It was an honor to collaborate with Chef David Bouley on this project and his longstanding work with RATIONAL combi ovens, from programming to recipe development. With references from the David Bouley Living Pantry Foundation , “David championed RATIONAL as essential to his culinary techniques and standards."
From the kitchen to the cutting edge.
Since bursting onto the New York dining scene in the ’80s, Chef David Bouley has captivated the culinary world. His famed restaurants have garnered numerous James Beard Foundation Awards and rave reviews from the New York Times, Zagat, and others. But it’s his belief in the healing power of food that put him on the cutting edge.
“I walked away from butter and cream in the mid-80s,“ says Bouley, whose experiments in nutrient-dense cooking began at the first restaurant to bear his name. “Bouley“ opened in TriBeCa in 1987, drawing Wall Street professionals and other demanding diners on the go. “New Yorkers don’t like to be slowed down,“ says Bouley. “They wanted energy to get back to work. So, I learned very quickly to take out the buttercream and work on the juices, and this evolved into very complex sauces that gave people lots of energy.“
In recent years, he’s expanded his interest in the healing power of food, creating the Doctor and Chef series at his newest endeavor “Bouley at Home,“ where he partners with health practitioners in search of many important answers. “What’s the function of food? And how deep can it go into our lives, giving us energy, a better night’s sleep or even deal with health challenges.“
Much of what he’s learned from those explorations is currently being distilled into a new book “The Living Pantry,“ which will give families the building blocks of healthy meals and offer a wealth of information gleaned from a lifetime on the cutting edge of the culinary arts. It’s the culmination of a journey that started on the small farm where his grandmother taught him to cook and led to a life at the forefront as a chef, innovator, and respected restauranteur. RATIONAL has been there for much of that, providing the tools that maximize consistency and productivity.
Tradition meets technology.
Bouley’s love affair with RATIONAL began the first time he used a combi to prepare rotisserie chicken instead of using conventional equipment. “We realized that the RATIONAL program was much more efficient,” says Bouley. “The moisture was unbelievable, the skin … everything we were looking to accomplish in a very expensive rotisserie, we were doing in the RATIONAL – with less labor, less cleanup, and in less time. So that’s when our attention went to RATIONAL.” The more he explored, the more he liked about a tool that both simplified and amplified his cooking. “We never would’ve have been able to embrace certain techniques, no matter how we manipulated the environment to accomplish a certain goal,” says Bouley. “RATIONAL makes it simple.”
The challenge:
Chef David Bouley wanted to improve the nutrient density and health benefits of his dishes.
The solution:
Bouley uses a RATIONAL combi oven to prepare rotisserie chicken and other dishes, which allow him to achieve better moisture and skin texture than with conventional equipment. It also helped him with the fermentation of black garlic, which required specific humidity levels to increase its nutritional value.
Customer benefit:
The RATIONAL combi oven simplifies and amplifies Bouley's cooking, allowing him to achieve consistent, high-quality results. It also provides efficiency in the kitchen with intelligent programming that allows for the simultaneous preparation of multiple dishes.
That includes the fermentation of black garlic, which can provide 100 times the nutritional value of regular garlic, but has to be carefully aged. “It was a real struggle for us to maintain a specific humidity for a certain period, so we use RATIONAL for that,“ says Bouley. “The cycles in the RATIONAL are way beyond our minds in terms of the results we can get. I’m still learning things I didn’t know that I could do with an oven.“ One thing that impresses Bouley most is the efficiency that RATIONAL brought to his kitchens. “This oven can do a program of two different dishes on each shelf, and it can tell us when those dishes are ready at different points,“ says Bouley. In the past, managing that same task would have required a carefully choreographed ballet with timers and complex logistics. Now, it’s all handled with intelligent programming, creating efficiencies that are crucial in a world recovering from a pandemic that closed countless restaurants and put many others on the edge.
“Initially, the RATIONAL was a workhorse. It was doing things for us that we couldn’t do in regular ovens. But now it’s driving lower food costs, lower labor costs, and giving us more consistent quality and service,“ says Bouley, adding that, after 30 years, he’s still exploring its potential. “We don’t know of any tool in our kitchen that supports us with the kind of efficiency that the RATIONAL oven does.“ And he looks forward to seeing where the future leads.
“We’re at a turning point. There’s no question about it. A company like RATIONAL realizes that kitchens are changing. Everything is changing. And they’re right there with that change,“ says Bouley. “It’s very exciting to be part of that.“