The problems I'm trying to solve are
-- knowing when my oven is preheated
-- crust burning during the final bake
I'm using cast-iron and clay bakers for the most part, and I use an IR thermometer on those with good results, so the conduction part of oven heat transfer I feel like I have under control. But I have no handle on the radiation and convection parts, and my oven's own readout is an underestimate with large variance.
It would be nice to have an external digital readout, something i can see without opening the oven. When I search, there's a category of remote barbecue thermometers which sound cool, though I'd probably lose the remote, Something with a sensor and cable and readout beside the oven would be fine. Any favorites?
OTOH it's also possible that the crust-burning problem is a sufficiently complex result of radiation and convection that no simple instrument will guide me, and I'll just have to watch and keep notes of settings. FWIW I have a 10 year-old 23" Gaggenau electric with a bewildering variety of settings; I usually use top plus-bottom heat w/o convection.
but I can help with the burning crust. First thing is to make sure the upper element is off when baking. When my oven was on the blink and the bottom element didn't work (didn't know that at the time), I burned a few loaves by turning on the top element.
The second thing is to provide some insulation between the bottom element and your pot. I do that by putting pizza stones on the shelf below the one I am baking on. My crusts come out dark but not burnt.
Hope this helps!
Colin, this seems to be what you're looking for: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/MASTECH-MS-6500-Digital-Thermometer-high-quality-precision-associate-with-hold-function/32264012378.html?scm=10…
It has a slim wire probe that can easily slip though the oven door, is pretty accurate (I haven't calibrated mine against a lab standard), reads instantaneously (2 readings per second), and is inexpensive. I use a binder clip to position the sensor in the air near the cooking area.
I can't comment about the burnt crust, though,
I just noticed that the thermometer in the link I posted is not available in the US, but here's where I bought mine.
https://www.sweetmarias.com/product/digital-thermometer-with-thermocouple
Same product, but a higher price. Still, not very expensive.
Many thanks for these ideas! I actually already have a thick baking stone low down and a rack of tiles up top; sometimes I worry that I've made the oven's airflow too weird by doing that. Re thermometers I should have thought of Sweet Maria's -- I roast coffee, and coffee roasting has a high level of geekery around temperature monitoring. "thermocouple" turns out to be a really useful search term.