There’s one way to tell the guy who isn’t in control of his grill skills: He’s the one hacking open your steak to see if it’s done. While there are many available methods to figuring out if you’ve reached rare or gone all the way over to medium-well, nothing beats internal temperature for telling you when to pull your meat off the flame.
The problem with that is: If you jab the thermometer in too late—and you’ve already past your desired doneness—knowing the temp is as useless as getting the phone number of a girl after she moves to another country. That’s why the guys over at iDevices came up with the iGrill.
A meat thermometer attached to a digital monitor that wirelessly sends data to your smartphone via Bluetooth, the iGrill lets you punch in the temp you want—from their presets, or custom—and will send an alert to your phone from up to 150 feet away when you’ve reached perfection. The app even has a guide to which temps to set for whatever meat you’re cooking to whatever doneness you and your buddies want.
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iGrill comes in two styles: iGrill2 ($99.99) and iGrill mini ($39.99). Serious pit masters and grill heads will want the iGrill2. It can handle up to four professional grade probes, tracking an entire grill full of meat at one time. (It comes packaged with two probes, but you can buy additional ones for $24.99 each.) The large digital display lets you know the exact temp while you’re manning the grill, and the app shows you the temp of each probe so there’s no confusion.
The mini is just as capable, but only tracks a single probe, and shows you the approximate temp with a color-coded light ring on the monitor instead of actual numbers. You do still get exact temps on your phone, though, so you’re not totally in the dark. Both models have magnets on the bottom to keep them securely positioned to any metal surface near your grill.
Both also allow you to set an alert to let you know when you’re a few minutes away from done, so you can grab a fresh drink and head back to the fire. The truly obsessed can watch a real time graph of the temp progression, showing exactly when your meat hits each temp. Perfect for aspiring pit masters to get the feel for timing. Because the only time a knife should ever cut into meat is when you’re eating it.
iGrill mini – $39.99
iGrill2 – $99.99
