The Best Oven Thermometer (2024) Tested, and Reviewed

Preheat the oven. It’s the first step in, well, any recipe that uses the oven. Allowing your oven time to fire up and create the perfect conditions for cooking your dinner or dessert. When it comes to taking the temperature of your actual food, we have plenty of recommendations for the best instant read probe thermometers out there. But what about the temperature of your actual oven?

The best oven thermometers

If you’re an avid baker, your breads and other pastries demand consistent temps. If you’re the designated turkey chef on Thanksgiving, getting the proper doneness could depend on knowing if you have an accurate oven or not.

High heat roasting, low and slow cooks—there are many more projects that will come out better with a good oven thermometer. We tested both probe and dial oven thermometers and models from brands both reputable and mysterious. Read on for more details about our top picks and a definitive answer to whether you should by an oven thermometer at all.

By the way, these are ambient temperature thermometers, not meat thermometers. If you’re looking for meat thermometer click over here.

Do I need the best oven thermometer? Do I need an oven thermometer at all?

The short answer is: You probably do, at least for periodic use. But the real question is, “how much do I trust my oven?”

If your food tends to come out perfectly at the time and temperature recommended in the recipe, then you can, for the moment, rely on the oven’s existing settings to give you a good guess as to the temperature inside.

The tricky thing with ovens though, is that they cycle on and off to conserve energy (you’ve probably heard it happening with electric clicks or the woosh of the flames relighting). That means when you set your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature is actually fluctuating up and down during the cooking time, cooling a few degrees before the internal thermostat notices and triggers the gas or electric heating element to kick back in. Then it heats things up to more than 350 degrees to make up the difference before shutting off once more. So, what you’re really setting when you turn the knob or punch those buttons, is what the oven will target as an average temperature while the door is shut.

If you’re unlucky and your food often comes out underdone, a bit too crispy, or worse, burnt, no matter how diligently you follow a recipe’s instructions, then you might have an oven temperature calibration problem. In other words, your oven isn’t being honest with you about what’s going on inside. This will happen in every home kitchen at some point, perhaps because the oven is cheap (a regular feature in many apartments) or just because the oven is old. That’s when an oven thermometer becomes an essential kitchen tool for making sure your most finicky baked goods or your holiday dinner’s main course comes out correctly and on time.

Best oven thermometer overall: ThermoWorks Square DOT Digital Oven Thermometer

If you know Thermoworks it’s likely for their Thermapens. They are, in our opinion, the best instant-read thermometers you can get. But the Utah-based company makes more than just food thermometers. They make the best ambient cooking thermometers as well. The Square DOT is a digital thermometer with a readout that sits on the countertop, so you don’t need to try to read it through the glass of your oven door. It has the added benefit of two temperature channels, one to give an ambient temperature reading and one to give an internal temperature reading of what you’re actually cooking at the same time. This is particularly nice if you’re using the Square DOT to pull double duty for BBQ in your smoker. It also has an “average temperature mode,” which is, by far, the most precise way to determine your oven temperature. It offers average readings in 15 minute increments that will take into account the cycling of the oven. In a sense, it’s fact-checking what your oven is saying. It can also pull double duty easily in a grill or smoker, where control over temperatures is a bit more, er, manual.

What we didn’t like about the Thermoworks Square DOT Digital Oven Thermometer

The pressure-mounting metal clip that holds the probe was too narrow to clip on to our oven rack grates. It might not be for yours, but the fact that it didn’t fit our testing oven means it’s not universal. After bending it open a bit the clip did fit more snugly, but pulling on the probe wire could twist it out of position causing it to fall. And unlike the analog thermometers we tested, it requires batteries and a wire running out of your oven door. Wire no though, if you do need to check the ambient temperature while you’re cooking, this will give you an accurate reading no matter where you put it.

Best Analog Oven Thermometer: KitchenAid Oven Thermometer

Of all the analog thermometers we tested, KitcheinAid’s stayed in an acceptable ±5-degree range most often. Its three-inch dial was easy to read well with its bold, red indicator needle and we liked that the dashes on the dial were marked down to five-degree increments. It was also the sturdiest in both the hanging and standing positions, as it actually uses a metal clip to cling to the oven rack, no dangling or toppling problems at all.