LATER this month a Jersey inventor will collect the latest in a string of prestigious awards for an appliance, which she hopes will revolutionise life in the kitchen.

At a ceremony in London on 28 July, Subina Shami will receive the Global Women Inventors and Innovators Network exemplary diamond award for her cuisine machine, an automated counter-top appliance which cooks complicated recipes, using fresh ingredients, at the touch of a button.

Mrs Shami, a former accountant who worked for the Treasury, has already seen her prototype design recognised in the European Product Design Awards, the British Invention Show Awards and the Good Design Awards.

She describes the cuisine machine as ‘the future of cooking’, saying: ‘We shouldn’t be standing there over a hot stove. With this, you don’t have the need for a hob because there’s a sauté function. It also steams, fries, pot roasts and can provide the dry heat of an oven. It gets you back the time you were spending in the kitchen and it will produce food that is perfect every time.’

What distinguishes Mrs Shami’s invention from traditional multi-cookers is that it not only controls the pressure, temperature and method of cooking but also introduces different ingredients separately into the cooking cycle in recognition of their different characteristics.

Whereas a cook might have to create a dish in stages, returning to the kitchen to add ingredients such as vegetables ,which require shorter cooking times, the cuisine machine uses pre-programmed electronic recipe cards which replicate that process automatically.

It was back in 2009 that Mrs Shami found herself lamenting the fact that her weekend would be spent largely toiling in the kitchen, creating recipes that would require a series of intricate steps that were unavoidably time-consuming.

‘There was a moment when I said “I wish I had a machine that would just do it all for me”. I thought there must be something out there but [other products] had not yet appeared and, anyway, normally in cooking there are three or four steps when you have to add something. It was that bit that was driving me up the wall,’ she explained.

Taking her concept to designers 4D Products Ltd, she supervised the creation of the award-winning prototype which demonstrated that a device with several pods, containing the different elements that constitute a tasty meal, could be made to follow pre-determined sequences to mirror the skill of the chef.

Mrs Shami explained that automation not only saved time but also helped to prevent waste. She added that, assuming the ingredients were properly loaded, the machine could achieve a consistency of result that would otherwise require continuous monitoring in the kitchen.

Her next step is to seek a manufacturer who will turn the prototype – made with off-the-shelf components – into a bespoke product for the domestic, and potentially also the commercial, markets.

‘Now I need to make connections,’ she said. ‘People need to get rid of the notion that an inventor is a mad scientist. They need to see this as a real person with an ambitious idea, a lifestyle-changing appliance. I want this to be the next washing machine or dishwasher. This needs to be a breakthrough thing which is sustainable.’

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