I’m not one of those guys who enjoys grilling. I like to cook – I’m the primary meal preparer in our family – but I also live in a place where it has managed to cool down to 96° at 7:30 pm. So standing over a hot grill watching meat cook isn’t my idea of a good time. When the good folks at Meater offered to send me one of their Meater+ Bluetooth-enabled meat thermometers to review, I jumped at the chance.

After all, like most people, we’re doing a lot more cooking at home and a lot less eating out nowadays. And what kind of geek would I be if I didn’t test run a smart device to help me cook my meat?

The Meater+ and its box

The first thing of note about the Meater+ is that it’s beautifully packaged. My electronic instant-read thermometer – which, gasp!, requires that I go outside to check the meat, like some kind of savage – lives in the drawer with the other utensils. The Meater+ was going to find a home on the counter, until I (somewhat accidentally) discovered it also has magnets on the back, making it possible to live on the side of the refrigerator!

The probe

The probe is what you’d expect it to be: a long, slender piece of metal with a pointy end. It’s thicker than either of my prior thermometers, but it does a lot more so I’m willing to forgive that. But the probe lives in a really nice wooden box that, it turns out, does more than storage: it’s also the charging station and a Bluetooth repeater.

The charger runs off a single AA battery, which at first seemed odd. I have a ton of other smart devices in my house, and almost without exception they either plug in to an outlet directly or have a charger that does. But on reflection, a battery-powered charger is a brilliant design choice, since it means you can store this thing anywhere (including a drawer) and not have to worry about access to a plug. (Do your drawers have outlets in them? Mine don’t.) I don’t know how many charges I’ll be able to get out of a single AA, but I do know that replacing it with a new battery will definitely beat having to plug it in.

The real star of the show, though, is the Meater app (available for both Android and iOS devices). When first downloaded, it asks you what device  you have. The company currently supports three versions of Meater: the original, the Plus (which is what I’ve got here), and the Block. (I’ll get to the differences in a bit.) Once you select it, the app walks you through the required permissions (Bluetooth, obviously, but also location) and prompts you to make sure you’ve charged your probe.

You’re then taken to a very simple screen to set up a cook. You’re first asked what you’re cooking, and all of a sudden, I wanted to try some new meats. However, in the interest of science (or, well, this review), we had picked up a tri-tip from Costco, so I went through the menus to find it. I followed the online prompts to insert the probe into the meat. (You can tell the app to skip this after you get the hang of it.)

The only really important thing was to make sure you push the probe in to the notch on it, which the app, the printed instructions, and a sticker on the probe when you first get it, says is to protect the probe.

Grillin’

And you’re set!

Go back inside, turn on the ballgame (assuming that baseball is still a thing when you read this), and relax. After a few minutes, the app will update to give you an estimated cook time.

In my case, I needed to run to the store after I got the meat on the grill. I wasn’t at all surprised that the app disconnected as I drove away – it is Bluetooth, after all – but I was concerned what might happen when I got home. Thankfully, what happened was exactly what should have happened: the app instantly reconnected, and I was back to relaxing and writing this review while dinner cooked.

In less time than I thought, the app beeped at me. I went over to check and discovered that I had five minutes to go. (The meat ended up taking less time than the initial cooking estimate, so it’s a good thing I had the potatoes going already.) It counted down, beeping every minute (and, I should mention, not using my phone’s default notification sound, which I might have ignored thinking it was an incoming email or something).

When time expired, I got a message to take the meat off the heat. Check. The app said my meat was at 119° and that it needed to rest for 16 minutes. OK. Back to writing.

“Ok, Google, broadcast ‘dinner.'”

When that time expired, the app again played this pretty awesome harp/gong tone, which let me know I needed to tell Google to broadcast to the house that dinner was ready.

And how did it turn out? Well:

Perfection.

Beyond letting me do other things and simply not worry about the meat, the Meater+ let me remove the meat at exactly the time I needed to so it would finish cooking while resting. I’ve never been sure what time was needed for that, and now I don’t need to care too much, either. And that’s awesome.

As I mentioned, the company currently has three devices. The classic Meater is just the probe and charger case. According to Meater, this device has a range of 33 feet in an oven or gas grill and 10 feet in a smoker.

The Meater Plus looks the same out of the box, but the big advantage is that the charger is a Bluetooth repeater, giving you 165 feet of wandering before you’ll disconnect.

The third product is the Meater Block. This is an oversized charging block that fits four Meater probes, which are included. It also has a built-in screen that allows you to use the device without a smartphone. It has the same 165-foot range as the Plus, making this a fantastic buy if you routinely cook multiple things at once.

Early in the setup process, the app had me create an account for Meater Cloud, which allows you to track or even share cooks online. Unfortunately, this uses a really strange setup. Instead of providing a website to access, Meater Cloud requires that you either have the Block or two mobile devices. One of those devices needs to stay within Bluetooth range of the thermometer, and it can then be used to transmit its information to the other device, enabling you to keep an eye on your meat while you’re at the store.

It also offers Alexa intregration, which I wasn’t able to test, being that we’re a Google Home family. I do hope that the company adds Google integration at some point, as I’m a bit curious as to what exactly you get by integrating an assistant.

All in all, I’m very impressed by the Meater+. Though I wish the cloud integration were a bit better thought out, that’s at best a minor quibble. I can’t wait to try it out on other meats (including that Thanksgiving turkey). Yes, it’s expensive; it’s four times the cost of a regular instant read thermometer and twice that of other wireless meat thermometers. However, the “smartness” of it, with the cook time estimations, notifications, and rest time counters, make the extra cost well worth it.

I wholeheartedly recommend the Meater+ to anyone who cooks.