Review: ThermoWorks Signals BBQ Alarm Thermometer

My mom texted a few months back to signal enthusiasm for a new baked potato recipe. It was an America’s Test Kitchen recipe by Lan Lam where, at the end, the spuds' internal temperature is checked with a thermometer. Mom's already a baked-potato pro, so as peculiar as the technique sounded, I was curious to see what caught her attention.

At around the same time, I began reviewing a new remote-probe thermometer and, like the great scholar who thought to combine peanut butter and chocolate, I looked at the thermometer and that text from Mom and realized it was time to bake some potatoes.

Lam’s spuds get a quick bath in a salty brine, cook in a hot oven until their internal temperature hits 205 degrees Fahrenheit, come out for a quick coat of oil, and go back in for 10 minutes to crisp the exterior before you cut them open and slather ’em with butter. My gentle twist was to put a probe in both the largest and smallest potato and set the alarm in each to go off at 205 degrees. This kept me from needing to open and close the door and poke them with an instant-read thermometer every time I wanted a reading. I just set the temperature alarm and started listening for the beep about 45 minutes later. The result was so good, this will be how I make bakers from here on out.

Photograph: ThermoWorks

The device I used was the Signals BBQ Alarm Thermometer With Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Wireless Technology, a four-probe thermometer with a base station that does everything a good cook or pitmaster would want. It offers temperature readouts and alarms, and it has an app that allows you to follow along by providing some time-temperature graphs of what you're cooking, a nice additional feature not available on the display built into the base. The app also makes setting the alarm temperature easier, and if you're cooking several different things at once, allows you to type in labels that appear on the base and correspond with each probe, like "brisket" or "chicken."

This is the style of thermometer with a probe at the end of a cable that snakes back to the base. The probe goes in the food when you start cooking and stays there until it's done, and you can read temperature information on the base, in the app, or on a dedicated remote display. Having the option of multiple probes means one of them could be an "air probe," which takes the temperature at the cooking surface in your barbecue or oven. Setting it so that an alarm goes off when it hits a designated temperature is nothing new, but one of my first impressions with the Signals was remembering how freeing just doing that is; let the thing cook and go about your business until the alarm goes off.

Comparing Signals to the Smoke and Smoke Gateway combo, which I own and love, and reviewed several years ago, this newer model neatens things up with one base instead of Smoke's clunkier three-piece system. Signals has the capability to run four probes instead of Smoke's two. Four is a lot unless you're really, really into barbecue. With something some long-cook barbecue fans will appreciate, Signals ties in with its Billows fan controller, meaning if the temperature dips, the fan spins to get the fuel burning faster. I was testing in Seattle's wet, cold midwinter, and I have a gas grill, so I moved testing inside, where having four probes running into my oven was twice as many as I could ever imagine needing.

One of my first dinners with it demonstrated the basic pleasure of cooking with always-on probes. My sister came over with a nice salad, and I made the sweet potato and peanut salad from Vishwesh Bhatt's cookbook, I Am From Here. I also made his pork tenderloin with tandoori spices, and since the loins were slightly different sizes, I put a probe in each, with the temperature alarms set, and tucked them in the oven, freeing me up to set the table and shoot the breeze. Not needing to interrupt the conversation every few minutes to poke the spuds with an instant-read thermometer gave us the fleeting feeling in our busy lives that we were real adults.

I discovered finer points as I continued cooking using both Signals and my Smoke. The Smoke comes with a pocketable remote display called the Smoke Receiver which connects to the base via an extremely reliable radio signal. You can also buy a $54 Wi-Fi bridge called the Smoke Gateway that allows you to monitor the temperature on the ThermoWorks app. Signals ditches the radio in favor of Bluetooth—a dicey proposition stability-wise—but builds in the Wi-Fi, which streamlines things nicely. This all creates a bit of a jumble, optionswise. If I was choosing which one to buy, I'd consider Bluetooth too unreliable and remove it from the equation. If I had extremely solid Wi-Fi all around my house and near my grill, I'd probably opt for the Signals. If I really wanted four probes, or the ability to connect to the Billows, I'd get the Signals. Otherwise, I'd go for the Smoke, which, even with the add-on Wi-Fi bridge, uses the same app and is often going to be the cheaper option.

Still, the Signals works great. Take, for example, this past Thanksgiving when I got excited about the idea that you don't really have to baste a turkey during cooking, which meant I could put the probe in the breast, put the bird in the oven, and not even crack the door until the alarm beeped at 165 degrees. Instead of fussing with it, I got to hang with our guests, enjoy some deviled eggs, and keep things running smoothly. I could also look at the app's time-temperature chart and get a good idea of when the bird would be coming out of the oven. A few weeks later, still in a fowl mood, I made Nik Sharma's spiced roast chicken with turmeric, paprika, and Kashmiri chili, and it continued to hammer home that always-on thermometer advantage for longer cooks, whether in the oven or the ’cue.

I experimented a bit cooking with the probes on the stovetop (like I could have done on a grill), making Sharma's lamb chops with scallion mint salsa, and while they came out great, the cords got in the way. Ditto for a David Tanis ribeye recipe that starts on the stove and finishes in the oven. This more active style of cooking is more the realm of instant-read thermometers, or potentially a cable-free Bluetooth probe that you could leave in there while you flip the food in the pan. Cable probes just aren't designed for this.

I did run into a few problems. The Wi-Fi setup can be surprisingly painful. The alarm function on the app and the base don't seem to fully sync up, which can get annoying when you've already turned one off and the other starts beeping while you've got a handful of hot stuff. Also, the app's homepage serves ads for other ThermoWorks products, which is tacky.

If we're approaching the end of a story and I'm rhapsodizing about baked potatoes and the capabilities thermometers have had for a couple of decades, that likely means that Signals is a good, solid piece of equipment … and that there's not much that's truly new here. It works well, but it feels like a half step to the side and a half step forward.

Cordless Bluetooth probes face their own challenges, which get compounded when they get small and, importantly, thin enough to really be practical. Notably, it gets hard not to fry the circuitry when it's over high heat. Getting a battery large enough to be useful into something you're trying to miniaturize is a bit of a paradox, and there's also wacky stuff that happens, like when the antenna strength changes depending on the temperature.

Photograph: ThermoWorks

Wrapping up, I thought I'd get clever and use the Signals making a quiche, perching the probe on the edge of the pie dish to measure the temperature in the center, and while it was helpful, it was also overkill.

I finished testing the night before I went on a trip. There wasn't a ton of food in the house, but there were potatoes, so I called up Lan's ATK recipe again, put the probes in, set the alarms, stuck the spuds in the oven and went downstairs to pack, not returning to the kitchen until the alarm beeped. They were perfect.