Buy our Winning Oven Thermometer:
Full testing details and ranking chart:

An oven thermometer is the only reliable way to know what’s happening inside your oven—unless you have a model that’s inaccurate, hard to read, or falls off the racks.

We tested 10 oven thermometers to find the best one:
CDN Pro Accurate Oven Thermometer
Taylor TruTemp Thermometer
Polder Commercial Oven Thermometer
Cooper-Atkins Dial Oven Thermometer
Williams-Sonoma Oven Thermometer
Norpro Oven Thermometer
Taylor Connoisseur Oven Thermometer
Taylor Oven Thermometer
Maverick Oven Thermometer
Maverick Large Dial Oven Thermometer

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For reliable, consistent results with recipes, a good oven thermometer is critical. When we used a high-tech digital thermometer to take the temperature of five different home ovens preheated to 350 degrees, some missed the mark by as much as 50 degrees. Here’s one big reason why: An oven’s internal thermometer only gauges the temperature of the location where it’s installed, which is necessarily in an out-of-the-way spot in the back, front, or side of the oven box. But these areas can be subject to hot spots or drafts that make their temperatures differ from the center of the oven. Only a good freestanding oven thermometer can tell you what’s really going on right in the middle of the oven, where most food cooks.

For several years, we’ve relied on our winning dial-face oven thermometer from Cooper-Atkins, but we’ve also noticed new models on the market and wondered if anything better had come along. We scooped up nine dial-face models priced from $4.63 to $20.94 to pit against it. (We avoided bulb models since we’ve found that their tinted alcohol can get stuck and give inaccurate readings.) Most of our lineup had the option to hang from the racks or sit upright. Either way, we wanted a thermometer that was easy to position and remove for a periodic reading. In addition to ease of use, we rated the legibility of the faces and, most importantly, the models’ accuracy. Finally, to assess quality control, we purchased four copies of each thermometer and ran the entire set through testing.

America’s Test Kitchen is a real 2,500 square foot test kitchen located just outside of Boston that is home to more than three dozen full-time cooks and product testers. Our mission is simple: to develop the absolute best recipes for all of your favorite foods. To do this, we test each recipe 30, 40, sometimes as many as 70 times, until we arrive at the combination of ingredients, technique, temperature, cooking time, and equipment that yields the best, most-foolproof recipe.

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