This Clever Three-in-One Kitchen Gadget Is an Ace of Baste

Every time. Every damn time with these Joseph Joseph characters. They churn out these clever little design spins on common kitchen tools, so sensible and seemingly obvious that you want to laugh or cry or smack your own forehead or eat a meal prepared with said tools. They even done it to the humble baster.

The latest gem from the designers who brought us utensils with built-in feet and childproof knife blocks and pop-out ice cube trays is this: An Inception version of a turkey baster, with a meat thermometer and a cleaning brush stowed inside it. You may only use a turkey baster once a year, but meat thermometers and cleaning brushes, those are doo-dads for all seasons.

This wonder device is called the ThermoBaste. Now listen here: You can’t expect to baste, take the temperature of your meat, and somehow clean them both while all three tools are nested together. Instead, you’ll need to separate the three pieces in order to use them as intended. But in combining all three of those things into a culinary matryoshka doll, it condenses two of the most awkwardly shaped kitchen tools into one, freeing up some drawer space in the process.

As a bonus, it’ll also save you from jabbing yourself with a meat thermometer when you’re fishing around for kitchen utensils in the dark. You’re still on your own with the corkscrew.

While the baster looks a bit oversized to accommodate the other tucked-in tools, the meat thermometer looks pretty handy. It doesn’t just list the degrees in Fahrenheit and Celsius of whatever it’s plunged into, it also provides an on-dial cheat sheet of the appropriate internal temperatures of different kinds of meat. Poultry, lamb, well-done beef, medium beef, rare beef, pork, ham; there’s an entire petting zoo on there.

The cleaning brush is for the baster, so you don’t have to do that thing where you suck in soapy water and squirt it out with the baster 14 million times in order to clean it.

The price is very fair. Let’s break it down. Your average meat thermometer goes for less than $10, and you can expect to fork over $20 or so for a fancy digital one. Basters? Those’ll set you back $5 to $10 based on the build quality. And a decent skinny brush, that’s another $5 easy. At a cool $20, the ThermoBaste is right in line with a cacophonous baster/thermometer/scrubber combo. Good luck getting those other options to all snap together neatly.