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Comment by zerocrates | Hacker News Reader

There's a barbecue recipe guy I like, big proponent of leave-in thermometers (the kind with leads that snake outside the barbecue). He likes to say that the in-lid thermometers are just fine, provided you're planning to eat the lid.

I still probably wouldn't use an IoT one, though.

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It’s quite amazing how wrong those lid thermometers can be - I ruined my first brisket trying to use the lid thermometer and then bought a Thermoworks Smoke (the kind with the two wires like you describe, where you stick one reader in the meat and the other goes laying on the floor of the smoker). When the Thermoworks thermometer read 250F the lid thermometer read 400F.

Why would an IOT thermometer be any better than one that just has a readout on the lid?

I understand that if the thermometer is on th lid and not actually measuring the meat it's crap, but if it's measuring the same way as the IOT version, then the readout is fine on the lid.

Placement. Either you want a probe thermometer measuring the internal temperature of the meat or an air temperature probe on the indirect side of grill. The gauge on the grill is likely to be off 50-100 degrees F. They're often cheaply made and not as high quality as something like a probe themometer from Thermoworks, or presumably this Weber device.

Because you plug it into a thermocouple device that you poke inside the middle of your roast, which is a completely different temperature than the air in the grill. This is an addon Bluetooth thermometer Option for Weber grills - I have a Weber but didn’t get this option.

I think the others are missing your point a bit.

I use an IoT thermometer so that I can monitor smoking progress over 13 or so hours and still do things like go to the hardware store.

i'm gonna level with you here, i've never eaten meat in my life, so am out of my comfort zone here, but i can't help but feel from reading this that the HN crowd have a propensity for over-engineering that is coming to the fore here.

Fire, knives and an apron with a pithy slogan - c'mon, how hard can it be?

A business built to sell grill gadgets to the HN crowd sounds like a guaranteed recipe for failure.

Anyhow, folks who are serious about preparing smoked brisket, ribs, etc., are very particular about the temperature of both the air/smoke and the food. Two thermometers and maybe a computer-controlled fan or damper are not far outside the norm.

> A business built to sell grill gadgets to the HN crowd sounds like a guaranteed recipe for failure.

Haha, gadget as in IoT crap, maybe, but we're for-sure the market for: aeropress, sous-vide devices (yes some do them DIY but...), dedicated pizza ovens, and so on. You got a gadget to prepare food or drinks that already have other ways to prepare them, HN's not a crazy place to market it. Bonus if it's "sciency" or can be described as more "authentic".

But of course we're not like the stupid plebs falling for those silly devices we don't like.

(mind, I'm far from immune to this, so I'm not just casting stones at others—oh I am getting one of those pizza ovens at some point. That's happening.)

Heh. I mean only that HN'ers are too fussy to sell to. People do indeed love gadgets and other vehicles to try to fill the void. Why is why I intend to build a domed brick and clay bread/pizza oven in the backyard when time and knowledge permit...

It's not an HN thing. Cooking meat well is actually tricky.

Cooking meat well is easy, just throw it in until it looks and chews like shoe leather. Cooking meat properly on the otherhand.

Jokes aside, cooking meat properly should almost always have a leave in thermometer for anything that isn't being seared.

You have not the experience to even make that claim in a valid way. Being snarky doesn't compensate or hide your ignorance of the topic.

It's ok to not know something about a topic and not disingenuously comment about it.

How do you know when someone’s a vegetarian? Just wait, he’ll tell you.

Harder than you think if you want good results. BBQ is the hardest form of cooking I’ve encountered and I’ve tried most things.

Perhaps think of it like the way people perform agriculture now, and even on the garden scale.

Sure, you could go with a standard soil composition and add water on a schedule, then harvest when it feels best.

Or, you think of it as a system with inputs and outputs. If you can observe the system and manipulate the variables (soil composition analysis, moisture measurements, temperature control and sunlight optimization, etc) accordingly, then your yield can improve dramatically.

Any nursery sells a multitude of tools to measure and manipulate those variables, and farms are a whole other beast of systems design.

It's much the same with cooking meat. Control the variables, improve the result.

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