Polder Cooking Thermometer with Timer & Clock

My mother never owned a cooking thermometer. The food wasn't done until it was obviously too hot for the little microbes to survive on it. Of course it was also cooked too far for humans to eat it, either. Maybe that's what has inspired me to buy so many thermometers.

This is one of two Polder probe thermometers that I own. The other is a simple device that beeps when the food has reached a threshold temperature. This one does a lot more!

Not only can you set a high temperature, you can set a low temperature, too. You can even set a high and a low, so the alert beeps if the temperature leaves a certain range.

It also has a countdown timer, and a count up timer. And when it's not busy being a timer, it will display the current time.

Having all these functions makes it a little more confusing to program, but it has enough clearly labled buttons that it is very possible to program that one function you haven't used since you lost the instructions without the instructions.

It's biggest drawback, however, is that while the timer will show you the seconds counting down, you have to set it to a full minute. No 2 minutes, 30 seconds for example. You either need to make it 2 minutes or 3 minutes. I don't mind that kind of impresision in a wind-up timer, but for a digital device that even shows the seconds ticking down, I hoped for better.

Despite that, thermometer is now the Alpha thermometer in my kitchen, sitting on the sidelines only when I grab my fastest instant read instead. (Oh... that reminds me. While this one isn't designed as an instant read, it is actually faster than my slowest instant read thermometer is!)

If you're only going to own one thermometer, this is the one for you. It's also the one for you if you're looking to add to your thermometer arsenal without spending an arm and a leg. This one is a good value.