When Matt from Meater approached UK BBQ week and asked if anyone would like to try the product I wanted to give it a go.
With the rotisserie, consistency in the setup; the fuel and the weather conditions are all factors that can make or break your Sunday roast or your game changing Turkey during the holidays. When you first start using the rotisserie you tend to increase your cook times or affect the temperature by lifting the lid of your BBQ. What I really needed was a probe with no wires! In comes the Meater “The First Wireless Smart Meat Thermometer”
So how did I get on with it? Overall I liked the product. I have been watching it for a while with anticipation that it would be great for the rotisserie and it was. I found the temperature accuracy to be good, sometimes the same as my Thermapen or 1-2 degrees different. The app was very clear and simple to use and consistent between Apple and Android devices. I found the setup simple (maybe because I work in technology) and using the combination of Bluetooth, WIFI and the Meater Cloud Feature, I found syncing devices worked very well. I did see a few tweets about range so for my setup I used an old IPAD approx. 2m away from the BBQ. My shack is more than 10m from my house, so I knew it would be outside of the Bluetooth range and may have problems if I tried without it. In the future, the mini block should certainly act as the bridge.
Setting up the cooks was very good and simple, though the presets were aimed towards the US market based on USDA guidelines. There were a great deal of support videos on their youtube channel that helped you get started with examples of how to use the product. Being from the UK, I did find these quite Americanised. Also as a BBQ fanatic, I tend to avoid using the oven at all costs so some of these videos did not appeal to me.
Monitoring the cook was very good, I tried a combination of Apple and Android devices and found them to be consistent. Randomly the connection would drop, I could not explain this though it was not frequent enough to affect my cook.
The bit that let me down was the battery, I cooked a whole chicken with some serious smoke and after washing the probe it did not charge too well. You have to give it a serious scrub between cooks to get enough contact for it to charge. There is a little LED battery indicator though I think this was just for the batteries in the block and not relevant to the probe. Also the app does not currently give an indication of how much life is left so if you like your low and slow it can be quite worrying. This in fact did happen to me and I was surprised after a quick 30 min charge I could not resume where I left off.
There has been some concerns in the UK BBQ community regarding the range, and temperature accuracy. I did not see these problems during my cooks though knowing the people who had these problems I believe them to be genuine and I have discussed these with the Meater team.
Overall, would I buy the probe? The short answer is yes. Is it the finished product for the general BBQ market? I will let the community decide as Its possible there are some factors that may affect your experience of using the product. Will there be some improvements? Certainly, speaking with Matt at length about the team, their vision and their approach to improvement, I see this being very good in the future as more people start using it for BBQ and provide their feedback.
If you would like to know more, you can find more information about the probe from the official website https://meater.com
What’s Good |
What could be improved |
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