Review: Combustion Predictive Thermometer and Display

My favorite thing about a fancy gadget I recently tested involved being nine feet from it and sipping a cold one. I wasn't doing nothing, just close to nothing: talking to my brother-in-law Ben while occasionally glancing at a countdown timer on a display next to the grill.

That timer is a feature on a sophisticated new Bluetooth probe thermometer from Combustion. You plug in the desired doneness temperature of the food you're cooking, and it uses sensor data to estimate how long until that temperature is reached, displaying the countdown next to the target and current internal temperatures. This helps you know how much time you have to chill out.

While it is correctly marketed as catnip for barbecue aficionados who love monitoring long, slow cooks in their fancy smokers and grills, I integrated the Combustion into my everyday cooking, often grilling for a bunch of family members, and it fit right in.

The $199 Combustion Predictive Thermometer and Display is a cordless probe with a base station. Technically, you could buy just the probe for $149 and connect it to your phone, at which point you save fifty bucks but lose much of what makes the Combustion so endearing.

The probe has a whopping eight temperature sensors spread along its length, which is nuts when you consider that most thermometers have only one, but the Combustion takes advantage of each one in useful and dorky ways. Most notable is how those sensors monitor temperatures on the inside, outside, and surface of the food, allowing the predictive part to work with surprising accuracy. Insert the probe, and after a few moments the display shows the remaining time estimate. Part of what is so nice about it is the way it masks the technology behind the readout’s simple interface.

One evening, I put some dry-brined pork chops on the grill, essentially a “sear, sear, let it coast to a finish in a cooler spot” operation. Using a display that’s not your phone to monitor this task feels like an expansion of your culinary senses, and, to borrow a cheesy title from the late, great Jimmy Buffett, a license to chill. (RIP, Jimmy!)

It didn’t need to be complicated. Mom and Dad like marinated chicken breast from The Prime Butcher in New Hampshire, and for good reason, especially when it’s not overcooked, not that this ever happens when Dad’s cooking. Similarly, the Combustion did well with bone-in chicken breast on one night and steak tips on another.

The Combustion certainly has competition. I’m a big fan of the ThermoWorks Smoke, which sports two corded probes and does not have the predictive timer but now costs $89, a great value. There are also Bluetooth thermometers like the Meater, which I’m less of a fan of, with its disturbingly thick probe and lack of display except the one on your phone.

These differences may seem like small potatoes, but the ability for a thermometer to create a vibe should not be overlooked.

Back at home in Seattle, I switched from the grill to the oven and got slightly more sophisticated. In general, I had no connectivity issues working with the probe in the oven unless I used something like a covered Dutch oven. It would have been cool if that had worked, but it was pretty easy to understand why it didn’t. Roasting posed no problems, however. I always like using roast chicken as a benchmark, and Combustion’s creator, Chris Young, went on recent jag doing kitchen gear review videos and ended up with an overcooked bird when roasting a chicken in a Joule Oven Air Fryer Pro by Breville.

That was the same problem I encountered when I reviewed the Joule Oven in 2022, so I thought it would be fun to put the Combustion through a similar test. I riffed on a favorite recipe—Simon Hopkinson’s roast chicken—dry brining then slathering it in butter and tucking it into a hot oven. Guided by the Combustion, it came out great, particularly in the breast, the easiest part to overcook.

I also improved on a favorite easy recipe of slow-roasted salmon I picked up from Ends + Stems, using the probe to signal an early exit from the oven so I could crisp the skin in a hot pan without overcooking the fish.

What I had yet to get into were some of the more advanced features, a task I offloaded to my chef friend Hamid Salimian in Vancouver. Hamid has cooked at and run some of the best restaurants in the city, is a culinary instructor at Vancouver Community College, and runs The Good Flour Co. with chef Jen Peters. Perhaps inspired by Young’s Instagram leg of lamb video, Hamid made a Persian feast featuring a leg of lamb that had spent the previous night slowly roasting away in his oven, the thermometer inside sending a host of information to both the display and the app on his phone.

I thought Hamid would want to talk about deep-dive cheffy stuff first, but when I got there he went for something a little more basic.

“I like how easy it connects. It’s no BS. Trying to get this to connect,” he said, grabbing the handle of his Anova Precision Oven, “is like pulling teeth.”

I took a bite of the lamb and knew that the rest of his comments about the thermometer would be positive.

“I really like the prediction,” he said. “They put a lot of thought into this.”

He also liked more technical aspects, like being able to download a CSV file with data from his cooking, which allowed him to troubleshoot a recipe after it was done. This, he noted, would be great for restaurant documentation, pasteurization, and batch cooking.

Hamid already had plans to use the Combustion in his classes to help explain the relationship between time and temperature to his students.

“You can look at the graph on the app and see it as a simple setting, then you can look at the advanced setting and see how the heat is penetrating the meat.”

He was also excited about its ability to read the surface temperature of the food being cooked.

“Surface temperature helps you estimate how quickly heat will penetrate depending on fat content. Something fatty will have faster heat penetration than something fibrous. Like Wagyu versus tenderloin. If you’re going to cook something finicky, knowing the surface temperature is a huge help.”

That’s a deeper dive that most of us will ever take with our cooking, but I’m glad it’s there for those who want it.

“Is this for the average cook? No it’s for the geek who’s going to spend $200 on a thermometer,” said Hamid, “but it’s worth it.”

This nudges up against an important point. Like its aforementioned competition, this won’t be the only thermometer you need. First, you’ll want to own something like the ThermoWorks Thermapen ONE ($71) for instant reads of whatever you’re cooking. Then get something like the Combustion (or Smoke). The downside here is more money for two things, but the two thermometers work very differently and both are wonderful tools.

While the Combustion marketing material proudly touts its ability to read surface temperature, that’s more advanced cooking than most of us will ever do in our kitchens. As a cookbook author, reviewer, and reader, I’d argue that good recipes already take into account what you need for excellent results, without that data.

I never really spent all that much time with the app. Not my bag you might say, but I counter that I didn’t need to because I had everything important on the display, making this the first cordless leave-in thermometer that felt like an improvement on corded models.