Rice Cookers

[Timko]

Rice cookers, not rice burners, right?

[uNicedmeMan]

Rice cookers, not rice burners, right?

lol.
Yes Timko, rice cookers.

[jubuttib]

You can even make bread in them!

It's true, we tried. The recipe is available in one of the early volumes of the manga Yakitate! Japan.

[Monocacy]

. . . Cooking rice is a pain, it would be nice to have some waiting nice and hot for me when I was done with the meat/other stuff.

I hear that rice cookers are great, but I prefer to cook rice on the stovetop. We make rice several times a week, and the routine is pretty simple. For jasmine rice, rinse the grains in the pot until the water runs clear and then drain. Add 1.25 cups of water per cup of rice, bring to a boil, stir once, and then lower the heat and cook with the lid on for 16 minutes. The rice grains on top will stand on end if you do it right. This only requires a few minutes of active involvement, so it is easy to do while cooking the rest of the dinner.

If you want to get fancy, you can cook rice pilaf-style – fry dry rice in oil or ghee with aromatics (onions, garlic, cumin seed, cinnamon stick, cardamom, etc.), and then proceed as above. To jazz up the rice even further, substitute chicken stock or coconut milk for some or all of the water, and/or add a pandanus leaf or roasted chopped Poblano chiles.

Of course the best thing you can do for rice is serve it with Thai food.

[Blake_T]

If the rice was filthy the residue might burn a bit but never any rice and never if I washed the rice properly.

most people are too lazy to wash rice, myself included. washing it is the "correct" way to do it.

while washing it reduces the chance of burn, many of the cheaply made large capacity rice cookers available here will still burn it if you don't make X amount. i have a 12-cup that even with washing, will burn the bottom if i make less than 3 cups. i then bought a 3-cup that never burns it, even if i make a 1/2 cup.

certain types of rice are waaaaaay more dependent upon washing them before cooking them.

[Frank Delicious]

To keep smaller amounts of rice from burning in a larger rice cooker, you need to open it up and stir it a couple of times during cooking. That is how I get around it when making 3 or fewer cups in mine.

[Dig It]

Gotta give a shout out to the wife and I's rice cooker. It's such a BA machine. Neuro Fuzzy

[uNicedmeMan]

^^ That does look pretty BA!

[jubuttib]

Yeah, I thought about getting that, but the price tag (235 euros over here) buried that idea. Maybe in the future.

It was tested by a Finnish magazine called Tekniikan Maailma (World of Technology), which tests and reviews all sorts of things from cars and motorcycles through computers to kitchenware etc. They had to exclude the Zojirushi from the test proper, because it would have caused the second best cooker to only get 1 star (out of 5). It was also over twice as expensive as the other cookers. It and other high-end cookers are in a class of their own, no normal cookers can compare.

But yeah, I can recommend the Phillips (came second in the test btw), it's a 10 cup cooker that has yet to burn any rice, even with only 1 cup. I haven't tried half a cup, since I have no need for half a cup of rice. =)