On a business trip with Sammic representatives

By Nate Sanford; CFSP. Sales Development Manager

The first frozen flakes of snow have already begun to fall for some of us in the chillier states. On my recent business trip out to the intermountain states of Idaho and Utah, the mountain tops were beginning to wear their beautiful caps of pearl white snow. I would get a good chance to view the unique scenery as I joined my local Sammic representative Chef Zach Barker of IFE Intermountain Food Equipment, on a four-day sales seminar that was loaded with cooking demos.

Being the new guy on the block at Sammic, I had a lot to learn about all of the unique solutions that the global leader provides the restaurant and hospitality industry. I could think of no better person to learn some of the more advanced cooking skills for vacuum sealers, sous-vide, and vegetable preparation equipment, than from Chef Zach. Our first order of business was prepping our food for our first demo scheduled for lunch the next day. This is where Sammic first stepped in to make my life a whole lot easier. By using the right tools for the right job we were able to get things done quickly and consistenly. Setting up our CA-311 vegetable preparation machine with a dicing grid and slicing disc made fast work of our potato sides. What really made me happy was the fact that once all of the potatoes were cut, in a matter of seconds, I didn’t need to add them to water or spray them with an acid like lemon juice to keep them from oxidizing. Nope, all I had to do was bag them up and vacuum seal them.

That was a huge timesaver alone, but what we really needed to do was precook, or par-cook, our root vegetables. We were also going to serve infused carrots for lunch and those needed a little longer cook time than we were going to be able to pull off on site. That’s where Sous Vide cooking really came through for us.  We had two options, cook and chill the food the night before, essentially softening the product enough to where we just needed to get it back up to serving temperature, or cooking the product the day of service by dropping it in the sous vide bath well in advance of the lunch where we would only need to remove it and serve it at our convenience later.  Because in this case, we were acting more like caterers, we went with cooking the day before and reheating for service the day of service.

We made Pork Roulade, infused carrots, roasted potatoes, sous-vide pineapples, and they were ready at a drop of a dime. The combination of quick prep work with the vegetable dicing and vacuum packing, mixed with cook-chill cooking and sous vide retherming, really made for an exciting lunch that could be pulled off for a large group of people in a matter of minutes. Now that I knew the ropes, we started cooking for the rest of the demos where we served everything from stuffed chicken breast to BBQ ribs, and all of our sauces and sides. All of our guests were very happy to enjoy the wonderful food that Sammic had to offer.

Needless to say, I had a great time and owe special thanks to Zach and all of the team at IFE for all of their hard work. They have been Sammic representatives for years and do a great job spreading the word about how Sammic solutions can help save time and money in a kitchen while upping the food game to whole new levels. I look forward to my next journey and will definitely come hungry…

Thanks for reading!