"I could never do French fries for a banquet without the SelfCooking Center," says Martin Pfefferkorn, executive chef at Grand Hyatt Atlanta. "They’d get soggy. If you cook them in the RATIONAL SelfCooking Center, they stay crispy for a half hour."
Just-right fries are but one of the many results the SelfCooking Center can produce. Its all-in-one capabilities are designed with easily programmable yet nuanced functions, all with chefs' needs in mind, as RATIONAL has been paying attention to chefs’ often overlooked or under-served needs for more than three decades.
“We’re not equipment manufacturers; we are solution providers,” says Steve Snitkin, RATIONAL’s head chef and sales manager. There are challenges in the industry, such as a chef needing to grill 1,200 steaks at once. We have a solution for that. Everything in our SelfCooking Center is based on giving the chef a real working solution.”
Programmed for Ease
Since launching its first combi-steamer in 1976, RATIONAL’s focus has generated innovations over the years, up to its SelfCooking Center, launched in 2004.
“We only make one product, which is the SelfCooking Center, so we focus all our efforts into that,” Snitkin says, adding that ease of use is a priority and a point of difference for RATIONAL equipment. “You can make a piece of equipment that makes a perfect roast or perfect chicken, but if it’s not easy to use, what’s the point?”
Pictograms on the SelfCooking Center’s control panel take the guesswork out of cooking. “If I want to make seafood, I hit a button that looks like a fish,” Snitkin explains. “From there, we focus on the process of cooking; there are many different ways to make seafood. You can bake it, pan fry it, steam it—choices come up when you hit the fish button.”
“All you do is select the product you’re cooking, and it goes into a sub-process of 57 different choices,” says RATIONAL Marketing Manager Vinod Jotwani. “So whether it’s one steak or 50, it’s going to adjust the climate, temperature, and time for you. It allows managers to spend more time managing their team, planning menus, purchasing, and other things. You don’t have to manually open the door, turn the pans, or flip the steaks like you do with traditional combi-steamers.”
The deliciousness is certainly in the details for any true chef, and Pfefferkorn says the efficiency RATIONAL provides doesn’t sacrifice quality but in fact helps ensure it.
“It’s phenomenal the way the programming works,” says Pfefferkorn, who uses three full-size and two half-size SelfCooking Centers in various applications across his property, including in the hotel’s restaurant, main banquet kitchen, and its separate kosher kitchen. “If you put a turkey in, for example, it starts out slow and gets hotter. You can cook a perfect turkey with RATIONAL [better than] with a regular convection oven, and it does it automatically. The program provides some steam so it doesn’t dry out, and at the end it gives some more heat so the turkey gets a nice crust on it.”
Even for large events, the SelfCooking Center can prepare the entire meal—meat, starches, and vegetables—all at once, in advance. Then at go-time, what’s served to guests is not just some hot-boxed relic of yesterday’s culinary genius. “The Finishing feature brings the temperature up for all items in eight minutes,” Jotwani says. “If the steak is cooked medium rare, it will still be medium rare when brought back up to serving temperature. Most chefs, if they don’t have a SelfCooking Center, have to cook and put all of the food into hot boxes; it’s dry heat, and it makes food tough. With our equipment, you can have, say, 100 plates in the rack, and in eight minutes it will be up to temperature and ready to garnish and serve.”
For Pfefferkorn, the SelfCooking Center is a key player property-wide. “In the restaurant, we do a lot of warming of plates overnight for our 24-hour room service operation,” he says.
Assessing F&B Needs
RATIONAL begins contemplating its designs by consulting with a network of more than 150 chefs, as well as talking with customers. New feature additions and tweaks continue to hone the SelfCooking Center to enhance ease of use and usefulness.
For example, 2009 saw the creation of the CareControl feature. “People with hard water issues in their areas always had challenges using combis or steamers,” says Snitkin. “Now, the SelfCooking Center is always a very clean, hygienic, and energy-efficient piece of equipment. It’s a major benefit, especially now with hotels wanting to go green.” Another benefit is time and labor saved in cleaning.
It’s all part of RATIONAL's ongoing dedication to making a comprehensive product ever more comprehensive. “What I like about RATIONAL over other equipment is you have it all in one machine,” says Pfefferkorn. “You have a steamer, an oven, a convection oven—everything.—TW
