Tasting notes

Are old-fashioned cooks a thing of the past thanks to Thermomix?

Welcome to the kitchen of the future

I FIRST HEARD about this magical machine from a French friend, a cook so accomplished she makes her own foie gras, starting with a live duck. ‘Oh, le Thermomix!’ she cooed, ducking beneath home-made saucissons hanging from her ceiling. ‘C’est fantastique!’

Thermomix was created in 1971 by the German company Vorwerk, and the latest version takes the concept of a food processor to stratospheric levels. Plug it in and it will weigh, chop, heat, steam, blend, whisk and more. You have it demonstrated in your home by a technician, who teaches you its arcane ways and leaves you with an emergency phone number, should you have problems with your béchamel. It feels like joining a cult.

The Thermomix sat there for a few weeks, dominating our tiny work surface. Its buttons glowed kryptonite green while we tiptoed around it.

I enjoy cooking. To me, relaxing at home starts with putting on a pinny and chopping an onion. This leaves my husband slightly out on a culinary limb. His signature dish, enjoyed once a year on Christmas morning, is scrambled eggs.

But this weekend, he visited Thermomix’s website (connected to the machine via the recently launched Cook-key tech), selected his recipes and got cracking. He made pizza dough, both wholemeal and plain, for a family film-night feast. He did a vegetable pasta sauce. For the first time in our 12-year marriage, he turned up to dinner at my parents’ house on Sunday with a beautiful apple cake dusted with icing sugar (the Thermomix can take granulated and transform it into icing in mere seconds). This morning, I went to work fortified with a muesli smoothie that he and Thermomix cooked up together.

From being an alarming alien squatting on the worktop, Thermomix is fast becoming one of the family (with a Christmas invitation guaranteed). And I am increasingly redundant.