If everyone bought their food ready made from the supermarket then I would be out of a job. Who needs a recipe for pizza when you can pick up one made for you in a factory by people in white coats and hair nets, lovingly slipped into a box and all ready for you to take home? Who needs to know about how a mixture of flour and water and yeast and salt can be kneaded into a soft and air-filled dough, or which cheese melts most sensuously in the heat? And why would anyone need to know which anchovies, what tomatoes and how much basil to put in their topping? No one needs a cookery writer to tell them how to open a box. In fact I would be the one who needed to be shown exactly how to switch on a microwave. (No, seriously, I have never actually done it.)

Daft as it sounds, it never even crosses my mind to buy a roast dinner ready made or to pick up a chicken tikka masala out of a little plastic tub. When I walk into a supermarket I don't even glance at the rows of shepherd's pies and cauliflower cheese. The idea of not making my own supper seems completely alien to me. I can't remember the last meal I didn't cook from scratch. Cooking is just what I do, it's my thing, even when I come home so tired I can hardly stand, I somehow still make something to eat that doesn't involve taking fish and chips out of a box and warming them up in the oven.

Millions of people disagree with me. Sales of ready-made food may be down but supper from a box is still big business. Somewhere in all those ranks of slickly designed boxes must be something pretty special. So who better to find it than our favourite chefs, who know a good supper from a bad one?

We matched the chefs to the food, so they could compare it with the real version they make so brilliantly themselves. We fed them everything from top of the range to bargain bucket and from several of the best-known high-street names.

Some are made with ingredients that are Fairtrade or free range, sometimes organic and often using the same seasonings and spices we would use at home. Some are made on vast production lines and stirred in vats the size of the Isle of Man, while others are produced by little more than cottage industries. Our willing experts savoured the good, the bad and the downright disgusting.

So thank you, Angela and Anjum, Richard and Raymond, Giorgio and John and Eric. Thank you for tucking in to our bumper feast of instant suppers. (Sorry about the so-so ones and making you spit instead of swallow.) Thanks for finding the dinner-in-a-minute that everyone should know about and the TV supper that is worth three stars.

Thanks for giving the thumbs up to the dinner you don't have to peel or feel, slice or chop, stir or season. The meal that you can cook and eat with one hand tied behind your back. Or more likely holding the TV remote control. The sort of supper that would make a cookery writer redundant. Thanks a bunch.