Christmas - The big annual celebration looms over the catering calendar – both a challenge and an opportunity. We track the trends and showcase the best new products and ideas to help take the worry out your menu planning.
Christmas is one of the most significant periods of the year for the hospitality industry. Christmas dinners, featuring turkey and all the trimmings, are among the most popular products largely due to the tradition and nostalgia associated with these dishes. While not the most complex cuisine, they offer a sense of tradition and nostalgia. The RATIONAL iCombi Pro and iVario Pro can replace a wide range of traditional appliances and replicate various cooking processes, including preparing everything needed to create a delicious turkey dinner.
For menu planning, operators can create and manage their recipe ideas digitally, transferring cooking programs to all networked RATIONAL cooking systems with a single click. This feature is ideal for operators with multiple locations, ensuring consistently high-quality results at every site. Recipe creation enables operators to easily develop and record recipe ideas, facilitating seamless production planning on a PC or laptop.
The ConnectedCooking digital network solution by RATIONAL includes a global recipe library offering inspiration from RATIONAL master chefs. This library features a recent addition of a festive Christmas chutney recipe for the iVario Pro, among many others.
Turkey can be notoriously challenging to cook properly, and many people have experienced tucking into a dry slice and having to compensate with extra gravy! This is where cooking with the iCombi Pro can make a significant difference. The intelligent iCookingSuite feature determines the optimal cooking method, ensuring a perfectly cooked turkey every time.
The iCombi Pro is even capable of operating without supervision, including overnight. With its low-temperature cooking function, the iCombi Pro excels at preparing a variety of meats to perfection—whether it's roast pork with crackling, roast beef, roast lamb, roast turkey, duck, or goose. Both large and small roasts can be cooked precisely to the desired specifications.
The operator can simply specify the desired browning and cooking level, and the iCombi Pro handles the rest. After preheating, the raw meat is placed in the cooking cabinet, where it is automatically browned. The cabinet temperature is then quickly reduced to gently cook the meat and hold it at the perfect temperature. This process ensures that even the toughest or driest cuts become tender and juicy.
The iProductionManager function not only increases productivity but also adds enormous flexibility to production schedules while also reducing running costs. The option of cooking different products at the same time in a combi steamer isn’t new, but
iProductionManager takes the whole concept to a higher level. As well as telling operators what products can be cooked together, it allows chefs to select whether they want all the food to be ready at the same time, or if they want it all to be cooked as quickly as possible, or if they want it cooked as energy efficiently as possible. This is particularly good for a Christmas dinner where there are lots of individual components.
There are also savings to be made, increasing profit margins. Cooking meat, such as turkey, in the iCombi Pro using its intelligent process can reduce shrinkage by up to 20%. Additionally, the intelligent cooking processes in both the iCombi Pro and the iVario Pro help prevent overcooking, ensure portion control, and minimise wastage.
These equipment pieces also contribute to energy savings, with the iVario Pro cooking up to four times faster than traditional methods and using up to 40% less energy.
The iVario Pro is ideal for creating a variety of dishes with ease, such as gravy and cranberry sauce. The largest model, the iVario XL, with a substantial volume capacity, is suitable for establishments catering to as many as 500 meals per day, making it perfect for large Christmas functions. With the optional pressure-cooking function, this can all be done up to 46% faster.
Additionally, the MyDisplay feature in RATIONAL cooking systems allows operators to customise the user interface according to their specific needs. This can be utilised so that kitchen staff only see the functions they need on any given production day. This ensures that even untrained staff can achieve the desired results after a short training period.
