Nothing is worse than a prime rib of beef when you want it rare, or barely grilled sea bream already charred … The Meat ° it + probe from the French kitchen accessories brand Mastrad promises you cooking for little ones onions, without having to keep your eyes on the BBQ.
Planted in a piece of meat or a fish, and connected to an application, Meat ° it + wants to make us outstanding cooks. The end of the kitchen nightmare? 20 minutes cooked this funny little accessory.
Bluetooth to the cooks’ rescue
Extracted from its magnetic charging base (handy for “sticking” it on a refrigerator), Meat ° it + looks like a small metal thermometer. Its black plastic end incorporates some electronics, but also a Bluetooth chip that allows it to communicate with its base. Which base, also Bluetooth, will communicate with the smartphone of the future top chef. On board, the Meat ° it + application.
Cooking time set to the nearest degree
Once the probe has been spotted by the smartphone (the link could reach up to 60 meters, anyway!), It is important to first select its cooking method: from plancha, to rotisserie, including smokehouse, oven and BBQ charcoal. Next comes the selection of the type of food: beef, duck, pork, fish, turkey, mutton, chicken, veal. The song type follows.
For beef, for example, you can choose sirloin, spider, flank steak, etc. These subcategories are extremely numerous. Finally, the cook chooses his type of cooking. An ideal temperature is sometimes suggested (as for fish), but we can find, like for beef, the classic blue, rare, medium, medium, well done, well done cooking. All that remains is to plant the probe in the room (a diagram is available on the smartphone screen), while taking care to let its plastic end protrude, then to activate the cooking in the application. By crossing the selected criteria and measuring the temperature measured inside the piece during cooking, the application knows at any time where the cooking is.
The probe measures the interior temperature of the dish and the target temperature to be reached, defined by choosing the nature of the dish and the desired cooking. The user thus knows the remaining cooking time in real time. He can calmly go back to preparing his meal or have a drink with his friends by the pool. Mastrad specifies that its probe measures the temperature to the nearest degree and that it can operate from -30 ° C to + 300 ° C. Please note: it can only be used for parts that are at least 2 cm thick.
Notifications for onion cooking
Three minutes before the end of cooking, an audible alert and a notification are received. It’s almost time to sit down to eat. Rebelote when cooking is finished, a siren sounds. This time it is high time to remove your meat or fish from the heat. Hanging behind the charging base, a small plastic key allows you to extract the Meat ° it + probe without burning yourself.
We successively tested Meat ° it + with a piece of barbecued beef and a slab of baked salmon. The desired cooking (rare and well done respectively) was well served. In open terrain (outdoors, with a barbecue) the probe has never had any difficulty staying connected to our smartphone, even at a good distance. Inside, the connection was sometimes interrupted while our salmon was in the oven, in the kitchen, and we telecommute in our office, yet not far away.
In this case, an alert message is received. We just had to place the base of the probe, which acts as a relay, halfway between the kitchen and the office, for contact to be reestablished. Another alert also if the probe is in contact with flames. This happened to us when in a hurry to do battle with our meat, we had placed it on the grill of a barbecue whose embers were not glowing enough.
It’s hard to miss …
Meat ° it + is Mastrad’s second connected probe after Meat ° it launched a few years ago. The differences are minimal: the new probe is recharged on battery and no longer on battery, and the base has a protective cover. The application seems to have been fleshed out as well. Still, it seems very difficult to “mess up” with such a kitchen clerk. Sold at the same price as its predecessor, 89 euros, Meat ° it + is undoubtedly to be recommended to amateur cooks or blunderers, but also and above all to all gourmets wishing to impress their guests.