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For Chain Restaurants, Consistency Is Key

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Technology enhancements have enabled chain restaurants to achieve perfect results every time, which is important when operating multiple locations across the country. Imagine ordering a grilled chicken sandwich at your favorite eatery while traveling only to find it tastes nothing like what you’ve experienced back home.

Chain restaurants do all they can to deliver consistency meal after meal, day after day, year after year. Technology plays a big part.

With the Hobart Combi® Oven, you can program precise cooking consistency into every kitchen in your chain. Offering three cooking modes—steam, convection or a precise combination of both—the Combi can be programmed with up to 100 recipes that anyone on the staff can operate simply by selecting the product name and pressing “Start.”

The convection mode enables you to cook with dry heat, with an option to inject steam at any time with the touch of a humidifier button. The convection method is ideal for pastries and breads, glazing and coloring.

The steam mode cooks with fan-assisted steam up to 212 degrees Fahrenheit—great for fish, shellfish, rice, vegetables and meats.

Or you can prepare meals using the combination mode, which lets you cook in convection mode while maintaining the humidity levels you want from 0 percent to 100 percent, ideal for cooking poultry or rethermalizing products.

Not only does the Combi let you produce a wide variety of meals, but it is also simple to use, enabling you to customize cooking to ensure consistent and repeatable cooking results with every operator.

Controlling food moisture and results is simple because of Hobart’s easy-to-use controls and programmable settings for true recipe repeatability. The Combi control panel is self-diagnostic, which makes it easy to customize oven modes and phases to cook any recipe in any quantity to perfection. Up to 100 different customized recipes using 10 different cooking phases in any sequence you want can be named and saved in the Combi oven. So the next time an operator prepares a dish, he or she just has to select the name of the product, because all the cooking modes are set and ready to go.

To guarantee that the temperatures of the recipe you select remain consistent, Hobart added a water-cooled control board. This independent control board results in a more reliable and consistent service life of the control board. Heaters are activated through water-cooled solid-state relays that have no moving parts, no arcing and no noise as with traditional contactors. This technology provides increased reliability and better working conditions, since the relays can be switched on and off at a higher rate than electromechanical contactors.

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Chain-wide consistency is even easier with the optional Hobart Combi Barcode Scanner. It lets you create a virtually infinite number of unique barcodes, each one containing a specific recipe. An operator simply scans the barcode and presses “Start” on the control panel.

The accompanying software guides users through up to 10 phases of a recipe, including cooking mode, temperature, length of cooking time, humidity level and fan speed.

Using this software even lets you program recipes based on manufacturer instructions and tie the instructions to the barcode on the packaging. This system enables operators to simply scan the packaging barcode using the provided hand-held scanner, which automatically loads the recipe settings and starts the oven in preheat mode for that particular product.

You can print custom recipe sheets with menu item name, recipe program cooking phases and barcode. This feature eliminates the need to scroll through the Combi’s control panel or push multiple buttons for operation, making it even easier for operators to use the oven. Just point and shoot.

Having the cooking instructions tied directly to a barcode allows for repeatable and consistent results with limited effort.

The ease of scanning a barcode for cooking instructions basically eliminates the need to train operators on the Combi. The scanner automatically transfers the recipe to the Combi and starts the oven in the preheat mode.

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The Combi oven was built to not only increase versatility and consistency but also to save you energy and money.

When the Combi oven reaches the set temperature, it automatically reduces to half power in order to reduce energy consumption and lower energy costs. It can also be set to automatically preheat so that it is ready to go first thing in the morning to decrease downtime of staff and equipment.

Ensuring that you get the most from the heat you are paying for, the Combi has super-insulation properties that direct heat to stay inside the oven, not outside, saving you energy and money and maintaining temperature levels to produce the highest quality product.

Learn more about Hobart’s Combi Oven and how to help increase product consistency.