Cooking Thermometers

Trigger-Happy Cooking

If you’re the kind of cook who dislikes poking and disfiguring your food in the name of accurate temperature taking, then you’ll like using the laser-type cooking thermometer.  It’s very handy, capable of producing fast readouts, very flexible and best of all, no part of it has to touch your food – ever.

Laser cooking thermometers

The more accurate way of calling a laser cooking thermometer is as the infrared non-contact cooking thermometer.  It uses infrared technology to measure heat emitted by an object (in this case, food).  As the food heats up, its surface temperature increases and it begins to emit invisible heat energy.  This is the energy that the laser cooking thermometer picks up and displays on an LCD panel on the back of the instrument.

Making adjustments

The laser thermometer is also capable of picking up transmitted and reflected heat energy.  So if you’re cooking food using a shiny pan, the heat reflected from this pan will be measured by the thermometer as well.  This can sometimes cause problems because the thermometer will then give a false or inaccurate reading.  To make up for a possible error, adjustments can be made when using a laser cooking thermometer so only the energy emitted by the food is measured.

It is also important to understand the field-of-view capacity of the particular unit you’re using.  The spot size (area where the infrared hits the object) should not be larger than the object itself.  If the object is small, the laser thermometer should take readings within close proximity.

All-purpose temperature gauge

Other than taking food temperature, there are several more reasons you might want to buy a laser cooking thermometer.  It can actually be used to take surface temperatures of a variety of objects and materials.  You can, for example, take readings of boiling water, syrups, baby formula and cooking surfaces.  Some units can even take measure room temperature and heating systems.

When it comes to flexibility, laser cooking thermometers are hard to beat.

Tags: Laser Cooking Thermometer
Filed under: Cooking Thermometers | Apr 4th, 2010.