Gastronomic meals used to necessitate an early-morning trip to the market followed by hours of painstaking labour in the kitchen.

No longer. France’s top female chef is promoting a machine that turns vacuum-packed capsules into gourmet dishes at the press of a button.

Anne-Sophie Pic, the only French woman to boast three Michelin stars, says ChefCuisine will enable the most ham-fisted of amateur cooks to produce dishes worthy of her illustrious restaurant in Valence, central France.

What is claimed to be the world’s first fully automatic haute cuisine machine will, she says, have the same impact on cooking as Nespresso did on coffee.

Detractors have denounced the £199 Chinese-made appliance as a nightmarish object likely to undermine French cooking skills and destroy the nation’s gastronomic heritage.

They say that it comes amid the alarming spread of projects designed to fool French families into believing that gastronomy can be quick and easy.

ChefCuisine, which was developed by Nutresia, a Swiss start-up, resembles a coffee capsule machine and functions in much the same way — except that it uses plastic packets containing vacuum-packed dishes created by Pic.

Each packet has a microchip that tells the machine how long it needs to be cooked, and at what temperature: suprême de volaille for 15 minutes at 63C, turnip fondant for 12 minutes at 83C, and chicken juice with date chutney for eight minutes at 68C, for instance.

Users have nothing more strenuous to do than to place an online order for the food capsules before putting them in the machine, filling it with water, pressing the on-off button, and waiting.

Those who want to impress their dinner guests can use the pipettes and the pastry bags supplied as accessories to make pretty patterns with reheated sauces and purées.

The dishes are sophisticated: foie gras with lemon confit for 12, for instance, or beef fillet with soya honey, mungo beans and ginger and crunchy vegetables for 16.

Pic claims that they are the nearest thing yet to home-made haute cuisine since the food is pre-cooked following her own recipes, delivered within 24 hours and then reheated with restaurant-style precision.

“When the cooking is controlled so that you reach an exact temperature, it offers perfect textures, unequaled taste and a rigorous quality,” the chef said.

La Tribune de Genève daily newspaper described the result as “quite convincing”. It said that the cauliflower cream was unctuous and the scallops “firm under the teeth”, while the association of foie gras with lemon and pear “works well”.

Yet there are no desserts, since Nutresia was unable to reproduce the necessary textures, and the project as a whole has proved to be controversial.

“This seems to me to be a very bad idea,” said François-Régis Gaudry, a French food critic who hosts a popular radio show on France Inter, the stateowned station.

He said that ChefCuisine, which is on sale in France, Belgium and Switzerland, was among a host of schemes designed to “externalise restaurants and to give gourmets the impression that they have nothing else to do than to open their mouths”.

Gaudry added: “People are being asked to live in a totally hermetic world where meat comes in a plastic packet. If this continues, we won’t know what a cow looks like in 15 years’ time.”

The promoters of similar projects argue that they meet a demand for high-quality meals in a society where families have little time to cook.

However, Gaudry countered: “How much time do we spend on our smartphones? Why not spend that time cooking? Wouldn’t it be better if all those people who take photos of themselves and put them on Instagram went to a cheese shop instead to find out what a good camembert is?” Pic rejected his criticism, saying that her aim was to “encourage the French to cook and to democratise cuisine at home”. She added: “There are moments when you want to cook and you have time for it, and there are moments when you lack time but when you don’t necessarily want to sacrifice your desire to eat well.”

Haute cuisine at the push of a button

Crunchy parsnip crisps with six-spice mignonette. 12

Rolled fillets of sole with caramelised chicory and tonka beans with shellfish sauce. 16

Scallops with semisalted butter, lentil stew and velouté with sweet spices. 16

Pigeon seared with voatsiperifery pepper and root vegetable dices with wellseasoned cinnamon sauce. 16
Caption: Anne-Sophie Pic supplies dishes for the ChefCuisine