Coolest little cooking tool ever 🙂

(Dirty Lazy Keto'er, Sucralose freak ;)) #1

Okay, I hope I’m not just slow to the party, but I never even knew these things existed !
So I was watching a YouTube vid on how to roast your own coffee beans in a cast iron skillet, and the guy was talking about how important it was to know the temp of your skillilet… And then he broke out with this little Infrared laser thermometer… Just point it at the skillet…or whatever else you need the temperature of, and unlike an old school thermometer where you have to wait a little bit, this thing is instant, and good for up to 700 F ! …and you can use it from 6"… Or 100ft. It instantly tells the temp of whatever the red pointer is hitting :slightly_smiling_face:

And it has the added bonus of driving the cats crazy chasing the red light :slightly_smiling_face: … already did that :grinning:

Anxious to roast some fresh green coffee beans. Got 3 lbs of Costa Rican single origin today too.

(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #2

Chris, you’re insane. :slightly_smiling_face:

(Dirty Lazy Keto'er, Sucralose freak ;)) #3

Sometimes :slightly_smiling_face:

But come on, is this cool tech or what ?

#4

Pre-keto, I baked a lot of sourdough bread and one of my co-bakers used this for dough temperature :slight_smile:

(Marianne) #5

Chris, you are funny!

You should have your own cooking show - get yourself on YouTube. You could have a cottage industry on the side.

(Doug) #6

Love those things, Chris. :sunglasses:

(Dirty Lazy Keto'er, Sucralose freak ;)) #7

Yea, cool right ?

So as I walked around the house, I opened the fridge, and pointed it in… Yep, 40 degrees sounded about right. Walked out back and pointed it at our above ground pool from 40ft away, which we had been in that afternoon, when it was 78 degrees. It was now 76, again spot on :slightly_smiling_face: Amazing :slightly_smiling_face:

(Full Metal KETO AF) #8

I have the same gun Chris, I use it almost daily to read skillets or cast iron temperatures. I do a lot of blackened meats and sousvide searing so things can get too hot when you go for those high temperatures…it’s a really useful tool for a small investment. :cowboy_hat_face:

(Dirty Lazy Keto'er, Sucralose freak ;)) #9

Thanks David. Why had I never heard of these ???

(Doug) #10

They’ve been getting better and cheaper at a rapid pace. It wasn’t too long ago that they were prohibitively expensive for the average person. Holy Crow… $16 :smile:

(Dirty Lazy Keto'er, Sucralose freak ;)) #11

Saw one on WalMart.com for $9.99 !

(Doug) #12

My employer had one 20 years ago; $3700.

(Dirty Lazy Keto'er, Sucralose freak ;)) #13

Holy %# !

This reminds me of when my buddy and I were looking at digital memory cards many years ago, which were like 1 GB and we were like, OMG ! 1 GB ! That’s huge ! Never mind that they were over 3000 ! Now, 1 GB is nothing, and you can get one for a few … if you can find one this small :slight_smile: I wonder how many people are still “making payments” on one of those $3000 cards ?

(Doug) #14

For my first computer in 1996, I paid $400 extra for an additional 4 megabytes of RAM. I checked a couple years ago and effectively, RAM prices had declined 99.96% - from my price of $100 per megabyte to ~ 4 cents.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #15

When the IBM PC/AT came on the market, it was equipped with 640 Kb of RAM, ran at a screamingly fast 12 MHz, and came with an enormous 20 MB hard drive—more storage than we would ever need in our lifetime. My current computer came with a 930 GB hard drive (they claim 1 TB, but they lie), and it’s already starting to seem small . . .

(Libby) #16

I spent part of my youth on a farm in Costa Rica which had a little coffee grove. Between the fresh coffee beans, the pristine spring water and the fresh cream from the cows it was impossible not to learn to love drinking coffee! A couple of years ago I decided to order green coffee beans and roast them myself… it just wasn’t the same. Maybe because I wasn’t doing it on a wood stove like we did there. It also created way more smoke in the house than one would like. Maybe if I’d had a heat sensor like that it might have gone better. Hmm.

I bought an air popcorn popper after doing some research about how other people roast their beans. Haven’t broken it out yet. You may have inspired me to try again!

(Dirty Lazy Keto'er, Sucralose freak ;)) #17

Yes, so my first attempt will be outside on our BBQ grille, to handle the smoke situation, using the laser thermometer for heat control. Hoping our outdoor grille can make enough heat (up to 500 F or so ?)

If this doesn’t work, next will be a popcorn maker…

Might consider an actual coffee roaster if we see good promise with our initial home roasting.

#18

I bought one not long ago that has a mode for body temp and a mode for temp of objects.

(Anthony Peach) #19

Just a word of caution here. You are correct that they are very neat and accurate, but a couple important points:

  1. they measure surface temperature only. This means that you should not use it to measure the temperature of meat during cooking, for example, as the inside will not be as hot as the surface. Would be fine in your skillet case.
  2. the red dot is simply an aiming assistant. The actual IR sensor is the larger indentation on the front of the device. While you can measure things at a distance, the “spot” you are measuring can be quite large in diameter. The diameter of the measured circle increases with range. Then the temp. value you get is more or less an average of all the temperatures in that circle. Keep it closer for the best accuracy.
(Dirty Lazy Keto'er, Sucralose freak ;)) #20

Thank you Tony. Of course all of my meats are likely to be about 131-150 F “all the way through”… At least after the first hour or two :wink:

Yes, about the distance. I had tested it on our stove from across the kitchen, and our above ground pool, from across the yard, and it seemed to be very accurate… But upon reading the instructions (don’t know what got into me :grinning: lol) it did actually say, “For the best accuracy, measure temps with laser thermometer 12-18” from the item"

Of course when roasting coffee (the reason I bought it in the first place) I’m standing right over the skillet anyway.