The Best Oven Thermometer Will De-Fraud Your Oven

Your oven is likely lying to you—and an oven thermometer will prove it. Sure, in a perfect world, the number on the dial face would match the internal temperature exactly. But the reality is that, most of the time, there’s a discrepancy between the temperature on the knob and the actual oven temperature, the calibration of which can vary based on the weather, your altitude, the age of your appliance, and countless other factors. Your oven probably heats differently from your best friend’s oven, which heats differently from the ovens in our test kitchen. And that’s assuming your oven is heating evenly, at all: It might very well have hot spots.

A few degrees Fahrenheit off the mark might not be a deal breaker—but oftentimes the discrepancies can be significant. Contributor Sarah Jampel’s home kitchen oven—a liar if ever there were one—is off by a whopping 75 degrees Fahrenheit. Just try getting consistent results or proper doneness on your angel food cake if you’re baking it at 250 degrees instead of 325. An inaccurate oven can also potentially cause food safety issues. If you’re relying on only the recipe’s cook time and your oven’s temperature dial, then you might not be heating food enough to bring it out of the danger zone, particularly if your dish contains meat.

Cooking intuition helps. But knowing where you stand with your oven helps too, particularly if you’re a beginner home cook. This is where an oven thermometer comes in—a tiny tool that’s here to save all your hard work from over-crispness and underdoneness alike.

Which oven thermometer is most accurate?

The best oven thermometer is the ThermoWorks DOT Thermometer. It measures temperatures up to 572 degrees with beautiful accuracy. If you’ve never used a probe thermometer, the design of this one might surprise you. The body, a magnetic dial hub, latches onto the front of your oven, while the attached long metal probe goes inside your oven. From there, you can either slide the probe directly into whatever you’re cooking (ideal for turkey) or, clip it onto a rack.

At this point, you might be thinking one of those simple dial thermometers is a better choice. Just hang it from a rack and it does its thing, no clips, probes, or batteries needed. Yes, a hanging dial thermometer is better than nothing. But a probe is considerably more accurate. 

That dial thermometer often tells temperature in ranges of 10 degrees. Then, on top of that, every time you open the oven door to read it, you cool down your oven about 50 degrees—as well as letting out steam, which might give your cake a sunken center or your soufflé a flattop. A ThermoWorks DOT tells you the exact temperature, down to the degree, and can be read without opening the door.

Additionally, ovens heat and cool in cycles, so whatever reading you do happen to chance upon on that analog dial thermometer could be different one minute later. And one last flaw—these dials usually hang on the front of the oven rack. Do you bake your cakes at the front of the oven, pushed up against the door? The tiny ThermoWorks dot probe can hang from a little clip right at the very center of your oven. (We recommend using an all-metal binder clip to secure the probe to a middle oven rack. If you want a more permanent or less DIY-looking solution, ThermoWorks also sells a durable stainless-steel grate clip for $4 as well as a dedicated air temperature probe for the DOT.) 

With the probe in place, all you have to do is plug the connector cable—which is 47 inches long and can withstand high heat—into the hub, and an instant and accurate temperature reading will appear on the DOT’s digital display, which features large numbers and a backlight for easy readability. If you have suspicions about hot spots (the back right corner of my oven is a well known cookie burner, for example) move the probe around during preheat to see what’s what.

The DOT makes checking the true temperature of your oven wildly simple, and since it comes with an alarm setting, it can also alert you when your oven is preheated to your desired temperature based on the thermometer’s reading. As another added plus, you can easily detach it to use in your smoker, pizza oven, or backyard grill, so you can have accurate temperatures outside as well as in.

There are other digital oven thermometers on the market, but as far as brands go, ThermoWorks has definitely earned our trust. They make one of our favorite kitchen timers, and you probably recognize their Thermapen instant-read thermometer and their adorable entry-level ThermoPop, both of which are our top picks for the best digital meat thermometers. They’re what we use to ensure our steaks are perfectly medium-rare and our chicken breasts will not give our friends and family food poisoning. Like the cooking thermometers, the ThermoWorks DOT is easy to use, fast, and dead accurate—everything we could want from the best oven thermometer. It’s truly a set-and-forget kitchen tool, providing vital information for all of your baking and roasting needs while staying entirely out of the way.

What is the best inexpensive oven thermometer?

If a digital oven thermometer still seems too gadgety for you or if you’re more of the air-fry type and only use your oven once a month, an analog dial oven thermometer, like this one from Rubbermaid, which displays a temperature range of 60 to 580 degrees, is better than nothing. The stainless-steel construction can withstand high temperatures, and opposed to the DOT, you’ll never have to change a battery.

That said, we recommend it with all the reservations above. A $9 dial is never going to be as accurate as a digital thermometer, so unless you’re a home cook who rarely bakes or roasts, treat yourself to the DOT.

How do I use an oven thermometer?

To get a read on your oven’s true temperature, simply park your probe in the center of an oven rack positioned in the middle of your oven (using either a grate clip or an all-metal binder clip), crank the heat to 400 degrees, and see what the display says. When it hits a steady temperature, you can move the probe around to see if your oven has hot spots. If you’re curious about how far off your oven is, turn the temperature up every 25 degrees from 250 to 500 and see what the actual temperature is when it settles. Write down how far off your oven is in either direction on a piece of masking tape and stick it somewhere visible. Then, when it’s time to bake, set the temperature accordingly and check the real-time reading on the thermometer’s display to make sure your oven’s not too hot, not too cold, but just right.

Being able to heat your oven to the temperature called for in the recipe will mean that the cook times—and the results—will be more predictable and more reliable. If we say to roast your chicken for 45 minutes at 425 degrees, but your “425 degree” oven is actually 375, it’s going to take a lot longer to cook (and it might not come out as golden brown, either). An oven thermometer will make sure you hit that mark at the intended time and that your chicken looks better than it ever has before.

Your oven is one of the most versatile tools in your kitchen, and with an oven thermometer keeping it honest, it can truly meet its full potential. Having attained temperature perfection, it’s now your duty to spread the good word. When your friends complain that their veggies always come out charred or their cakes never seem to puff up perfectly or their cookies are taking way too long to crisp, you’ll have the solution ready to go. After all, chaos may be a part of life, but it has no place on your sheet pans.

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This article was originally written by Alex Delany in 2017. It was updated by MacKenzie Chung Fegan in 2020 and Nico Avalle and Lauren Joseph in 2022.