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I'm looking around for other, newer temperature sensing technology, beyond the inserted thermoprobe. I bake cookies (hundreds and hundreds rolled) and like to monitor the internal temperature of the cookie, so I insert a probe into one dough, and monitor from there. Is anyone familiar with temperature sensing instruments, meant for use in the oven and for baking, perhaps already utilized in the mass production industry?

For every oven batch that I make, I lose 1 cookie -- the "sacrificial cookie" which held the probe. The cookie lost is partly good because I get to taste one of each batch, but then again I already know if a batch is good or not anyway, so the sacrifical cookie is necessarily a 1/16 percentage loss/wastage.

I wonder if there's some IR tech that I can attach to elements of my oven, maybe even come with datalogging features. Furthermore, I'm using just a regular, 5-rack home oven right now. Perhaps late this year I will upgrade to a professional oven -- are there any brands that support data-driven baking?

Any clues would help! Thanks!

wearashirt
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    Can you clarify what you're actually trying to accomplish? Why do you need to take the temperature instead of just watching for another sign of doneness? (I'm asking partially because I doubt you can get the internal temperature without poking in - IR sees the surface not the center - so you might want to look for solutions that don't involve knowing the internal temperature.) – Cascabel Feb 13 '16 at 17:18
  • Yeah, I know the IR can only go that far... I do measure doneness for consistency. I even weigh bits of dough before rolling them together. – wearashirt Feb 13 '16 at 17:34

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Internal temperature will always mean something has to be inside the baked good. If it is a probe remaining in it during baking, make sure it is LIGHT, because otherwise it will become a heatsink and influence the measurement. Scientists would probably use bare or glass-beaded thermocouples (wiring these up correctly is not completely trivial).

The problem with IR thermometers (and thermal imagers too) is that the sensors themselves like to be kept cool, the best of such instruments actually cool the sensors actively - so no putting them inside an oven easily. At the same time, most materials that could be used for a window to let the thermal radiation but not the heated air through are expensive (germanium etc) and/or hard to handle (table salt) - normal glass will appear black/opaque on a thermal imager, normal metal will be a mirror. And inside an oven, you will need a sturdy window that won't eventually be heated through in continued operation...

rackandboneman
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  • Any suggestions for such thermocouples? I have bare ended thermocouples. Just kind of unsavory burying them inside a dough -- though this will spare me the sacrificial cookie. – wearashirt Feb 15 '16 at 16:14
  • Glass beaded for extra crunch... but seriously, you indeed wouldn't want to eat a cookie that had anything with non-food safe solder in it :) – rackandboneman Feb 15 '16 at 20:17