After spending the winter huddling inside and eating a rotation of the same recipes over and over, people love to get outside and start cooking on their grills and using their smokers. But not everyone is ready to compete in a BBQ Pitmaster Competition. For many people, cooking on a grill can be a frustrating, hit or miss experience of undercooked chicken one day and overcooked steak another.
The problem is that people typically try to ascertain the “doneness” of the meat they are cooking on their grill by reading a BBQ cooking book and trying to apply the estimated cooking times, by assessing the outside of the meat, or by pressing on it and feeling how firm it is. As they say on the TV show Shark Tank, “There has to be a better way.”
If you aren’t a professional cook and really want to consistently cook meat on a grill, then the best way is to use a thermometer. When you use a thermometer designed for use on a grill you can make sure the chicken you are cooking isn’t underdone, make sure the chicken isn’t dried out, and have perfect, medium-rare steaks. And, you can consistently cook meat this way every time.
I wrote about the original MeatStick in 2021 (You can find that article here). At the 2023 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) MeatStick announced their new model, the MeatStick 4X. It was released in February.
The new MeatStick 4X improved on the original model’s design by including four temperature sensors, which makes it easier to measure the coldest part of the meat, as well as the ambient temperature in your grill, for more accurate cooking.
MeatStick 4X isn’t just for use on a grill. It also can be used in pans on your stovetop, in a smoker, in a sous-vide cooker, or in a deep fat fryer.
MeatStick 4X also has a “DualShell” case for higher durability, 70+ hour battery life on a single charge, and a wireless range of up to 650 ft. / 200 m.
Unfortunately, a very snowy winter in the western U.S. has kept me out of my backyard and away from my grill. The snow has finally melted enough that I was finally able to test MeatStick 4X.
I’ve tried a number of different grilling thermometers. There is a common challenge to using all of them. Most people heat up a portion of the grill to a high temperature, sear the exterior of meat, move the meat to a cooler part of the grill, and bring the interior of the meat up to the proper temperature based on the desired doneness. Unfortunately, the electronics in grilling thermometers aren’t capable of being exposed to the high temperature used for searing the outside of the meat. This leaves the outdoor chef with two choices: the reverse sear or searing the meat first and then inserting the temperature probe. The reverse sear, for those who are unfamiliar, involves first cooking the meat on the cool part of the grill until the interior temperature of the meat is at the target temperature for the desired doneness (or just slightly below it), removing the temperature probe, and then searing the outside of the meat without raising the internal temperature of the meat too much and overcooking it.
If you have a gas grill with a separate, very high heat searing burner, then reverse searing is a very viable option. Reverse searing can be a little more challenging, however, if you aren’t able to create a super-hot zone on your grill that is capable of very quickly searing the outside of the meat without raising the internal temperature too much.
Trying to insert a thermometer into a piece of meat that you have just seared can be very challenging. The searing process has started rendering the fat in the meat, making it very slippery. Given this, getting the meat thermometer perfectly centered into a steak, chop, or piece of chicken can be problematic. And, without the temperature probe being perfectly centered, it isn’t going to measure the internal temperature of the meat properly. This is where the four temperature probes in MeatStick 4X make a difference. Even if the temperature probe was inserted at a slight angle so the tip of the probe is closer to the edge of the piece of meat (and therefore closer to the heat of the grill), MeatStick 4X leverages the additional temperature sensors in the probe to compensate and correctly measure the interior temperature of the meat.
I tried MeatStick 4X in several different cooking sessions. First, I cooked a steak. A favorite trick is to take the meat I’m going to grill out of the freezer and defrost it using a Traeger smoker. This provides additional flavor to the meat without adding too much smoke flavor. Unfortunately, the weather then turned against me and rain kept me from cooking the steak on my grill. So, still using MeatStick 4X my wife cooked it in our air-fryer, toaster oven. The steak came out perfectly medium rare and the air-fryer developed a nice crust on its exterior.
I followed this up with a tri-tip roast. This time I tried a cooking method that I had never done before. I decided to sear the steak on my grill and then bring it up to temperature in my Traeger smoker to try and add some additional flavor. MeatStick 4X worked perfectly in the Traeger smoker, but the experiment wasn’t as successful as I would have liked.
I have found that when cooking a tri-tip roast on the grill that to get it to perfectly medium rare I only cook it to an internal temperature of 120 degrees. The exterior of the meat is hot enough that wrapping the meat in aluminum foil to rest for 20 minutes brings the internal temperature up to medium rare. What I found was that in the smoker the external temperature of the meat was lower, so it still stayed rare at the end of the resting process. I expect that reheating the leftovers will provide me with the medium rare meat I was striving for. Live and learn.
While bringing the tri-tip roast up to temperature in the smoker, I was worried that the thick metal of the Trager smoker would block the connection between MeatStick 4X and my smart phone. In fact, I found that without even using The MeatStick Extender, I had about 15 feet of range, so I could stay away from the Trager smoke and the smoke that it generated. The Extender would have provided me with up to 650 feet of range.
The MeatStick app is very easy to use and includes a nice tutorial that walks you through all the features of the app. Adding any MeatStick temperature probe to the app just requires pressing the “+” button in the upper right-hand corner of the app and following the on-screen directions.
Cooking sessions are equally easy to setup in the app. Once MeatStick 4X is connected to the app, you simply press the button labeled “Setup Cook.” At that point you can either use the “Quick Start” method to use your own cooking temps or let the app guide you through the selection of cooking temperatures based on:
- The method of cooking (air-fryer, grill, smoker, oven, stove, sous vide, or deep fryer)
- The type of meat you are cooking (MeatStick 4X also supports cooking plant-based meats including burger patties, sausages, and steaks)
- The desired doneness
The app then provides you with instructions on properly inserting MeatStick 4X into your so it will provide accurate measurements.
Once you start cooking, The MeatStick app will provide you with an alert so you can remove your meat from the grill, tent it under aluminum foil, and let the meat rest before carving/serving. An alert is also provided if MeatStick 4X is exposed to too high a temperature and could be damaged.
Even if you have used the guided cooking method to setup all the parameters of the cooking session the app allows you to adjust them.
One additional hint when using MeatStick 4X: a set of silicone oven mitts make a good tool for handling a hot piece of meat after searing to insert MeatStick 4X.
Just in time for Father’s Day
Although not part of this review, MeatStick has just announced an upgrade to their wireless MeatStick Mini cooking thermometer, MeatStick Chef X. MeatStick Chef X is only 3-3/4” long. While it can be used for any cut of meat, the small size makes it ideal for measuring the internal temperature of smaller cuts of meat, fish, chicken, and other proteins where a longer temperature probe can’t be inserted properly into the protein.
