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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Combustion Inc.

After Last Year’s Thanksgiving Disaster, I Bought a Combustion Thermometer. The Result Was Juicy, Just-Right Turkey

In 2021, I hit a Thanksgiving home run.

After deciding to brine a turkey for the first time, the results were much better than expected. Guests were happy, compliments were given, and when I learned we were hosting again last year, I figured it’d be easy to replicate the juicy, delicious result.

But I was wrong. Last year’s turkey was a disaster, so overcooked that the thing was pretty much an inedible piece of gristle.

What happened? After reviewing the steps and comparing them to the previous year, I realized I simply left the turkey in my old oven for too long without taking the bird’s temperature. When I did take it out to check it with my old-school thermometer, it had an internal temperature of 200 degrees and was climbing quickly. Experienced hands will know that’s WAY too hot – over 35 degrees hotter than the suggested cooking temperature – and the results were what you’d expect: a turkey was so overcooked it was all but inedible.

Needless to say, this year, I wasn’t taking any chances. I was going to invest in a smart thermometer and keep track of the bird’s temperature in real-time.

Which one? I decided I wanted to go with the Combustion because I liked the idea of keeping an accurate read on the bird’s temperature from core to surface (as well as ambient temperature) via the thermometer’s eight sensors. I also wanted to take advantage of Combustion’s predictive technology, which would give me a countdown and notify me when it would hit the target temperature.

I took the Combustion thermometer out of its bright yellow box on Thanksgiving morning. I’d downloaded the app to my phone a day prior, enabled it to connect via Bluetooth with the Combustion app, and ensured the thermometer was fully charged. I estimated the turkey would take about four hours to cook at 300 degrees (that’s with convection – if I didn’t use convection, I’d have cooked it at 325). I put in a target temperature of 160 degrees, knowing the bird’s core temperature would continue to rise after I took it out of the oven and waited.

After about 30 minutes, the Combustion gave me an estimate for when the turkey would hit my target temperature. Unsurprisingly, it was cooking slightly faster than my initial estimates, but I was prepared because I had the Combustion.

I watched the countdown clock tick downward, and when it hit 160 degrees, the app told me it was time to pull out the turkey. I double-checked the temperature with my old school thermometer and it matched the temperature reading on my Combustion thermometer. I put foil over the bird and let it sit for about 45 minutes before carving it up.

The result? A juicy, just-right turkey.

You’re probably asking why I didn’t use a smart thermometer before, and it’s a good question. The answer is I should have, but I figured at the time I could just do the math myself. As it turns out, however, older ovens can be a bit unpredictable (as can turkey cooking time estimates), and now the Combustion will be a permanent fixture come turkey cooking time.

Could I have used another thermometer? Maybe, as long as it has enough sensors to measure the core, surface, and ambient temperatures. While the original Meater had two sensors, it couldn’t measure core, ambient, and surface temperatures. However, Meater’s latest thermometer, the Meater 2 Plus, has five internal sensors and an ambient sensor, so I figured that would have worked great as well.

But after my experience, I recommend the Combustion predictive thermometer. The company tries to get you to buy the pair of the thermometer and the yellow kitchen clock, but I found the app works just find (and meant less clutter on my counter). You can buy the thermometer by itself right now for $119, or buy the thermometer and clock for $159.

Chris Young’s Combustion Launches Predictive Thermometer for Presale

When Chris Young first announced his new product a year ago, he made it clear he wasn’t making just another Bluetooth-connected thermometer.

“I started building the first thermometer in the world to actually measure the real cooking temperature which can profile your food so that it can estimate things like how big is the food and how fast is it cooking,” Young said.

Young made a convincing case at the time, explaining how the product, the Combustion Predictive Thermometer, would utilize eight sensors to monitor the core, surface, and ambient temperatures and give a cook an idea of the food is done. Getting that gradient temperature is important because, according to Young, only with that can you (or your thermometer) correctly calculate the true cooking temperature and how fast an item will cook.

Now, a year later, Young’s first product from his new company is finished and is available for presale on the company’s website.

Outside of making the industry’s first predictive thermometer, Young also wanted his new product to be extremely simple to use. That drive for simplicity was motivated by his experience at Chefsteps, where the team working on the Joule spent lots of time and resources troubleshooting the sous vide circulator’s networking technology (the Joule sous vide circulator requires a paired smartphone to operate).

In short, Young learned that sometimes simpler is better when it comes to cooking, and with the Predictive Thermometer, simplicity comes in the form of a paired timer that has a big display and doesn’t require an app or set up out of the box (though an app is available for those who want one). According to Young, the thermometer utilizes the built-in beacon technology to broadcast the cooking data to the timer and any other Bluetooth-connected appliance that wants to communicate with it.

Young didn’t reveal pricing last year when he announced the product, but now we have it: The thermometer and timer are regularly $199 but are available now for presale for $139. You can preorder one on the company’s website.

Chris Young Wants to Bring Cheat Codes for Good Cooking to the Masses With His New Startup, Combustion Inc.

When Chris Young started working on Modernist Cuisine with Nathan Myhrvold almost 15 years ago, their original idea was to simply write a book about sous vide cooking.

“I still have emails where we thought it’d be a few hundred pages, we could get it done in a year,” Young told me in a phone interview.

As most know, Modernist Cuisine would grow far bigger than a hundred pages, and take much longer than a year to write. And while much of the multivolume work is dedicated to sous vide cooking, what Young and other early sous vide enthusiasts knew was that this cooking technique with a fancy name was just a means to a more important end: mastery of time of temperature in cooking.

“If you look at Modernist Cuisine, about half of the book is dedicated towards explaining the physics of heat transfer in the kitchen,” said Young. “Because [the application of heat] often makes the difference between a meal being spectacular and a meal not [being] so great.”

So when Young went on to found ChefSteps and eventually build a sous vide appliance with the Joule, the ultimate goal was always to give the cook mastery over the two elements that are so important in creating good food.

“Time and temperature are just sort of these cheat codes to better cooking,” said Young.

Chris Young

If helping aspiring cooks master these cheat codes was the bigger picture and sous vide was just one means to this end, Young realized at some point he had to go beyond sous vide cooking. That meant launching a new company called Combustion Inc. and making a thermometer.

But not just any thermometer. This one would come packed with eight different temperature sensors.

Why so many?

According to Young, when cooking a roast or a chicken, it’s important to not only get the temperature inside the meat, but to get the gradient temperature throughout it, including its surface and ambient temperatures. Only then, according to Young, can you properly calculate the true cooking temperature, how fast an item will cook, and when you should take it out.

Like any self-respecting chef-slash-cooking-technology entrepreneur, Young had hacked together a solution for his BBQ that allowed him to closely monitor internal and surface temperatures, but knew the solution with all of its wires and multiple thermometers wasn’t something wasn’t exactly approachable for the average consumer.

“I have a fairly kludged together a bunch of electronics,” said Young. “It’s not what I would call productized.”

Here is where he saw an opportunity to create a thermometer that would give him the type of data to help achieve the results he wanted. While there is certainly no shortage of smart thermometers on the market, Young felt none of them were able to give him the information he wanted to cook they way he wanted.

The Combustion thermometer, kitchen timer and app

“I started building the first thermometer in the world to actually measure the real cooking temperature which can profile your food so that it can estimate things like how big is the food and how fast is it cooking.”

Young wanted to build a thermometer that could be fairly sophisticated when it came to telling temperature and predicting when meat should be done. He also wanted the device to communicate this information with not only a paired kitchen timer (the other initial product from Combustion), but also with apps. He also knew, however, after having built the Joule, connected products can be also have their problems.

“I lived that,” said Young. “I know this probably as well as anyone at this point, because like we were all in on IoT, and we got it working pretty well, and I can tell you how painful it was. When it inevitably breaks, who’s responsible? And so the experience for the consumer is all this IoT shit that is just dumb.”

It was that experience with the Joule and the polarizing responses to connected devices that made Young rethink how to create a connected product. While he wanted to make a thermometer that is connected, with all the benefits that could bring, he also wanted one that worked out of the box without a complicated pairing and set up.

The answer was to make the temperature data freely available by broadcasting it using a built-in Bluetooth capability. That meant instead of going through a complicated pairing experience with its own app, the thermometer can utilize the beacon capabilities built into the Bluetooth spec to broadcast the time and temperature data of the chicken, roast or whatever is being cooked.

“We actually said, ‘Look, there’s nothing super secret about your temperature data,'” said Young, adding that the thermometer “advertises its data every 200 milliseconds” and all that data is just part of a beacon.

The beacon technology built into Bluetooth is what allows products like the Tile tracker other other devices to broadcast messages to your smartphone to give it updates. With the Combustion thermometer, the built-in Bluetooth beacon technology will send cooking data to the Combustion kitchen timer, (the other new product announced today) or its app (Yes, there is an app for those who want one, but Young makes it clear it’s not necessary). The device will also be able to send information to other Bluetooth-enabled appliances, like GE or BSH ovens, that want to communicate with it.

Young spent plenty of time at his last company making sure his device worked with other appliances, but it was painful. There were lots of meetings negotiating complicated technology and business arrangements for the Joule to integrate with other devices. These types of months-long negotiations were exactly what the onetime ChefSteps CEO wanted to avoid at his new company.

“This is sort of a version 2.0 business model,” said Young. “Because inevitably the old way involves a huge tussle between the appliance manufacturer’s desire to have a platform and app and the startup’s desires. I’m simply saying I make my money when I sell thermometers and I make my money when we sell other things.”

Young told me Combustion Inc. will sell the thermometer and the kitchen timer as a pair, but will also sell each separately. He wouldn’t give me pricing, saying only that they won’t be super cheap but also won’t be astronomically expensive. He said they plan to make them available by this summer via their website and not (as of yet) in retail.

In a way, Young’s efforts feel more like he’s making a tool for cooks rather than trying to monetize a venture-funded startup. It’s not unlike Dave Arnold and his Searzall and Spinzall products. That’s not to say Young isn’t looking to make money or doesn’t have big plans; he says the thermometer is only the beginning.

But, after a less-than-satisfying final chapter to the ChefSteps story, I can see why he’d want to get back a bit to the roots of what he started all those years ago with Myrhvold, which is to provide cooks with tools to better use the cheat codes to make good food.