“I like smarter, forward thinking kitchens,” is not necessarily what you’d think the chef and owner of a homey, burger-barbecue restaurant on a lonely strip of Route 15 in Leesburg would say about the future of cooking. But Rich Rosendale’s Roots 657 isn’t just a rural mom and pop shop.
Rosendale, a Certified Master Chef, ran the kitchen at the tony Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia and competed for the United States at the 2013 Bocuse d’Or, the most prestigious cooking competition in the world. Which is why it makes sense that Rosendale teaches two-day sous vide workshops, classes on the science of barbecue and weekend seminars titled “Chasing Excellence” priced at $1,250. He lends his name to high-end outdoor cooking equipment line Arteflame ($2,450) and the professional-grade Pacojet used for micro-purees ($5,570).
Officially launching this month, the Combivac Rosendale Innovation Line is a Henkelman vacuum sealer pre-programed with Rosendale’s sous vide recipes. Want to make bread? Seal dough in the vacuum pack and click the “knead” button and it will use 20 pounds of pressure to develop gluten. Want to tenderize chicken? Seal the meat in the vacuum pack and click “tenderize” and the meat will blow up like a balloon, stretching the cell structure and breaking down collagen and connective tissue. It can also marinate meat, blanch vegetables and keep fresh that hunk of bovine from the cow-share.
“I like anything that I can, kind of, control the outcome,” says Rosendale. And this precise, mechanized type of cooking minimizes kitchen disasters, as long as we know what button to push. // Starting at $6,000
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