I tested a kitchen gadget worth buying now to save Christmas dinner from disaster

Cooking Christmas Dinner piles on the pressure as there are fears over the turkey being undercooked, or tough as old nails. Yet the strive for a juicy, succulent turkey and hope of not poisoning your in-laws now has a helping hand from smart technology.

I tested out the Cosori Smart Meat Thermometer, which launched this year and links up by Bluetooth to a phone app to send the exact temperature of any meat while it’s cooking. Sounds good but I wondered how easy it would be to set up and use.

It comes in a sleek box that has something that looks like half the size of a knitting needle. This Cosori probe, which costs £69.99 on Amazon, is what’s pushed into the thickest part of a joint or slab of meat and left there to measure the heat and level of cooking that’s taking place.

I used it for a chicken roast in my oven but it can also be used with Cosori’s Dual Blaze air fryers. In terms of accuracy, there are two sensors in the probe said to measure food and ambient temperature to give results within a degree of accuracy.

It’s easy enough to find out online what internal meat temperatures are right for the kind of cooking you’re doing and I found temperatures in various above-board sites, but the VeSync app it works with has tons of information and allows you to set alarms for when the temperature reaches a certain point.

It even points out how long meat should be resting for afterwards. It’s basically like having a smart version of Mary Berry by your side in the kitchen.

It took me just a couple of minutes to download the app and understand how the Cosori Smart Meat Thermometer worked, it really is that simple. The advantage of the smart side of things is that you don’t have to keep opening the oven door to check on the roast but can keep tabs on it from much further away.

This smart gadget isn’t just for Christmas either as it’s ideal for Sunday roasts all year round and I imagine would be particularly useful when doing a barbecue.

You can be anywhere in the house within 50m to check on the state of play - whether watching Muppets Christmas Carol on the sofa or getting on with other household chores or lunch prep elsewhere.

Like most smart technology gadgets, it just makes your life far easier. It is more expensive than a regular thermometer at around £70, but it’s also able to do far more things and saves time and hassle It is worth every penny on a stressful family get-together like Christmas Day.

All in all, it’s peace of mind you are paying for with the Cosori Smart Meat Thermometer. I’ve cooked Christmas dinner for the family before and when you’ve got a large turkey, it never seems to cook within the time you expect.

Checking it for clear juices to run free and anxiously prodding it for signs of pink meat can add extra minutes on the clock to make dinner end up much later than the 3pm everyone expects.

For some seasoned cooks, this may seem unnecessary but as someone who doesn’t cook for six or more people regularly, this made me feel reassured that tech was measuring the temperature far more accurately than I ever could.

The Cosori Smart Meat Thermometer costs £69.99 on Amazon here. A similar product is the Meater Plus BBQ Wireless Smart Meat Thermometer, which costs £99 at John Lewis.

There are also recipes on the app and even a cooking graph for those who like to get really technical about their food. That would work the same while it’s in an air fryer and it could be interesting to do a comparison on how meat cooks in the oven compared to that.