No one can dispute the wisdom of following HACCP food safety regulations closely, both for the quality of the food you serve and the safety of your patrons—not to mention the regulatory and legal protections that go with accurate HACCP records. As we work with front line outlets … [Read more...]
Testing Your Oven’s Accuracy
Thanksgiving Day is just around the corner, and your oven will be used for turkey, pies, rolls, yams, green bean casserole…the list goes on and on! Your oven needs to operate at peak performance on turkey day, and now is the time to make sure it's calibrated properly. The … [Read more...]
Test Your Oven’s Accuracy
If you’ve had trouble getting your baked goods or roasted meats to turn out according to the recipe, it could be that your oven accuracy is off. A good cook should know their oven well. Are the settings accurate? How stable is the oven after it gets to your setting? The … [Read more...]
Check Your Thermometers!
Reputable thermometer companies include their instruments' specs on the packaging. With thermometers, this should include the temperature range the thermometer is designed to measure, the accuracy it should exhibit over that range, the speed with which it should exhibit that … [Read more...]
Thermal Secrets to Creating a Properly Made Ice Bath
The easiest way to test the accuracy of any thermometer is in a properly made ice bath. If you do this carefully, your ice bath will be 32.0°F within ±0.1°F. If you are not careful, the ice bath can be off by several whole degrees. (Just a cup with ice water in it can be 12 or … [Read more...]
Thermal Secrets to Boiling Point Calibration
Boiling point calibration tests are tricker than ice bath tests and are unnecessary if an ice bath test proves conclusive. Water boils at 212°F at sea level, but only at sea level. Changes in atmospheric pressure at elevations above or below sea level alter the temperature at … [Read more...]
The Truth About Ice Baths: Five Secrets Revealed
The Five Secrets About Ice Bath Tests 1. Make an ice bath wrong and you're better off not calibrating at all. 2. A glass of ice water is NOT an ice bath. 3. To be sure you have the right "ice to water ratio" throughout your ice bath, keep the ice on the bottom of the … [Read more...]
Anatomy of a Thermapen Package (Part 2)
(Continued from Part 1) Having satisfied your curiosity about the NSF, you allow yourself to actually open the packaging and you find... a Splash-Proof Super-Fast Thermapen (of course) but also... a fold-out technical manual (a good one-sheet encapsulation of some of … [Read more...]
Anatomy of a Thermapen Package (Part 1 of 2)
It's one of the most anticipated and important moments in a cook's life: the day their first Thermapen arrives. And yet in the rush of excitement, sometimes important details can be overlooked. "What are those documents that come with the Thermapen and what are they … [Read more...]
An Introduction to InfraRed Thermometry
From time to time, here on the ThermoWorks blog, we will turn our attention from the Thermapen toward other worthy topics in thermometry. One thing we get a lot of questions about is our line of infrared thermometer guns. Infrared thermometers provide the convenience of … [Read more...]