About Brandon Harpster
Brandon Harpster is a Certified Executive Chef (CEC) and the National Corporate Chef for Training and Events at Rational USA, where he designs and oversees culinary training programs, runs Rational’s culinary academies, and leads demonstrations and events across the country. He came up through country clubs, restaurant kitchens, and culinary education, earning his ACF Certified Executive Chef credential and spending years as both an executive chef and a culinary instructor at the Great Plains Culinary Institute at Southeast Community College in Lincoln, Nebraska, before joining Rational. He is a self-taught butcher, a Best Chefs America honoree, and a Nebraska Restaurant Association Chef of the Year recipient. In his current role at Rational USA he serves as a bridge between the technology and the operators who use it, training chefs at every level on the iCombi Pro, iVario Pro, and iHexagon across real kitchen scenarios.
Episode Overview
In this episode, André Natera sits down with Brandon Harpster to talk about what connected kitchen technology actually changes for a working chef. The conversation opens with a brunch disaster: a steamship round that failed overnight at a country club, no monitoring, no alert, no one to intervene. Harpster uses that story to frame the entire case for connected cooking, and spends the rest of the episode proving it through specific, real kitchen applications rather than marketing language.
They go deep on the iCombi Pro, iVario Pro, and iHexagon across scenarios that any serious operator will recognize: delta-T roasting, overnight stock for clarity and yield with no one in the building, a 15-minute risotto that requires only three stirs and is a repeatable system rather than a shortcut, Peking duck skin development, brisket hybrid smoking workflows, zone heating, sous-vide-style cooking, and pasta-in-sauce preset functions. They also cover what Rational’s corporate chef network actually does, how the training academies are structured, and what a field role in culinary technology looks like for chefs who want to move off the line.
Topics covered in this episode:
- The overnight steamship round failure that made the case for connected cooking more powerfully than any demonstration
- How the iCombi Pro handles delta-T roasting, built-in resting cycles, and high-volume brunch egg production
- Running overnight stock on the iVario Pro for better clarity and yield with nobody in the building
- Why a 15-minute risotto that requires three stirs is a repeatable kitchen system, not a shortcut
- Peking duck skin development and brisket hybrid smoking workflows in a combi oven
- Zone heating, sous-vide-style cooking, and pasta-in-sauce preset functions on the iHexagon
- What Rational’s national corporate chef network actually does and how the culinary academies work
- What a career path in culinary technology looks like for chefs who want to move off the line
Guest
@brandon.harpster
@rational_usa
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