Marriage to a Fellow Tool-Whore

It's fun being married to a tool-whore who not just enables me to buy more cool kitchen gadgets, but actively encourages it.  

I'm still trying to figure out the cause of my two custard failures (seriously, I've made several dozen successful ones and never had a failure before, so this is bugging me), and I can't rule out having simply overcooked it (see below for my reasoning). 

So, I researched kitchen thermometers and came up with two well-regarded models tested by organizations I trust, the OXO Good Grips Glass Candy and Deep Fry Thermometer ($23), and the Thermoworks ChefAlarm® Cooking Alarm Thermometer and Timer ($65). They both have significant pros and cons and the price varies significantly (the expensive one isn't so expensive we can't afford it, but it does seem like a lot to spend on a thermometer) so it wasn't an easy decision.  Anyway, I sent the links to Chris thinking that he may have an opinion based on his own needs/uses.  I also thought he'd most likely encourage me to just get the cheaper one as it would almost certainly meet my needs.

A few minutes later, he came to my office and we had the following conversation:

Chris: This is probably not the advice you were looking for ...

Me:  [thinking: great, he's going to suggest making do with what we have]

Chris: ... but I think you should get them both.

Me: [eyebrows up] What? Really?

Chris: Yeah.  I'm pretty enchanted by the electronic one and the various uses, though I don't like that it uses triple-A's instead of rechargeables.  And the cheap one is low-tech and looks both accurate and reliable ... and it'll be great to have after the fall of civilization.

Me: Well, OK, then [orders both].

Why I think I may have overcooked the custard:

I tend to use my Fluke infrared (IR) thermometer (and it lives on the kitchen island), as it's quick and extremely handy.  But after my first custard failure, I made it again, this time using TWO thermometers, the Fluke as well as a cheap candy thermometer, the kind with a dial and a probe that extends down into the custard that you clip to the side of your pan.  

I noticed that the Fluke tended to read significantly cooler than the candy thermometer, by about 7-8 degrees F.  But the nature of IR thermometers is that they measure surface temperature only.  You can hold the trigger and scan across the item's surface, and when you release the trigger, it'll give you an average of the surface temps, but it's still just surface temperatures.  The probe, on the other hand, is measuring (I think) an average temperature along its length below the surface.  

I cooked the custard until the IR readings were consistently 170F.  The probe also showed that it was around 170F by that point as well (why do they sometimes match, and sometimes not?), but it took significantly longer to get there.  So maybe I cooked it too long, or maybe it was much hotter than 170 near the bottom of the mixture, despite my constant stirring.  And custards need to be kept under 180-185F, otherwise the egg yolks do weird things.

Making custard with four
thermometers is kind of a pain