The Meater 2 Plus is a wireless meat thermometer that connects to your phone during any type of cook. The proven concept is built on with Meater’s newest model, which is even more set-and-forget than before. It boasts higher temperature resistance and better connectivity, so you can put the probe through almost anything, even deep frying.
On a personal level, I love cooking, especially protein. That means smoking, searing, reverse-searing, and everything in between. If it needs care and attention during a cook, I’m there. The process is therapeutic but can be difficult. For every cook, different temperatures and variables are at play. You have to worry about ambient temperatures and protein behavior against heat.
That’s why the Meater 2 Plus has become my absolute favorite tool for smoking and general cooking. The probe essentially brings any cook to your smart home, allowing you to keep an eye on your chicken, beef, or any other protein from your Android phone.
Build and Quality
It just screams quality, even for a probe
At its core, it carries five internal temperature sensors along the first section of the probe. Those five sensors work to come up with an accurate temperature average for your protein. At the tip of the probe sits an ambient temperature sensor, which pinpoints your ambient grill or oven temperature. That feature has become indispensable for me.
Traditionally, most smokers or probe sets come with several probes that can plug into one power unit. Each is able to read one temperature and can report back as such. If you’re looking to read the ambient temperature of your cook, you’ll need to set up a new probe that sits above the grates.
The Meater 2 Plus doesn’t require that. It can simply read the ambient temperature and report back along with the internal temperature of your protein.
The build is one of the first things you notice when you take the Meater 2 Plus out of the package. It’s hefty, but not so much that it’s offputting. It comes with a charging base that resembles that of the original Meater probes. The base holds a small LED charging status light and a section to slide the probe in. On the back are a couple of magnets that allow you to place the station near your cook, which is vital if you want a strong connection. The charging process is powered by a single AAA battery, which can send enough juice to the probe to power it for 12 hours in just 15 minutes, like a traditional fast-charge.
Both the base station and the probe itself are built really well. The look and design of the probe are exceptional. It builds on the look of the first Meater probe and makes it even more intimidating by bringing a metal finish to the end that sticks out during a cook.
The Meater 2 Plus, from a design perspective, looks great. Something like a meat probe does not need to look good by any means. It just needs to read temp. However, something about the Meater 2 Plus looks so good sticking out of meat on the grill or in a smoker. It might just be a tool, but it’s a good-looking one.
Probe and App performance
Cooking is made so much easier
No matter how cool the Meater 2 Plus looks, it must work to be viable. Fortunately, it works, and it does its job well.
One of the cooks I did to test the Meater 2 Plus was a rack of beef back ribs. I chose that because beef ribs can be hard to do right. They need to come to a temperature of around 165 degrees Fahrenheit and then be wrapped for another hour or two until it comes to around 202 degrees.
What makes it difficult without a competent probe is that beef ribs can either take a while or no time at all, depending on the cut and thickness. While it was supposed to take several hours to come to 165 degrees, it only took two to get to temp, something that’s easy to handle if you have a good probe.
The entire cook is easier when your probe has no wires, allowing you to move it around to different spots frequently, depending on which areas are your smoker/grill’s hotspots. It is also easy to tell if it’s sitting in a hot zone because the Meater 2 Plus will tell you, which I didn’t know I was missing out on before.
To build on that, the Meater 2 Plus lets you go a step further where normal probes wouldn’t allow. The beef ribs need to be wrapped for the last half of cooking to help them render the internal fat. I would stick the probe through the butcher paper or foil when using wired probes to get a decent read. That’s almost impossible with ribs because you don’t want to be touching bone, and blindly stabbing in search of a small window of meat is almost impossible. It’ll completely throw off your temperature readouts if you get it wrong.
With the Meater 2 Plus, I was able to leave my probe in place and wrap the meat as is. No repositioning and no destroying the integrity of the wrap by poking it.
Once the ribs reached 202, I instantly knew through the Android app. The app is basic, but it provides some key insight for your cook. That includes an estimated time remaining before you reach your target temperature. It also gives a graph so you can read the internal and external temp over a period of time, ensuring your grill/smoker is consistent, and the internal temp of your protein is rising.
The Meater Android app showed exactly what I wanted to see during the test cook. The rise in temperature was normal and well within the parameters I’m used to for this type of cook. By all accounts, the Meater 2 Plus was working as it was supposed to.
Once it got the my target temp, it rang my Pixel 8 Pro rather loudly, which I have no problem with during a smoke. In all, the Android app is really easy to use and even offers tips for your next cook, wherever that may be.
All said and done, the ribs came out absolutely perfect. They rendered out exactly as they should have and came out extremely tender. Being able to leave the probe in during the wrap phase meant I could pull them exactly when needed.
It’s also worth mentioning that I backed this up with a trusted instant-read thermometer and traditional probes. During the cook, the temperatures were consistent with the Meater 2 Plus where they should have been. The probe does come with a certification for ±0.5 degrees Fahrenheit. Anything under that is negligible in my book.
Versatility at its best
The original Meater probe had several limitations. One was that the ambient sensor couldn’t be exposed to anything over 500 degrees, give or take. The Meater 2 Plus, on the other hand, can handle almost 1,000 degrees of ambient heat, meaning it can be used over an open flame.
For reference, a campfire sits at around 600 degrees, meaning you can slap a tomahawk steak on coals with a Meater 2 Plus probe after reverse-searing with no issues. That might anger some diehard open-flame chefs, but it certainly means that you won’t overcook an expensive piece of meat because you want to do it the old-fashioned way.
The Meater 2 Plus is also waterproof, which didn’t initially blow me away. And then I realized that deep-frying is done in liquid, and by extension, the Meater 2 Plus can be used when deep-frying. I know there are existing options out there for checking temp while deep-frying, but the fact that the Meater 2 Plus can handle those cooks as well is a genuine plus.
As far as I can tell, the Meater 2 Plus can handle just about any cook, except for pressure cooking. I do not recommend trying to pressure cook, which may damage the internal sensors and break the probe.
Connection woes
One of the only downsides that I came across was the overall Bluetooth connection strength of the base charging station. From what I found, it needs to be pretty close to the probe itself during a cook. Its magnetic back can be placed on a cool part of the smoker or grill, like the pellet hopper.
In my scenario, the smoker is right outside of the house, but even walking in the house resulted in a spotty Bluetooth connection. Either that or the Bluetooth connection was just slow.
Personally, I don’t like using Bluetooth for data acquisition from a smoker, as most modern ones have PIDs that can connect to your phone. It never works well, whether that’s because of the outside heat or the house’s external walls.
On the flip side, there’s a small issue with connecting the base to the internet, which gives access to a cloud connection that can be checked from anywhere. In order to do so, you need a dedicated device to be in constant Bluetooth connection with the charging base. From there, another device logged into your account can access all of the probe’s data via the internet.
This isn’t the best way to approach an internet connection. I wish the Meater 2 Plus base would connect directly to Wi-Fi rather than relying on a nearby device to tether it to the cloud.
I didn’t find these drawbacks to be considerable enough for me to write off the Meater 2 Plus significantly. You could easily remedy Bluetooth issues by connecting a tablet and setting it up near the base station for a constant connection, but that means another connected device.
Final thoughts
The Meater 2 Plus comes in at $130. That’s not cheap, especially for a meat thermometer. However, the versatility that the Meater 2 Plus brings is unreal.
Open flame, deep-frying, smoking, reverse searing, pan-frying, and even sous vide are on the table for the meater. It’s literally a do-it-all temperature sensor that allows for a ton of flexibility in cooking. Not only that, but it takes a lot of the worry out of preparing proteins, no matter what you’re cooking.
As someone who had always thought the Meater line was too expensive for what it is, the Meater 2 Plus addresses all of my concerns. At $130, it’s impossible to recommend for everyone and traditional thermometer probes work just fine for anyone. However, I think a $130 cooking tool that can be used literally anywhere in your kitchen or outdoor cooking space is justifiable if you want to expand.
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