The Best Oven Thermometer Will De-Fraud Your Oven

There’s no easy way to say this: Your oven might be lying to you. That’s right, whenever you preheat your oven—the first step in virtually any baking or roasting recipe—you’re taking a gamble that the inside of your appliance is actually heating up to the temperature you set on the display or dial on the outside. Even the helpful “preheat temperature reached” beep could be misleading. That’s because any oven, basic or fancy, gas or electric, convection or not, can require a little calibration to make sure it’s actually hitting the proper temperature to cook your food.

• Best oven thermometer overall: Thermoworks Square DOT Digital Oven Thermometer
• Best analog oven thermometer: KitchenAid Oven Thermometer

Of course, the surest way to know your food is cooked consistently is to use a meat thermometer or probe thermometer (and we have plenty of recommendations for the best instant read probe thermometers). But what about taking the temperature of your oven?

For the serious baker, many of the breads, cakes, and other pastries in your repertoire will require consistent temperatures for evenly browned or properly risen results. When you cook that one giant turkey on Thanksgiving, getting the proper doneness for your bird starts with knowing whether you have an accurate oven or not.

From high heat roasting to low and slow cooks, there are many more projects that will come out better with a good oven thermometer. We tested probe and dial oven thermometers and models from brands both reputable and mysterious. Read on for more details about our top picks and a definitive answer as to whether you should buy an oven thermometer at all.

The short answer is yes, but the real question you should be asking yourself is, “how much do I trust my oven?”

If your food tends to come out perfectly at the time and temperature recommended in the recipe, then, congratulations, your oven has reliable settings that give you a good guess as to the temperature inside.

If you’re unlucky and your food often comes out underdone, a bit too crispy, or worse, burnt, no matter how diligently you follow a recipe’s instructions — or you automatically read “preheat to 350” as “turn my oven’s dial to 375” — then you might have an oven temperature calibration problem. In other words, your oven isn’t being honest with you about what’s going on inside. This will happen in every home kitchen at some point, perhaps because the oven is cheap (a regular feature in many apartments) or just because the oven is old. That’s when an oven thermometer becomes an essential kitchen tool for making sure the most finicky baked goods or your holiday dinner’s main course comes out correctly and on time.

The tricky thing with ovens though, is that most cycle on and off to conserve energy (if you’ve heard electric clicks or the woosh of the flames in a gas oven, that’s what’s happening). That means when you set your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature is actually fluctuating up and down during the cooking time, cooling a few degrees before the internal thermostat notices and triggers the gas or electric heating element to kick back in. Then it starts heating things up (probably to more than 350 degrees) to make up the difference before shutting off once more. So, what you're really setting when you turn the knob or press those buttons, is what the oven will target as an average temperature while the door is shut. As more appliance makers have started including convection settings in their ovens that circulate the hot air more evenly, temperature fluctuations and “hot spots” in certain areas of the oven have become less of a problem than they once were, but making sure your oven is accurate to begin with still matters.

While you should own an oven thermometer, you don’t need to leave it in at all times. Once you get to know the idiosyncrasies of your oven you can just use it a few times a year to make sure nothing has changed. Also, keeping it in your oven permanently may affect its performance over time.

Thermoworks Square DOT Ambient Thermometer

$69 $48 (30% off)

Thermoworks

What we love: If you know ThermoWorks it’s likely for their Thermapen instant read thermometers. They are, in our opinion, the best you can get. But the Utah-based company makes more than just food thermometers. They make some of the best ambient cooking thermometers as well. The Square DOT is a digital thermometer with a readout that sits on the countertop, so you don’t need to try to read it through the glass of your oven door. It has the added benefit of two temperature channels, one to give an ambient temperature readings and one to give an internal temperature reading of what you’re actually cooking at the same time if you pair it with one of their high temp cooking probes. It also has an “average temperature mode,” which is, by far, the most precise way to determine your oven temperature. It offers average readings in 15 minute increments that will take into account the cycling of the oven. In a sense, it’s fact-checking what your oven is saying. With a wide temperature range that dips well below freezing, it can also pull double duty for many other kitchen projects, too.

What we'd leave: The metal clip that fixes the probe to the oven rack was too narrow to clip on to my rack grates. It might not be for yours, but the fact that it didn’t fit our testing oven means it’s not universal. After bending it open a bit the clip did fit more snugly, but pulling on the probe wire could twist it out of position causing it to fall. And unlike the analog thermometers we tested, it requires batteries and a wire running out of your oven door. Wire or not, though, if you do need to check the ambient temperature while you’re cooking, this will give you an accurate reading no matter where you put it.

What we love: Of all the analog stainless steel oven thermometers we tested, KitchenAid's stayed in an acceptable ±5-degree range most often. Its three-inch dial was easy to read with its bold, red indicator needle and we liked that the dashes on the dial were marked down to five-degree increments. It was also the sturdiest in both the hanging and standing positions, as it actually uses a metal clip to cling to the oven rack, no dangling or toppling problems at all.

The clip-on hook is a bit finicky at first (unless you have a KitchenAid brand oven, which includes a horizontal gap toward the front of the rack where the thermometer is designed to go), but it did clip securely onto the crossbars of our oven rack. While the numbers on the temperature gauge were smaller and less bold than we might have liked, given its accurate performance when placed at the front of our oven — where it was extremely easy to read —we thought it was the best of its bunch.

What we'd leave: The only instance where KitchenAid’s thermometer fell short was in the high temperature test. It ran too hot by about 20 degrees Fahrenheit. However, given that the kinds of cooking that happen at 500ºF are often shorter and demand you watch your food anyway, we think it’s a little less important that an oven thermometer hit exactly the temperature there than at 350ºF, where 20 degrees in either direction could really mess up your cookies.

Every oven is different, and even though lots of them look the same, many oven thermometers are a bit different, too. This presents some challenges when pitting thermometers head-to-head. Because we found it to be so accurate, we used the ThermoWorks Square DOT’s average temperature feature to create our baseline. When we dipped the ThermoWorks probe (both with and without its averaging feature turned on) into a pot of boiling water for 15 minutes to determine its calibration with a known temperature of 212º F it read 211º F, which is pretty darn accurate (and a smaller discrepancy than the ±1.8º the manual promises). We adjusted the results of all of our ThermoWorks probe findings by one degree to get the “real” temperature (we could have done this as a percentage change, but it only would have changed our calculations by about .5 degrees which is nearly impossible to determine on an analog dial thermometer).

Next, we hung all of the analog thermometers in the same oven near the center. Because the food can get in the way, oven thermometers won’t always be able to hang out in the middle of the middle rack, but we felt this was the fairest way to determine overall ambient temperature accuracy with regard to where the food you’re cooking would actually be sitting.

We preheated the oven to 350º F and took a reading of each thermometer. Then we set a timer for 25 minutes (somewhere in between a long preheat and a short bake) and checked the readings again after the oven had a chance to cycle off and on a couple of times.

Next, we repeated this same procedure at 500º F. We made our calls on the accuracy of each thermometer based on how close each was to the adjusted ThermoWorks average temperature at both the short and long preheat benchmarks at both temperatures. We then repeated this process once more with all of the thermometers placed in the front of the oven, right by the door, to see if their location had any effect on overall consistency.

Finally, we tucked all of the thermometers in the back corner of the oven to test their readability at a quick glance. We also hung and stood up each thermometer and jostled the oven rack in and out to determine a thermometer’s stability in both positions.

Adam Campbell-Schmitt

What makes a good oven thermometer

We judged the thermometers on the following

OXO Good Grips Oven Thermometer

$18

Amazon

Like so many Oxo products, this thermometer is well designed. It features a wide stand, a tapered opening on its hook that can fit racks of many diameters, and was also the weightiest unit we tried, making it particularly stable. The dial isn’t the biggest, but it’s substantial enough to read the thick black indicator needle at a glance. The numbers weren’t bolded though, and it’s a little taller than other models. That means that if your oven racks are all in use and stacked closely together (certainly a possibility with lots of baking around the holidays), this thermometer could get in the way.

Taylor Large Dial Kitchen Cooking Thermometer

$10 $9 (10% off)

Amazon

They say bigger is better and when it comes to this thermometer we’re inclined to agree. With a three-inch-diameter dial, it had the largest temperature gauge of any analog model we tested. The numbers are bold and Celsius readings are smaller but legible. The indicator needle is relatively thin, though that didn’t affect our ability to read temperatures too much. Its wide face is matched by an equally wide base, which can stand securely on any oven rack. Its hook isn’t perfect, we found a little small for the wires of the oven rack. Its temperature readings were stable from preheat to sustained heat, though toward the cooler end of the acceptable range. If you’re the kind of person who prefers everything in large print, this is definitely a good choice.

Crate & Barrel Oven Thermometer

$10

Crate & Barrel

If this looks similar to the Taylor thermometer we just discussed, that’s because it’s basically the same, right down to the model number printed in a tiny font on the face. But we were curious to try this Crate & Barrel branded version because there is one important stylistic difference: The face is black with white writing. We wanted to see how that impacted readability in the back corner of a dark oven. We found it did offer improved readability at a glance. But otherwise it performed exactly the same as the Taylor and its white background. If you're the kind of person who puts your phone apps and web browser on “dark mode,” then this one’s for you.

CDN Multi-Mount Oven Thermometer

$13

Amazon

This small, square, reflective metal face is easy to ready and the whole thing is quite compact, which is handy for tucking away in the corner of the oven. It has a two-way hook that worked fine, though the fold-down stand, while space-saving, was unsturdy and prone to slipping between gaps. True to its name, this thermometer has yet another mounting feature, a magnet. We didn’t find a great place in our oven for it to stay put and remain easily readable. And we’re dubious about using the outside edge of our oven for temperature checking versus a location that’s more central. So ultimately the defining feature of this thermometer, it's various mounting options, didn't prove all that useful, but because of its size, shape, and readability it still worked well when hung.

Oven thermometers we don't recommend