Brandon Harpster is the National Corporate Chef for Training and Events at RATIONAL USA. He trains chefs across the country, runs RATIONAL's culinary academies, and develops cooking programs that translate connected kitchen technology into repeatable, scalable results for working operators.

This episode starts with a brunch disaster. A steamship round failed overnight at a country club, no monitoring, no alert, no way to intervene. Harpster uses that story to frame the entire case for connected cooking, and then spends the next hour proving it.

• How the iCombi Pro handles delta-T roasting, built-in resting, and consistent brunch egg production at volume
• How the iVario Pro runs overnight stock for better clarity and yield with no one in the building
• How a 15-minute risotto program that requires only three stirs is a repeatable kitchen system, not a shortcut

André Natera and Brandon Harpster cover the iCombi Pro, iVario Pro, and iHexagon across real kitchen scenarios including Peking duck skin development, brisket hybrid smoking workflows, zone heating, sous-vide-style cooking, and pasta-in-sauce preset functions. They also discuss what RATIONAL's corporate chef network actually does, how the training academies work, and what a field role in this industry looks like for chefs who want to move off the line.

RATIONAL

• RATIONAL USA Linktree → https://linktr.ee/rational_usa
• RATIONAL USA Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/rational_usa/
• Chef Brandon's Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/brandon.harpster/
• RATIONAL ChefLine → https://www.rational-online.com/en_us/customercare/contact-us/chefline/ | 866-306-2433

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