I'll very likely get one of the IP's, as cooking ribs and other slow cooked meats do take a lot of time now, and pressure cookers are like playing with a bomb.
At the very least, good basmati is steamed - you only add enough water to cook the rice (you don't drain it afterwards), then bring it to the boil before simmering it at a very low heat. It's pretty hard to reliably get right - every time I use a new stove or pan or try to cook a quantity I don't often do is a gamble. If you mess up it's either crunchy or squishy.
I usually only buy the one type of rice, a short grain brown rice from SunRice in Australia, and usually only when it's on special.
Anyway, point being: I know I can cook this one particular type of rice to perfection in a saucepan with 1 volume-unit rice to 1.5 volume-units water. Bring it to a rapid boil for one minute, then wrap the whole pot in two dry cotton bath towels (hotbox), leave it for ~45 minutes.
Voila!
Also works with some short grain white rices, with 1:1 ratio and many fewer minutes in the hotbox.
Personally, I can't stand any long grain rice (Basmati, Jasmine, etc).
Side bonus: a lot of that nasty arsenic washes away instead of sticking to the rice and going in your body.
You're making assumptions that your definition of "perfect" is the same as everyone else's. There are cultural differences with respect to the preference of the actual texture and stickiness of the rice.
For example, my Chinese parents basically don't like the stickiness or texture of rice made by any other culture. It might be close minded, but it does illustrate that different cultures have different standards for what makes rice "perfect".
Measure and wash rice until the water runs clear.
Add twice as much water (by volume) as you have rice to a saucepan, and a bit of salt.
Boil the water.
Stir in the rice.
Cover with a glass lid (clear lid is important) and reduce to medium/low heat, the water should just barely be boiling.
Wait until the steam tapers off and you can't see the water layer anymore.
Carefully remove the lid, and start stirring the rice.
Continue to stir until the last of the water is absorbed / boils off.
I have a microwave rice cooker - doubles as a large bowl for eating, mixing, etc. Alton Brown would approve.
Yeah, for us in the west that's what it looks like, also many of us think 'rice is rice is rice'. But there's a huge variety all with different cooking needs, and there is a large difference between well-cooked and just-boil-until-it-looks-done rice.
But, as with most single-purpose appliances, rice cookers only make sense when you use it daily so that you can leave it on your counter top. Better rice cookers have start- and stop timers so that you can do long prep methods without having to think about anything.
I've never been to a Chinese home that didn't have a rice cooker (huge selection bias in there but still). If it were as useless as you say, a rice cooker wouldn't be a primary appliance in Asian households, the way a coffee machine or kettle is for us in the West (after all, why use those? you can just boil water in a pan).
That's a pretty fair statement. I'm of a Chinese background, and the only people I know who don't have rice cookers are people who don't cook rice often enough to merit one.
Also, I don't think I know any Chinese people who even bother cooking it the traditional way in a pot. My parents taught me how to do it when I was 10, but the only time I would ever do it that way these days is if I want the burnt crust at the bottom of the pot (sooo good when eaten with soup).
With the amount of rice we ate, it just wasn't practical to cook rice on the stove. We always had rice in the rice cooker (we didn't keep it warm though), if someone finished the last of the rice, they'd just add more rice and water, and turn the rice cooker on. We'd cook rice 2 or 3 times a day, it probably helped that we ate rice for 3 meals a day. Even when we moved down to 5 people, it was still so much more practical to use a rice cooker.
Anyway, my point is that if rice is your staple food, it makes sense to get a rice cooker. It's just that much easier, and saves a space on the stove. Just add rice, salt, and water, and press the start button. It means you can worry about cooking the rest of the meal, or even just go off and do something else and forget about the rice.
With a rice cooker you turn it on and forget about it; it always comes out perfect. When you do that every day, it's so very easily worth it.
I did, at one point, have a multi-purpose rice cooker that had all kinds of setting similar to an instapot. I could put rice, mean, veg and cook the whole thing without attending it. It was nice, but when it broke down I didn't replace it.
The high quality Japanese or Korean ones will be pressure cooked and cooked in a way that allows it to stay warm in the cooker for days. Not a single grain of rice will be stuck/inedible. If you get the cheap rice cooker, it'll burn, cook unevenly, go bad if left overnight in warm mode, etc.
If you eat rice 2-3 times a week, get a Zojirushi or a Cuckoo.