Stop Making This Chef-Hated Steak Grilling Mistake

If you love grilling out, you probably worry about making sure everything’s cooked all the way through. I certainly do — I grill at least once a week, and whenever I have some good protein on, like steak or chicken, I hear echoes of Gordon Ramsay yelling “It’s raw!” on “Hell’s Kitchen.” These days, I rely heavily on the use of my meat thermometer, especially when trying to cook a perfect steak, but a recent chat with a grilling pro reminded me of another reason that you should be using a thermometer. “Cutting into the meat on the grill to check if it’s done is a big [mistake],” Matt Abdoo, executive chef and co-founder of Pig Beach BBQ, told me. “You spend all this time and money on a great steak or burger, and then end up draining all the juices by slicing into it too early.” 

Fortunately, it’s really easy to avoid doing this — especially since Alpha Grillers’ incredibly popular instant-read thermometer is 50% off at Amazon right now, making it just $10.

Alpha Grillers Digital Meat Thermometer

This thermometer has unbelievable stats, the likes of which I rarely see on Amazon. It has over 63,500 five-star ratings, and over 100,000 people picked one up in just the past month. (You read that correctly.) It reads temperatures within a second or two, and is accurate to within half a degree Fahrenheit. It even has a magnet on the back, so you can hang it on your grill cart or refrigerator and keep it ready for the next time you cook. Finally, and most importantly for our purposes here, this meat thermometer has a chart right on the front that includes the proper temperature ranges for cooking beef, as well as poultry and pork. The Alpha Grillers digital meat thermometer is basically a perfect grilling tool.

Chef Abdoo’s comment about cutting into meat took me back to my early days of grilling, before digital thermometers were commonly used by home cooks. (Or, at least if they were, my uncle and grandfather didn’t use them when they were teaching me to cook on our family’s Weber charcoal grill.) I always knew that cooking steak and other proteins to the right doneness was important, but I checked it in exactly the way chef Abdoo said not to — by prematurely cutting into it — and most of my food arrived at the table looking pretty mangled. It’s embarrassing to think about now, but I think it’s an important rite of passage for a lot of grillers.

“A digital instant-read thermometer is a game-changer,” chef Abdoo said. “You will look like a pro, and there will never be any more guessing or serving meat that was hacked up on the grill.” If this is a bad habit of yours, no disrespect; we’ve all been there. But now that you know, stop doing it and begin serving food that looks like it came out of a steakhouse kitchen. Ypu just need to grab this shopper-loved digital thermometer while it’s only $10.

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At the time of publishing, the price was $10.