I’ve been firing up the Big Green Egg throughout winter and as the weather has started to get a little nicer I’ve been grilling even more. I’ve been really frustrated lately though with my grill not coming up to temperature as fast as I thought it should. I also have been getting some odd results. I recently put a couple of racks of ribs on and they came out really dry and overcooked. I had the temperature right the whole time, and couldn’t figure out what was wrong.

Then things got confusing. I took out my Thermapen and a couple of other thermometers and started getting really odd temps all over the grill. Today I fired up a pot of water to calibrate the thermometer that sits in the dome of the Big Green Egg. This is the one I use constantly to know the internal temperature of the grill.

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Whoa! That’s not just off, it’s horribly off. I was shocked that the thermometer was reading -60 °F lower than it should be. A quick turn of the nut on the back and it was calibrated!

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Why am I posting about this? It’s a really simple thing, but I bet a lot of people don’t do a calibration. Your out there grilling away and you need to know your temps. I’m not sure if being outside all winter causes the calibration to get all screwed up. Either way it was off so much that I was grilling at temperatures that were just way too hot.

I had the newly calibrated thermometer in tonight for some grilling and things were so much better. Lesson learned. Get a pot of water boiling and make sure all your thermometers and probes read 212 °F on the nose.