the temperature of meat in 5 seconds or less. Good ones like the ThermoPop (at the bottom of the picture) cost about $30, and a top-of-the-line Thermapen (top of picture) costs about $100. Of the thousands of barbecue teams competing for prize money every weekend across the nation, I have never seen one that didn't use a digital meat thermometer (usually a Thermapen).
BarbecueNews.com - 10
APRIL 2020
THERMOMETERS MAKE YOU A BETTER COOK