I’ll admit, I’m the Posse rookie when it comes to smoking meat. I bought a Weber Smokey Mountain cooker about two months ago and I’ve used it half a dozen times, mostly with success.

I’m also a technology writer and gadget reviewer, so every time I take on a new hobby, like smoking meat, I take the opportunity to immerse myself in whatever new and exciting gadgets go along with it.

I know temperature is important, so I jumped into my first cook using my existing kitchen thermometers. I have a Thermapen and a ThermoWorks Chef Alarm, which uses a wired probe.

I know enough to know I need to monitor the temperature of the fire at the grate and the internal temperature of the meat. The Chef Alarm helped with the meat, as I only have the meat probe. I used the Thermapen for watching the temp of the smoker, although because it shuts off to conserve battery life, I had to open and close it every time I wanted to take a reading through the little rubber grommet in the side of the my smoker. It worked, but it was a pain.

It was during the 11 hours of that first cook I decided to research and buy a thermometer with two probes.

Leaders in the field include the Maverick ET-732, iGrill 2 from Weber and the ThermoWorks Smoke. I’m already a big fan of ThermoWorks, so I picked the Smoke ($99).

The Smoke has almost everything I’m needing in a thermometer.

It comes with two probes, one for meat and one for the air temp. It has a big display that shows both temperatures, along with the high and low for each during the cook, plus the ability to set high and low alarms for each probe so you get an alert if your temp gets too high or too low.

This setup would be good enough on its own, but the Smoke also has a wireless display you can carry with you up to 100 feet from the smoker.

The remote display also has an alarm that beeps if you lose connection to the base unit. I haven’t found much not to love about theThermoWorks Smoke, other than its lack of a timer.

My ThermoWorks Chef Alarm probe thermometer has a timer so I can keep track of how long I’ve been cooking. Its not a necessity, but it’s a nice feature that I miss on the ThermoWorks Smoke.

The portion of the probe wires that are inside my smoker do get covered with soot, but its easily washed off with a damp cloth.

Both the remote display and Smoke base unit run on two AA batteries, that are included. The ThermoWorks Smoke is just about perfect. It has a very easy to learn interface and it performs flawlessly.