MEATER® Smart Meat Thermometer 4+

Cooked to perfection

I waited approximately 18 months from inception to production for this "meater". It was well worth the wait, it takes a bit of getting used to the fact that you are cooking by temperature not time and finding that cooking times are actually shorter than traditionally accepted, a win win as you save on energy bills.
Beef, Gammon, Pork and Chicken have been cooked to perfection, succulent and moreover not over cooked. The app is customer friendly and self explanatory.
My two gripes are 1. the Bluetooth range is very limited and 2. It is difficult to determine the exact meal time as the duration of cooking is not determined until it has been cooking for a while, so to bring all the various ingredients of the meal together takes a bit of guess work.
Other than that I love it.

Poor in several ways, but does the basics

This is a nice UI and appears to do what it says, but it is let down by two major flaws:

1. Using a kettle BBQ, the metal shell of the BBQ frequently interrupts the Bluetooth connection, which leads to constant notifications which are both useless and cannot be turned off. The probes reconnect on their own after a few seconds, so no action is needed, but it means that the app cannot be left to alert you of real issues with the sound on as it’s a constant flow of pings that mean nothing. An option to choose which notifications are enabled would solve this.

2. The cooking time estimates are wildly inaccurate. Fora 10 hour slow roast pork shoulder, I always get around 3 hours estimated at the start. Also, probes with cooler ambient temps sometimes show shorted estimates for the same cook (I use multiple probes in the same joint)

Not as good as it could be

I have had one of these gadgets since Christmas. I have had limited success with them, meat tends to cook at different rates depending the size, if it is boned, rolled, tied and/or stuffed, the algorithm does not take these factors into account hence I get very inconsistent results. I would strongly suggest working with a variety of chefs, and home cooks to re-develop the cook menu to include some more options. Strange things happen while cooking meat like a small roast takes proportionally longer than a mid sized one, then from mid to large size you are on a curve not a linear pattern. Bone in meat can take less time since the bone acts as a conductor of heat into the joint. Stuffed items need extra time. A trussed chicken will take longer than an untied one which in turn will take more time than one on a French rack. In summary nice physical device quite badly let down by a poor app, more exactly a bad Options set and AI

Developer Response ,

Hi,
Thank you for your review!
Our algorithms use the temperature values provided by the probe to estimate time to completion as opposed to pre-programmed times in the app. You will see that the time estimate changes throughout the cook, as if the internal temperature climb stalls the app will re-calculate based off the new information it has received.
If you're getting inconsistent results, it may be that your probe is positioned in a thinner section of meat which cooks faster than the thickest section, we would always advise positioning the probe in the thickest central portion of meat to achieve the results you are looking for!
I hope this helps!