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In the five Thanksgivings I’ve hosted, I’ve never found cooking a turkey to be technically all that hard. Yes, it can be a space hog, and yes, it can take a while, but when you break it down, my turkey roasting process involves rubbing something on and under the turkey skin and sticking it in the oven—perhaps with a spot of basting.
The thing that has annoyed me, and I think has annoyed the host of every Thanksgiving I’ve ever attended, is that if that turkey cooks slower or faster than you expect it to, it can leave your guests waiting for you to get organized. There is nothing more stressful than rushing to finish the gravy, mashed potatoes, perhaps even the centerpiece while you will your bird to stay warm. While there are guides out there that give you a pretty good idea of how long a 12-pound bird should cook compared to a 10-pounder, it would be so useful if there were a tool that could tell you ahead of time exactly when your turkey will be cooked. As it happens, there is.
Predictive thermometers have been around for a few years now, and they do exactly what the name suggests. A predictive thermometer monitors the internal temperature of whatever you’re cooking and spits out an estimate of when that food will come to your chosen temperature. If it wasn’t clear from my hand-wringing about turkeys finishing on time, a good predictive thermometer is my solution for Thanksgiving meal planning. In my experience, the best predictive thermometer is the Combustion thermometer, which took the top spot during our 2023 thermometer testing.
The way it works is pretty simple: Put the thermometer’s probe into whatever you’re cooking before it goes in the oven and set a target temperature using the display or the smartphone app. After about 20 minutes, the app tells you how long your turkey will take to cook—you're making something smaller, like a chicken breast, the prediction will come out faster. In my experience, when cooking something like a turkey at a reasonably high temperature (as opposed to something like a brisket at a very low temperature), that prediction is within minutes of being correct.
I spoke with Combustion founder Chris Young, who has also worked on incredibly smart appliances like the Joule sous vide circulator during his time at Chefsteps and Modernist Cuisine. Young told me that the Combustion thermometer’s predictions can be as accurate as they are because the thermometer can take in so much information: Most other thermometers have one or two temperature sensors (one to provide an internal temperature, while the second provides an ambient temperature), but the Combustion has eight. That gives it six or seven more data points to use as its algorithm figures out how quickly and evenly your turkey is cooking, resulting in a more specific prediction than some other thermometers. Those eight sensors also mean that if you stick the probe deep into a turkey breast you can check not only that the internal temperature has hit 170℉, but whether parts of the turkey closer to the skin are starting to overcook in a problematic way.
One final piece that was vitally important to Young is that the Combustion doesn’t saddle users with a complicated connection process or constantly drop its signal, which is a problem we’ve encountered with a number of early smart Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connected devices. The surest way to lose people, Young says, is to give them something that’s hard to use out of the box. That’s why the Combustion thermometer was designed to auto connect either to your phone or the display right away without a series password entries or pairing codes. The range extenders also make it possible to go watch football or the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade upstairs while keeping track of what your turkey is doing. The company said it works up to 300 meters away, and I’ve found it reliable up to about 200 meters, which should be far enough for most people.
The Combustion thermometer won’t actually take the work out of prepping apps, sides, turkey, and pies, but it will make your planning easier. Hosting Thanksgiving is stressful enough as it is. This takes at least one cooking problem off of my plate.
