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Mass producing the most expensive rice cooker [video]

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126 pointszdw226 comments

I have a midrange Zojirushi rice cooker, a Vermicular Musui Kamado cast iron induction cooker, and a Kamado-san double-lid donabe rice cooker, all from Japan.

The Zojirushi makes respectable rice with minimal effort, as in we're about to walk the dog but we need to set up rice for dinner.

The Musui Kamado is a dramatic upgrade over an Instant Pot for every use except pressure cooking, for which we prefer a stovetop Fissler pressure cooker. Carefully following directions, it makes better rice than the Zojirushi. We use it whenever we want a feedback loop for fixed temperature, not unattended flame, such as cooking beans or stews. For tacos, I have to remember to transfer the cooked nixtamal corn for fresh masa, in time for my wife to start beans.

The Kamado-san double-lid donabe rice cooker takes the most care, and makes in my opinion the best rice, with a controllable bit of scorch as desired.

At home, out of expediency we use the Zojirushi to make our rice. I find myself avoiding meals that involve rice, out of boredom. In my work apartment, I haven't touched the Zojirushi or Musui Kamado for rice since adopting the Kamado-san donabe, and I look forward to rice.

If all sushi bar rice tastes the same to you, stick to the Zojirushi. If only food at the limits of your abilities captivates you, get a Kamado-san donabe. The Musui Kamado is the most versatile compromise. There's no novel physics here; its edge over both a Zojirushi and an Instant Pot can be explained by its precision-machined cast iron pot, of a better quality than Le Creuset or Staub (I have all three).

https://www.vermicular.us/shop/musui-kamado

https://toirokitchen.com/collections/unique-style-iga-yaki-d...

I appreciate that there are higher end devices but as someone who can definitely tell the difference between different sushi bar rice, I'm still satisfied with my Zojirushi rice cooker.

#metoo

We are a Chinese family (well except me) and a low/mid-range zojirushi gets the job done. Rice is important, but beyond getting the dryness and fluffiness right (don’t add too much water, use Thai longer grain rice), I’m not sure are eating habits would improve with much higher end rice cooking tech.

I also appreciate sushi bar rice, but it is something to have out rather than eat in. I guess if I was cooking more Japanese rather than Thai rice it would be different.

I have a rice cooker function on my instapot and never used it. I still don’t get why people buy these one off appliances like rice cookers. Making rice on the stove isn’t a huge inconvenience, pretty foolproof in fact. Once its set up you can walk away and do other things too.

> one off appliances

I have an instant pot as well. If I have to cook myself, I put everything I have got rice, lentils, chicken bullion powder, frozen chicken breast, frozen vegetables, cut pieces of carrot, red chili powder, ginger powder, garlic powder, black pepper, the works everything goes in the instant pot and I go to my MS Teams meetings. Food cooks and goes into "keep warm" setting.

In fact, that's quite literally what I did almost every morning for a bit last year when I was by myself. However, "normal people" in my family refuse to eat this even though I assure them it is perfectly edible.

It is perfectly rational to want to minimize the amount of time you spend cooking.

Edit: the rice cooker inner pot that I have is non-stick and is scratched up beyond all recognition but still they prefer using that to cook rice over my instant pot (with a superior stainless steel inner lining).

Are they concerned about bacterial growth? As long as you hit the critical temperature and time during cooking, extended warmth should be fine, right?

You might need an agar plate experiment to convince them, hah.

It's probably more about texture.

I'd assume at least some of those ingredients are overcooked, unless OP carefully chose that particular combination (and used frozen chicken).

The "OG tv dinner" / "what can be cooked in the same time" problem has always fascinated me. I expect somewhere on the Internet there's a list of combinations and cooking methods.

I had the same issue with crock pot meals and instant pot meals. The biggest culprit for me is a homogeneous texture (I have the same annoyance with making stuff in higher end blenders). You'll notice "high end" recipes suggest something to change up the texture; like add something crunchy after cooking. I think that makes a huge difference.

The whole point of this exercise is to be ideally no effort or if not low effort. Cooking multiple dishes is out of scope here. The chicken is indeed frozen chicken breast from Sam's club or Costco depending on which membership I have.

Interestingly enough, the longer I cook, the dryer the chicken feels. At some point, the whole thing becomes one mess except the chicken withdraws and feels very dry. It isn't supposed to be a fancy feast. All I'm saying is it is an option for when we don't want to actually put effort into cooking.

In some households, rice cookers are somewhat of a religious / commitment based relationship. The one that has always provided the cooked rice will continued to be trusted to provide the cooked rice. And it shall not be tossed aside when a more complex or shinier model is available. Almost like a favorite cup or bowl.

A colleague described to me after his time living in Japan encountering wonderful single-box puddings that could be prepared in a rice cooker. Unfortunately the rice cooker in a Japanese household is for cooking rice. Not for cooking puddings. The product probably failed.

s/bullion/bouillon

Semi off topic. If you have really ripped up non-stick. Probably worth getting rid of it especially if you have kids (not saying you do). The risk of chunks of stick coating being carcinogenic seems to be trivially mitigated by replacing the object.

100% with you. I’m no pro, but my stainless pot rice is basically perfect. Only thing I’m not great at is seasoning it like sushi places do.

> I still don’t get why people buy these one off appliances like rice cookers.

I can set a timer so the rice is ready first thing in the morning. My Zojirushi can cook a variety of rice techniques, like gaba brown which takes 3.5 hours. And after it is cooked, it will keep the rice warm for days, which is great for meal planning.

That seems like a recipe for food bourn illness - does it keep it hot enough to keep the rice outside the "danger zone"?

It should boil while cooking (I've never monitored exact rice cooker temps, but... boiling), which would sterilize the inside of the pot.

For the primary worry of bacillus cereus, it looks like there are some interesting heat susceptibility chances introduced even to spores after initial heat treatment. See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC239763/

Instant Pot keep warm is at least ~40°C (?), usually a good bit higher, which should be in the 45°C+ range to kill weakened spores.

So, maybe op isn't flirting with much danger?

If anything, I don’t do that because it makes your rice dry and not delicious.

I've been cooking regularly (3-5/wk) for 15 years and I hate making rice on the stovetop. Maybe I'm just secretly a terrible cook, but at best my success rate with stovetop rice is 50%. The other half the time it's either under or overcooked, and once I've opened the lid to evaluate I've never been able to "fix" it. Maybe all my stovetops have somehow been more irregular than yours.

Thus, I've used rice cookers for most of those 15 years. The $15 no-name brand works great! Never under or over-cooks the rice! I have the Zojirushi Fuzzy now, and I love it. I find its rice slightly better than the bargain-bin rice cooker made, and I'm spoiled to it now.

Generally I'm also somewhat dismissive of one-use appliances. But for me, a rice cooker is a must-have if I'm making rice with any regularity. It takes up maybe a cubic foot of space, stores really easily when it's not being used, and is pretty easy to use and clean. I wish all my small appliances were so convenient (where do people store such tall blenders?!).

Have you tried the "cook it like pasta" method? I never had consistent success with the traditional way, but abandoning all timing and measurement in favor of simply pouring some rice in a pot full of salt water, boiling until it gains the right texture, then straining has led to reliable satisfaction.

I can make perfect stovetop rice 100% of the time, if I'm paying attention. If I'm cooking for guests, that's what I'll do. Thing is, I'm an extremely distractable person, and I've burned my rice more times than I can count.

My little zojirushi lets me get some rice started, go on a bike ride, forget about the rice, watch a youtube video, send some emails, remember the rice in a sudden panic, and happily find that it still came out nearly perfect.

Plus the Zojirushis last forever. We're about year 20 of ours.

Their batteries, however, do not. Apparently on the model we have it requires quite a bit of disassembly and it's soldered in. In Asia it's expected to just be plugged in all the time and so the battery is just backup for when the power goes out. We, however, don't make rice all that often and so it gets put away after use.

I haven’t figured out how to change the time on my rice cooker anyways, and I’m pretty sure much of Asia (at least surely in China) will unplug rice cookers not in use (we got power outlets with switches).

And if you put in the correct rice to water ratio, it will be perfect.

    inner_pot_weight = input("How much does your inner pot weigh: ")
    RiceWeight = input("How much does your rice weigh in grams: ")

    water_amount = (int(RiceWeight) \* .19) + int(RiceWeight)
    total_pot_weight = int(inner_pot_weight) + int(RiceWeight) + int(water_amount)

    print(f'You will need to add {water_amount:.0f} grams of water, and your total pot weight will be {total_pot_weight} grams.')
    print("Set your pressure cooker to white rice, and do a natural release after 10 minutes.")

Add water until it is one finger segment (the first bend point on your index finger) above the rice. No other weights or measures necessary.

Maybe a rice cooker doesn’t make sense for most westerners but for Asians it is typically a must. I wouldn’t be surprised if many homes in Japan are using their rice cooker more than coffee machine - another one-off kitchen gadget that everyone more or less can agree is a kitchen stable.

In Asia you wouldn’t have a coffee pot but you would probably have an electric kettle.

Isn’t not having a kettle an American thing?

I think so. I didn’t see any in American hotels until about 10 years ago.

If you make rice everyday, you won’t be able to convince your Chinese wife to ho with a stove top method. Besides, even a pressure pot would take up some counter space, so you aren’t losing much.

What works for me in the instant pot: 1 cup rice to 1.25 cups water, set it to pressure cook 4 min, then wait 10 min, then release pressure. I get consistently decent rice this way, it’s not the parameters the manual recommends. If I follow the manual I get overcooked mushy porridge instead of rice.

One generally applicable reason is that you can make a few cups and it will be fine in the rice cooker for days. Pretty convenient.

A more personal reason is that I don't want to cook anything an instapot can cook except rice, so it doesn't add any value compared to a rice cooker.

That's a lot of nice kitchen gadgets you got there.

Thanks for the advice! I wanted to buy a Zojirushi, but teflon is a big no-no for me. What are the options for a rice cooker without teflon/aluminum?

"The Musui Kamado['s edge over its competition is] its precision-machined cast iron pot"

First time I went to Tokyo about 17 years ago, I specifically went shopping for the most expensive rice cooker. At that time, being dink’s, it would have been a fun souvenir. What I ultimately discovered as the most expensive rice cooker in the highest end department stores at that time, was a rice cooker made by Mitsubishi, where the cooking bowl was a machined chunk of graphite. Ultimately I wasn’t confident it would work in the US without a huge transformer, so I opted against it. Ended up buying a National (Panasonic) which has served me for over 15 years. Loved it so much, that I started giving them as wedding presents. Only one couple asked to exchange it… they’re divorced. Maybe a sweet rice cooker would have saved their marriage.

What was the model of Panasonic you bought? Sounds like a good alternative to preventive marriage counseling

SR-MM10NS

I expect the Zojurushi has equal marriage protective qualities.

Can we talk about rice cooker UX for a second?

I own a mid-level Zojirushi and it makes fine rice. No better or worse than the cheap Target rice cooker I had before, or the slightly less cheap Ninja pressure cooker that also made rice. Definitely better than stovetop, worse than good Asian restaurants.

But the Zojirushi stands out to me in terms of how user-unfriendly it is to a westerner...

First, it comes with its own rice measuring cups, because a Zojirushi cup isn't the same as an imperial cup. Which is kinda strange to begin with, because isn't it just a ratio of rice to water?

But there's not just one mismatched measuring cup, there's two. One is green and one is white, and the green one is for rice that isn't pre-washed, but that isn't labeled in English anywhere. And what is rice washing anyway?

Then there's the control panel UI. You have to choose between white rice, brown rice (that's fine), and also GABA rice and quick rice. What the heck is GABA and why would I want slow rice if there's a quick rice? And what if I want quick brown rice? It's not possible.

Once you hit start, no timer is present. You have no idea how long it's going to take (turns out, about an hour). How is it that this brand, with its special measuring cups and precise water lines, can't tell me how long it's going to take, but the ninja multi function pressure cooker could tell me down to the second as soon as I hit start?

As much as I appreciate good rice, using this appliance is such a cognitive burden that I keep wanting to replace it. I still use this thing every week, but it annoys me every time. I constantly think about selling it and getting a simpler Western model instead just because it's so complex and overengineered. I'd much rather suffer a 10% degradation in output quality if that means the controls could be simplified to just white/brown & start, with a built-in timer.

Does something like that exist?

Why does Zojirushi make it so complicated? Do the Japanese prefer having more options to tweak? (Reminds me of my old Casio watches). Is this a broader cultural preference, or just something special about this one brand?

Not defending the UX, it’s trash. But it starts showing you a timer when it’s more certain (usually around the 6-8 minute mark). I switched from a zojirushi to a Tiger from Costco, and it cooks the rice in half the time, but it has the exact same issues since it’s Japanese (separate measurement cups, no timer until it’s almost done) and the seals collect a lot more water than the zojirushi did. The rice comes out better and quicker though. I do think my zojirushi was broken because the rice kept getting worse and worse before I replaced it.

>And what is rice washing anyway?

There's an argument that you should wash your rice before you cook it to remove contaminants, particularly arsenic, which is a common soil contaminant.

It also removes starches from the rice, which can result in a cleaner/less sticky pot of rice where the individual grains are better defined.

I would avoid any rice grown in the United States if you’re concerned about arsenic levels.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1892142/

Seems like organic rice grown in California is actually lower than the average levels in many other countries?

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Arsenic-levels-mg-kg-in-...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187853521...).

I don't think simply washing rice appreciably reduces arsenic levels. It's just to get rude rid of the loose rice flour that grinds off during shipping/handling

Maybe it's your model? My Zojirushi came with a single clear measuring cup (which is actually just 6 US fluid ounces), the instruction manual gives a quick explanation of the various modes such that I don't find their presence burdensome, and the displays an estimated time right away (which is nice as some of the cooking modes take wildly longer). I'd never cooked much rice at home because I never got good results when I tried with the stove, and this turned it into a solved problem. I'm sure a $20 model could have gotten me 80% of the utility, but gestures vaguely at overwhelming consumer abundance.

(edit: reading another comment, turns out that plastic cup is one gou which is 6.10 fl. oz)

Maybe! I'd much rather have the simpler model, but their website wasn't very clear about what has what either, especially in terms of UX.

Alternatively, as we do in our (mostly) Chinese household:

Put rice in rice cooker. Rinse the rice and pour out water until it isn't cloudy. Add water to the depth of one thumb digit. Hit cook button, then ignore it.

Brown rice, white rice, whatever, all the same.

I'd have to check if we're still using a zojirushi or tiger, or are using a Korean cuckoo now.

> How is it that this brand, with its special measuring cups and precise water lines, can't tell me how long it's going to take, but the ninja multi function pressure cooker could tell me down to the second as soon as I hit start?

Well that one, cus they know people will just eyeball a thumb digit of water. So it won't know until it gets closer to done.

That's the kind of simple rice cooker I had growing up, too, and my parents used similar methods of estimation. It turned out fine and was much, much easier to use.

I remember the first time we got a Zojirushi hot water dispenser, and even then it was like "Wait, you have to push these tiny buttons in what order again?" Whereas the previous cheap one we had a giant, easy to use button front and center.

Maybe it really is a cultural difference...?

To be clear, we don't have a simple rice cooker. We have one of these terrible UX rice cookers with a shit ton of buttons and settings.

But we ignore all that and just do the thumb-level of water and hit the button that says cook (and also says like three other things too, but whatever). We ignore the other buttons.

> Once you hit start, no timer is present. You have no idea how long it's going to take (turns out, about an hour).

The rice cooker doesn't know either, it will take whatever is needed to take. Short of putting an extensive sensor array and ask you for the kind of rice you put in it, there's probably no way to actually predict it.

On the quick/normal setting, they taste different. My best image would be on black tea: you can use 95C water or near 100C water, one is quicker than the other to fully extract the flavor, but won't result in the same profile (you might actually prefer the quicker one, your choice)

On the UX...welcome to a world where you buy products of different cultures.

If that helps, many people don't actually follow the dosing cup to the letter and adjust the amount of rice and water to their taste, relative the rice we're using at that time after a few tries (at least I do, and so does anyone I talked to), so there is no guideline that would help us.

I'd perhaps compare it to coffee, there are machines doing it all automatically but they taste bland, and the better tools will expect you to know what you're getting into. Rice cookers are as serious business in Japan as espresso machine in Italy, you won't get a high end machine that catters to people who're not familiar with what's going on.

Hmm, thanks for explaining the profiles. I'll try a few and see how they taste.

> The rice cooker doesn't know either, it will take whatever is needed to take. Short of putting an extensive sensor array and ask you for the kind of rice you put in it, there's probably no way to actually predict it.

Why doesn't it know when it's so consistent every time? How does the ninja know? How does this one know when it's closer to 10 minutes? Seems like you should be able to estimate it down to a within a few minutes at start, then refine that estimate if need be. It's helpful to know whether something will take 15, 20 min or 45 to an hour.

Different rice varieties have very different cooking times, also ratio or rice to water also influences the time, so the machine can't just estimate based on weight.

What sensor do high-end rice cookers have that varies the cooking dependent on the rice variety? Steam?

Simple rice cookers have only a 100°C temperature sensor (or switch) that turns off the main element once the water is boiled.

Some rice absorb water very quickly, some rice very slowly, some rice you want more water, some very little, sometimes you want to add other ingredients too. That's more than enough to vary cooking times but not be able to estimate cooking times via the sensor.

Obviously.

My question is what sensor do they use to detect the difference?

I did some Googling but couldn't find any info.

IIRC, it's just temperature (and maybe time). Once the bottom of the pot goes above boiling, all the water has been absorbed/boiled off. Cheap rice cookers then just click over to warm, fancy ones might do something based on time, which can change based on other things like how log it took to come to a boil or how long between coming to a boil and the water finishing absorbing.

Usually the cooker senses the temperature and amount of unabsorbed water left (conductivity ? ai forgot the exact input but Technology Connections had an excelent video on youtube on rice cookers for those interested).

That's enough to manage a temperature curve and predict the last 10~15min of cooking (mine shows a time only 15min before the end), and doesn't require much input from the user.

On the one hand, I can imagine some estimation solutions that all make me think about software installation progress bars.

But on the other hand, if this is a piece of equipment you use regularly, you'll learn pretty quickly how long each thing typically takes, and after that initial learning period, the fuzzy progress indicator is no longer very valuable, and doesn't seem worth investing the engineering and UX time (and resulting higher product cost).

As a software-oriented community, I understand the impulse to throw code at the situation, but this seems like a situation where the cost of doing so doesn't really help very much. And it might actually make things worse, since most users are conditioned to trust/believe the sensors/indicators they see, and a countdown that keeps dynamically changing/jumping/slowing will confuse quite a few people who don't understand why it's a hard problem to solve.

And I think it's worth noting that this is par for the course with most things related to food prep. I'm always looking up cooking times for various things until I memorize the things that I cook often, and this seems like just another case of doing a quick search for a timetable.

Imagine you are making rice in this for the first time and you have no idea how long its going to take. That is ridiculous when you think about it. How do you even plan the rest of the meal assuming you won’t just be eating rice? Take the loss the first time and take 90 minutes to make dinner since the manufacturer didn’t have actually cooking with the thing in mind I guess.

> Imagine you are making rice in this for the first time and you have no idea how long its going to take.

How many times do you use it for the first time? Seems like a bit of an edge case to spend engineering time/add extra parts for.

I don't think this is some insolvable problem. It's literally estimating the time it takes to cook rice, and many other rice cookers (including other Z models, apparently) do this just fine.

It's not some edge case, it's literally the biggest question after you push start.

Imagine you’re grilling steak (or making lasagna, or cooking chili, etc) for the first time. The same principles apply. It’s easy to look this up, and once you do, the problem is solved.

Expecting a cooking tool to hold your hand to this degree doesn’t seem reasonable to me.

I’m almost certain that the manual gives an approximate time range for each mode.

Well, because rice is inexpensive, you.... could do a test batch? Sure, it would add $0.25 or something to the cost of your $100.00 rice maker.

Or you could just put the rice in extra early. It will get done early. But it will still be hot and perfect when you're ready to eat?

It feels like you have a big misunderstanding of rice cookers.

If it's your first time using it, you'll probably read the manual which will contain a table of general cook times. I just used a rice cooker with no screen for the first time and I had no problem with its lack of UI.

> Why doesn't it know when it's so consistent every time?

Because rice isn't consistent.

This is most apparent with certain varieties - a cup of imported Basmati "Royal" brand will take longer and require more water than the same amount of "Three Elephants" Jasmine rice from Thailand.

Even the same varieties produced by different brands/countries will turn out differently in terms of time required. This relates to differences in climate, storage, processing, and other factors.

It’s not a timer function but a sensor that detects signals the rices is done.

Depending on environmental conditions (temperature, etc) and amount being cooked, will vary but the results are repeatable quality rice, rather than a fixed cook time and variable quantity rice.

More expensive but better quality rice.

> Why doesn't it know when it's so consistent every time?

They had a feature (that I believe it's just integrated into every model now) labeled as "neuro fuzzy", decades before the neutral networks boom. I believe it's really just describing hysteresis. So it's doing things based on feedback from whatever sensors they have, but there's no learning from run to run (based on how you actually use the thing).

I also hate its lack of estimated times.

A bit besides the point, and not exactly disagreeing with you, but in my experience (living in Italy for over a year now) most Italians don't own a high-tier espresso machine. They have a cheap aluminum moka pot or a nespresso pod machine or perhaps a lower-tier Delonghi, etc. As a coffee nerd this surprised me a bit. I think part of it is that frequent and mainly fast coffee is prioritized over great coffee. Also, you can go get an espresso made on a god-tier machine at basically any corner for 1-2 euro.

Zojirushi rice cups are a standard. It’s just not a western standard: https://cooking.stackexchange.com/a/33033

I'm sure it is, but why didn't they localize it alongside the English buttons? At least print it in English on the cup, if not outright tweaking the corresponding water lines in the cook pan and the cooking logic to a more common measurement here.

I think most of your points have been addressed, but this one..

> a Zojirushi cup isn't the same as an imperial cup

Indeed, a zojirushi cup is 180ml, while an imperial cup is 284ml. Perhaps you meant a US Customary cup, at either 237ml or 240ml? Then there's a whole mess of other measurements people call a "cup" (118ml, 227ml, 250ml...)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cup_%28unit%29

A bit of history:

> The gō or cup is a traditional Japanese unit based on the ge which is equal to 10 shaku or 1⁄10 shō. Back in the year 1891 it was officially equated with 2401/13310 liters. The gō is the traditional amount used for a serving of rice and a cup of sake in Japanese cuisine. Although the gō is no longer used as an official unit, 1-gō measuring cups or their 180ml metric equivalents are often included with modern premium rice cookers.

* https://greedy-panda.com/2020/06/the-rice-measuring-cup-expl...

> Measuring rice correctly is the key to make delicious rice. For rice measurement, we use a traditional Japanese measure called go or rice cup. A level cup of this measuring cup is 1 rice cup. 1 rice cup equals approximately ¾ US cup or 180 ml.

* https://toirokitchen.com/products/rice-measuring-cup

I had no idea this was the case! Yeesh, that's even worse than I imagined.

Non metric units are a nightmare! I find them terribly interesting, but if you're looking for an unambiguous unit of measure, the metric system is the way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mile#Comparison_table

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pint#Other_pints

I'm totally on board. Hard to convince the other 300 megapeople living in this country though :(

"300 megapeople" cue Attack on Titan theme

> a Zojirushi cup isn't the same as an imperial cup

Right, but a US cup isn't the same as a Japanese cup, or a UK cup, or even a US "legal cup" etc.. unfortunately the "cup" isn't a useful unit of measurement any more than a non-XKCD-1179[1] date is a useful expression of a date (T_T)

> why would I want slow rice if there's a quick rice?

Slow rice is better.

> isn't it just a ratio of rice to water?

Yes (and therefore, indeed, WTF (!!!(?!)))

> what if I want quick brown rice? It's not possible.

There are levels to this game.

> You have no idea how long it's going to take

Indeed. Nobody does.

> As much as I appreciate good rice

Do you, though?

> I'd much rather suffer a 10% degradatio... if... controls could be simplified...Does something like that exist?

Yes (but not in/from Japan)

> Do the Japanese prefer having more options to tweak?

Yes

> Is this a broader cultural preference, or just something special about this one brand?

The former; every Japanese rice cooker (and website) is like this, only more so[2]

[1]: https://xkcd.com/1179/

[2]: seems like an infinitely recursive statement, since "every Japanese rice cooker" includes the Zojirushi rice cookers under discussion; however, infinite recursion is actually an explicitly-supported feature of TRON (OS, but that's the O in TRON), which powers almost all Japanese rice cookers[3]

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_project

many of your "complaints" seem easily solvable.

Rice washing is a fairly common practice in cultures that cook rice. You are likely from a culture where rice is not common so the solution is to look it up. My ten year old zojirushi rice cooker came with instructions telling you how to wash rice.

A "cup" is a horrible measure of volume because there are so many definitions. This is clearly not zojirushi's fault.

If you don't know what GABA rice is, may i suggest you look it up? Seriously, if you do not understand what something is, look it up instead of dismissing it as "unfriendly to a westerner".

I think this sort of condescending attitude is what makes products hard to use. I did in fact look all of this up, but that doesn't make the rice maker easy to use.

(Edit)

Believe it or not, yes, I can RTFM too (and did -- it still wasn't very clear, and neither were the online videos). But that's not really the point. I was more curious about why a company that clearly values the design behind its products would make these design tradeoffs. Is it the result of careful user research? Japanese cultural traditions? Thoughtlessness (unlikely?). Etc.

I find Japanese automobile dashboards easier to use than most American ones, for example. Japanese watches hellish to use. Sony anything pretty complicated. Is it a model/product/company/cultural/other factor?

IMO the more interesting question here isn't "How to teach HN dumbass to use a rice cooker" but "Why does this famous Japanese rice cooker company design its interface this particular way?"

This is the most accurate explanation about current Japanese design I've ever seen.

https://www.disruptingjapan.com/the-lies-myths-and-secrets-o...

favorite quote: > So, one thing we learned about Japanese users is that people feel insecure of empty space and people feel insecure if they don’t see everything up front.

you are now moving the goalposts. Understanding how to cook rice is a very different thing from a sony TV remote being complicated. Meanwhile, a sony playstation joystick is among the easiest designs to use.

I disagree that my reply was condescending.

>Rice washing is a fairly common practice in cultures that cook rice.

In the US at least, many brands spray additional vitamins and minerals to increase the nutritional value of rice, and specifically state not to wash the rice right on the packaging.

Because of this, there seems to be a pretty wide split on cultural lines on whether one should wash their rice, especially online.

> turns out, about an hour

Um what? That's absurd. Cooking rice should take like 15-25 minutes, 35 minutes tops.

There's more than one way to cook rice.

A lot of the Japanese rice cookers cook it a bit lower/slower than you'd normally do on a stovetop in a pot. The result is usually rice with nicer texture and flavor, but if you're only ever buying the cheapest rice, or value the speed it can be cooked, it's probably not worthwhile. Just stick to the really cheap rice cookers that usually take around 20 mins.

Here's a screenshot from the Zojirushi Fuzzy's manual, it generally takes around an hour to cook any rice.

https://imgur.com/a/pyA6l27

> Reminds me of my old Casio watches

If you ever want a UX example, go out and buy the following:

https://www.amazon.com/Casio-Classic-Core-DW9052-1-Wristwatc...

https://www.amazon.com/Timex-T5E901-Ironman-Classic-Black/dp...

NO NOT THROW AWAY THE CASIO MANUAL

Begin using the G-Shock first, making sure to learn how to do common watch tasks. Use chronometer, change time, set timers/alarms, etc.

Then, after doing that for awhile, trying using the Ironman. Just for kicks, don't read the manual. Attempt the same common tasks.

It's mind-boggling how esoterically-unnecessary Casio UX is.

That first link mention this feature:

“Auto-calendar out until the year 2099, the watch does not have to be adjusted for the number days in month even leap year until 2099”

Amazing! (That they dare list that as a feature, not that it seems to have a bug for 2100, which won’t be a leap year)

Japan stuck in their ways. 150$ Xiaomi smart rice cooker that was comparable to highend Zojirushi had very friendly UI. You can get basics done fine with small on board oled, but a lot of it is behind smarthome app and appliance is soft region locked. An offline high performance rice cooker with good onboard UI... probably one of the Korean brands like Cuckoo but I've never used. SKR knows how to do decent hardware and software though.

Cool, thanks for the suggestions!

The Xiaomi one looks beautiful and simple. I'll have to look for one next time I'm overseas.

The Cuckoo ones still look really complex, though. Was there a particular model with simpler UI?

The screw feeder is pretty cool. There are a lot of these but this is the closest I could find to the model shown:

https://www.kilews.jp/products/bsf-1450/

I take an abnormal amount of appreciation for the simple metal funnel guide that allows the operator to quickly get the screw loaded onto the driver.

Ya, I immediately saw the scratches on the one early in the video.

I wondered how the bit orientation and screw head were getting lined up. Is it the force and shape of the bit is enough for the screw to spin as needed and receive it?

Also, it seemed like the driver almost had force feedback over the screw points.

Because the worker’s arm seemed to slow just a bit out of what I’d expect. Could be just great precision though, if possible, why not try to keep the lateral motion confined or even on a particular track.

At that point it seems like robotics could be doing all this better.

> At that point it seems like robotics could be doing all this better.

Robots still aren't at the same amount of dexterity that humans can achieve, at least not in a price-competitive way.

Also, robots don't have the "automated QA" built-in that a human has - a robot will keep on placing screws and not notice something like a scratch or other imperfection, while a human can recognize this and yeet the partial assembly towards rework or recycling.

Way back in the mid-90s I worked a couple summers at a factory and one of the jobs there was using a machine like this. Now things may have changed in the 30 years since then but it basically just vibrated to get the screws to go down the V. Sometimes one would get through misaligned and you just threw it back in the hopper. Sometimes it would get jammed and you had to spend a couple minutes unclogging it. The screwdriver just had a trigger on it to make it spin. The bit was magnetized so if you got it close to lined up with the screw then it would put the screw in the slot correctly.

Nice, but I wonder if there are screwdrivers which could also automatically spawn screws (like a mechanical pencil) so you wouldn't even have to move back and forth from the feeder?

Why do only some stages use the feeder while others get a box of screws from which they have to pick up by hand?

I suspect that some screws, depending on location in the device, need to be stainless due to moisture exposure

Some types of stainless are non-magnetic and thus can't be picked up with a magnetic screwdriver, thus the need to hand-feed the screw

Another possibility is Some stages lack the time pressures needed for that assistance.

Also, it could be in some stages if a single screw is not placed, it will lead to catastrophic failure of the product. (Hence the screw counter in that first stage shown)

If you live in Europe, those aren’t really usable due to the electric grid system being different in Japan, and most of those rice cookers aren’t made for other markets.

Instead, you can buy any Cuckoo rice cooker: being made in South Korea they use the exact same electric grid system and socket. They are of similar quality and can be bought in the US too.

You should be able to use a Hong Kong or Singapore market Zojirushi in Europe with a UK -> Europe plug adaptor. HK and Singapore use UK plugs and 220/230 V 50 Hz as they were UK colonies.

No need for an adaptor, the units have a standard IEC 60320 C14 connector and are sold both with UK and EU plugs: https://yum-asia.com/eu/product-category/rice-cookers/?filte...

They sell 240v ones. And they have kettle plugs so anywhere that has computers will be trivial to get right plug

For uk it came with right one anyway out of the box

Cuckoo was a risky change well worth it. We got a fancy model induction pressure cooker (which also happens to look like the front of the sci-fi ship Event Horizon) and can really taste the difference in how the rice comes out.

Also there is something slightly sarcastic and dystopian about the voice it uses in English mode, which kind of adds to the fun.

I like how you can tell they optimized the assembly line in the places where it was most necessary - not all the stations have automated screw feeders, but the overall flow of the line seems fine, so they must have put them in the places where people were previously spending too much time fishing screws out of boxes, or where screws were frequently being forgotten (thus the counter).

And then at some stations they put the product on a rotating platform (lazy susan?) so that the person doing the assembly can freely rotate it 360 degrees easily without picking it up. You can tell that most of the stations didn't need it by watching how they work, but it must have been a big improvement for the stations that did.

Zojirushi is among the few brands that have sustained high quality products over a very long period of time, and is now unique in that regard for consumer products. I've owned two zojirushi rice cookers over 20 years and the first remains fully functional. The water boiler is great for dispensing hot water on demand for tea.

"most expensive": ~$1100 USD https://www.walmart.com/ip/ZOJIRUSHI-Pressure-IH-Rice-Cooker...

seems reasonable description

I have seen rice cookers selling for $7 and have myself bought and used rice cookers that cost under $20. they do a good enough job for a middle income household's needs.

Smokes, some people really take their rice seriously.

That probably includes shipping and importing from Japan:

> Sold and shipped by want.jp

Walmart has gone the Amazon route by allowing any seller to put stuff on walmart.com, leading to wild stuff like this.

walmart also recently started requiring login for online orders which is lame

roughly $550 if bought in japan

https://s.kakaku.com/item/K0001538484/

If you are in the market for a high end rice cooker I went with Vermicular: https://www.vermicular.us/products/musui-kamado

It's an induction "bowl" with fine temp control as well as rice modes. The tipping point for me was cast iron without a "non-stick" coating that would wear off. If you take the rice out of the pot quickly (30-60 min after done) you get almost no sticking.

Unfortunately no Zojirushi song though.

That thing looks awesome! But also... isn't at least one of the — if not the absolute primary and overwhelming — points of the "rice cooker" device that it not only cooks great rice, but also that it keeps the rice hot, but still in great condition, for for 24 hours (or more, with diminishing yum factor)?

Or does this mark me as "not high end" in terms of this type of device? (Highly possible (^_^) ... )

I know many people (as I understand it most of asia who use rice cookers) keep rice in the rice cooker "warm" but for me, that wasn't a requirement so I didn't feel like I was losing out. It's also been great to cook many other things in, which a rice cooker can do also, but thats more a "hack" than designed to.

I take the rice out, immediately put it in a container to trap the any moisture. When I reheat, it's great.

Damn that non-replacable watch battery which keeps the real time clock going when unplugged. I've had to almost completely disassemble a couple of Zojirushi rice cookers to replace that.

Yes, great machines but I shake my fist at whoever decided to solder-in the damn battery

I've done two now and replaced them with Keystone1250 battery holders from Digikey, soldered on the reverse side

They hold nice big CR2450 cells now and can be easily swapped but it's a real pain to have to do this at all

It's great to know that this is a thing! I had hopefully assumed the real-time clock was on a supercap or something.

It's almost forgiveable with RTCs, since they're generally not required for the main device functionality and RTC reference circuits invariably use coin cells. I've got an auto-darkening welding helmet, with its main power being supplied with the same planned obsolescence nonsense, despite having a solar panel on the front! It suddenly just stopped working, and my usual course of take-apart-the-broken-thing was thwarted due to its case being ultrasonically welded together. Only when I stumbled upon a random Youtube video of someone replacing the batteries in theirs did I get the oomph to pull the thing apart to change the batteries.

> Only when I stumbled upon a random Youtube video of someone replacing the batteries in theirs did I get the oomph to pull the thing apart to change the batteries.

Same for me and the rice cooker battery, a random video convinced me it wasn't going to be too bad, Youtube is a great resource and I'm so grateful to those willing to share their experience!

You don't happen to have a link to that Digikey part do you? My solution was considerably more janky and I might try to fix it.

I screwed up the part number, the correct part number is Keystone 1025, here's the link:

https://www.digikey.ca/en/products/detail/keystone-electroni...

It had the correct pin locations for my model of rice cooker

Here's the video that helped me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVege0o-quQ

Thank you so much for the Digikey reference. That video was one of the ones I watched also!

Noob question here. What makes these things more than glorified water boilers with a thermostat and a timer?

I have this suspicion that they are more necessary in tiny east asian apartment kitchens to make a burner available, and westerners who have much more kitchen space and larger stoves in comparison have latched on to as the right or correct way to make rice simply because its commonly owned in the east. Ignoring why one might own one or the fact rice was traditionally cooked for millennia without plug in cookers.

A few things.

1) It’s easier, you don’t have to watch them, just fill them and turn them on while you do something else.

2) The nicer models will hold the rice at warm-but-below-boiling for a while before cooking because the rice comes out softer and tastier, especially healthy brown rice.

3) The thermostat isn’t used to detect absolute temperature, it actually monitors the rate of change/first derivative to decide when the rice is fully cooked. This makes the required ratio of rice:water much more lenient and cooks the same amount independent of the rice type/size.

I love me some high end Zojirushi, but this feels stupid over engineered. That retractable Zojirushi cord though. My family upgraded from a top end Xiaomi/Mijia IH pressure rice cooker ($150 USD) to top end IH pressure Zojirushi ($800 USD) and they performed comparable.

Best rice is still... controversial... instantpot if one knows what they're doing, but it's definitely fussier than high end models that can figure out any arbiturary quantity of rice. I remember another friend with mid-high end Zojirushi scoff at instantpot rice until they tried some. Then a few years later Zojirushi integrated pressure cooking in their top end models. That said, from what I hear, there is something black magic about Zojirushi's ability to cook brown rice.

I remember when I bought my zojirushi around 14 years ago I was annoyed by the retractable cord because I was certain it would stop working before the cooker itself broke down.

Well, almost 15 years in (that milestone will be in July I think) and I can’t say the machine is any worse for wear, and I rarely use it less than twice per week. It’s a workhorse. It makes oatmeal at least once per week, rice usually twice per week, and occasionally some other grain. It does a great job on everything I throw at it. The retractable cord is doing just fine.

Turns out the bowl is relatively easy to replace via the Zojirushi website as well. I've done it twice and even contacted them once to ask if they had any in stock. They responded in a day and then updated their web store inventory.

Mine was discontinued and I can’t seem to find the bowl anywhere. At this point it has cost me something like a penny or less per use, so in terms of what I spent I’m not unhappy. I just wish I wasn’t using the same old decaying bowl, haha. It’s in bad shape.

Actually, like you mentioned maybe I should reach out directly and ask. I might get lucky.

We use our Zojirushi about 5x / week. The cord was definitely the weak point of the design, having failed about a year into our ownership.

The rest of the product works great.

Wow I actually have just the model less. Man does it make good rice. It has an AI chip in it

“Neuro Fuzzy” was an AI marketing term that was built into rice cookers for ages. I highly doubt AI has gotten that much advanced in cookers since the 90’s.

I think these types of rice cookers are so expensive as they use induction. Honestly I don’t know how much better it is but supposingly it allows for more accurate heating, allowing for more accurate cooking

I would imagine the reliability would be higher. A resistive heating element could degrade and eventually develop a fault, but an inductive circuit decouples the electrical circuit from the heating element. A fault or an impurity in the heating material wouldn’t prevent the inductive field from exciting the surrounding conductor particles.

Lol, I figured but given that it was like $800 I figured maybe it had to be doing something, even though I knew I'm falling for some marketing gimmick I had hope!

Luckily, once environmental factors and hardware variance are controlled for, it turns out making good rice really is a sentence-autocomplete complexity problem!

:-D

Does anyone know why they put so many reflective stickers inside of the machine? Is it to dissipate heat?

I would suspect that is exactly the case, cheaper than kapton.

I would guess for EMI isolation. Their PCBs are not shielded, nor are the coils of the heater. So it's just simpler to put metal stickers on the case at select points to pass the EMI inspection.

You want fluffy rice? Don’t let the rice absorb the steam right after it’s done. As soon as it is finished start flipping the rice so it cools/get as much steam out as possible. Don’t compress/squish the rice though as that is opposite of fluffy. Rice absorbing steam will make it saggy as it will have too much moisture. Closing the lid after mixing is ok

Zojurushi world-wide. Select your region:

    * Japan
    * The Americas
    * Taiwan
    * Korea
    * South East Asia
    * China
    * Hong Kong / Macau

No rice for you, the Europas, Africas or Australias.

[0] https://www.zojirushi-world.com/

Nah mate, when it comes to rice, Australia is an honorary part of SE Asia.

Wow, I had no idea the internals of a rice cooker were that complex. Do all models have that many parts or just the high end ones?

No, the most basic rice cookers are very simple. They use a spring-actuated switch and a magnet paired with an alloy button in contact with the bottom of the cooking bowl that has a Curie temperature just slightly above the boiling point of water. When the rice has absorbed all the water the temperature can finally begin to exceed boiling and the button heats up with it, causing the magnet to lose attraction to it. When the magnet is no longer able to overpower the spring, the switch opens and cooking is shut off (usually into a low power keep-warm setting) [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSTNhvDGbYI

Simple, yes, but genius. The things inventors of old have thought up are just astounding.

Technically, the most basic rice cookers are even simpler, in that they're a pot over a fire. :P

In that case it’s a pot you use as a rice cooker, not a dedicated rice cooker ;)

In that scenario, you are the rice cooker.

The Zojirushis look really nice, but I struggle to imagine what the functional differences are to an Indian stainless steel 'whistle' pressure cooker? Given sufficient heat, I can reliably cook any form of rice to perfect fluffiness with five whistles, and it takes less than 20 minutes.

It's interesting that almost all of the assemblers are women.

Anyone know why Japan went all in on these electric rice cookers while in India everyone still uses a basic gas pressure cooker? It can't just be the economic disparity.

Until fairly recently (and sometimes still), electricity could be fairly unreliable in many parts of India.

Is there a point to getting a rice cooker over an instant pot?

They're different appliances, no?

The rice cooker cooks at atmospheric pressure, and stops cooking when all the water is evaporated.

The instant pot is a pressure cooker.

In the end, it depends on your use case. If you cook a lot of rice, you will be disappointed with the instant pot. In my case, I don't have a rice cooker b/c I don't cook rice very often, and I use my instant pot or the stove top.

Top of the line Zojirushi uses pressure as well: https://www.zojirushi.com/category/rice_cookers/systems.html

Absolutely, I've yet to see good rice from an instant pot. Buy the cheapest rice cooker instead (usually like ten bucks).

It works well for the three kinds of rice we make and has the benefit of being faster with even easier clean up. No doubt a high end rice cooker could do a slightly better job on most kinds of rice (not the sticky rice).

I'm sure it's possible to get good rice out of an Instant Pot, but the Zojirushi is going to simply be better at it, and it doesn't really take any "dialing in" to get there; you just set the kind of rice and go pretty much, and then you get basically exactly what you want, every single time. Another advantage to a dedicated rice cooker versus using something like an Instant Pot is the obvious fact that it frees up your Instant Pot.

(Also, obviously, there are cheaper rice cookers than the Zojirushi, but there's definitely a reason other than cargo-culting why it's popular. I got one after the Walmart Made-in-China special I got crapped out on me. It is definitely, by a good margin, a better product with thoughtful design that produces very good rice.)

If you have neither a rice cooker nor an instant pot, get an instant pot. If you have one, the other compliments it well.

My wife is Chinese and we eat a lot of pot roast over rice.

No. We got rid of our rice cookers and replaced them with Instant Pots. Instant Pots make consistently good white and brown rice, faster.

Is there a point to getting a rice cooker over a pan of boiling water?

Not if your pan of boiling water automatically shuts off when it's done cooking.

(1) Put rice & water in rice cooker, press start.

(2) Leash dog, go outside for long walk to clear the head after day of Zoom / Google Meet.

(3) Come home 60-90 minutes later to perfect rice and a non-smoke-filled kitchen.

(4) Cook rest of meal in the same time it would take to cook the rice.

(4) Eat wonderful food that Chinese mother-in-law has kindly cooked & packed into many different containers for you.

Only if you cook rice like, every day, or multiple times per week.

I cook my rice in a microwave - 20 minutes on high. Don't like the clumpy stick together rice variants though - just white long grain.

how big is the market for $1100 rice cookers?

big enough to manufacture them on a large scale

That’s why there’s so much hands and fingers involved. Low volume, high price items usually involve lots of short but concentrated spurts of human labor.

I bet more mainstream rice cookers are built with more machines.

It's pretty much impossible to overstate how important rice is in the East Asian diet: for a comparison to the west, think something like bread, potatoes, and pasta combined.

Home chefs aren't necessarily going to want or need a top-of-the-line rice cooker, true - but considering how much rice the average Japanese home chef makes, they wouldn't necessarily not want one. $1100 at the high-end is nothing compared to the price at the high-end of virtually any other kitchen appliance; if you can afford it, why cheap out on something you're going to use almost every day, for almost every single meal?

But maybe more importantly, think about restaurants! Although the stereotypes are somewhat overstated, Japanese apartments are often too small to cook in comfortably, and people often work long hours and need quick bites at all hours of the day, so people eat out a lot. And Japanese building codes are far more liberal than western ones, so restaurants can be tiny and individual buildings in Tokyo can have twice as many restaurants as entire city blocks in the west. Net result: Tokyo has among the most restaurants per capita of any city in the world - and considering the population of Tokyo, that's a huge number of restaurants. And almost all of those restaurants are going to need at least one or two (and some a whole fleet); if you're making rice on an industrial scale, it absolutely doesn't make sense to cheap out.

Much of the above is true in many other places in East Asia too - most notably, China. That's a big market for high-end rice cookers!

Don't restaurants just use big rice cookers, not necessarily high end ones? Those things can make like gallons of rice at once.

Depends on the scale, I guess. I've definitely seen some Zojirushis behind the counter at more than a few restaurants.

The Walmart listing appears to be a "marketplace" listing, and is apparently shipped from Japan. Presumably these cost a bit less in Japan, since shipping isn't an issue. Perhaps one of our fellow HNers who lives there can enlighten us?

Don't live in JP but was looking to bring one back a few years ago, top of line Zojirushi _were_ ~$1000 USD, but with Yen depreciation are around $800 now. +200-300 for delivery/fees and 1100 looks around right.

Not big but Zojirushi is a big brand and not making a top-of-the-line rice cooker will slowly diminish its reputation from the likes of Cuckoo, Tiger, Aroma, or Midea.

I bet margins are getting razor thin and Zojirushi only has their brand name and reputation to bank on.

Fortunately for the Elephant-brand, their recipe for quality and name value is still strong.

I have a lower-end Zojirushi and love it. I've used it at least a couple times a week for years. I've periodically debated getting one of the stupid-expensive ones, like https://www.zojirushi.com/app/product/nwjec, but realistically the one I have is fine. If I were going to live longer, one day I'd get one!

Every household in Asia probably have a rice cooker, so I'd imagine a fraction of that makes the market large.

They even sell rice cookers at 7/11 here in Thailand, at least the slightly larger ones.

Probably as big or bigger than the market for $1100 blenders: https://www.blendtec.com/collections/commercial-blenders/pro...

(sure, the residential one is cheaper, but who wants that?)

Tangential question: Is there a way, on mobile browsers, to see the length of a YouTube video without unmuting it?

Is this the same as one subject to a teardown by a popular youtuber? It seems familiar but I might be mistaken.

Something about those screwdrivers is just satisfying.

We finally sprung for a Zojirushi a couple years ago. Not the crazy $1100 model, just one of their midrange ones that normal people buy. It's awesome. Set it and forget it. Absolutely perfect rice every time: sushi rice, brown rice, basmati, jasmine, anything you want to throw at it. From 1 cup at a time all the way up to seemingly metric tons of the stuff. :)

Great product at a great price. They have a lot of models in the $200-$300 range. Reviews are consistently great.

South Asia: 10x your rice by eating with your fingers and choosing long grain.

Iran: 10x your rice by adding saffron.

China: 10x your rice by frying it with leftovers and ensuring adequate gluten to support chopstick based consumption.

Japan: 10x your rice by rolling it up in bamboo with sugar and rice wine vinegar.

Southeast Asia: 10x your rice by picking glutinous breeds then steaming it in banana leaves or bamboo.

All of the above after migrating to the west: 10x your rice by spending money on AI appliances.

Are you implying that Zojirushi sells more rice cookers outside those regions?

"10x'ing your rice" with expensive Zojirushi products is mostly happening in Asia. Here is the company's 2022 revenue, by region, from selling their expensive cooking appliances (the most expensive of which are their rice cookers & warmers):

    Japan:        68%
    China:         7%
    Rest of Asia: 10%
    Americas:     14%

Approx USD$400M last year, which doesn't include their other excellent household appliances or travel mugs or insulated containers. (Aside: Their travel mugs are amazing.)

Source: https://www.zojirushi-world.com/corporatedata/cfr_2022.pdf

2 cups water, 1 cup long grain rice (2:1 ratio water to rice). Bring water to boil in a pot, add rice, stir and let return to boil. Immediately reduce heat to simmer, put on a lid and let cook for 20 minutes. Once the time is up, remove from heat and fluff the rice with a fork.

I’ve been cooking rice exactly like this for 15 years. It’s one of the easiest things to cook and it’s always come out great.

I really struggle to understand the reason for owning a rice cooker.

Maybe it's faster? Bringing a pot of water to boil can take a long time especially on some lower-quality/older electric ranges.

Rice cookers are actually slower in my experience. The benefit is that you don’t have to pay attention to them at all.

The slowness is a feature. The “smart” or “ai” or “fuzzy logic” or “buzzword” cookers take longer to cook the rice than a simple cheap cooker or a pot on the stove. The rice comes out better that way.

Induction Coil ones like in the video takes 2-3x longer for nicer rice. Which is pain in the ass for people use to 20m stove top rice. But fine if you make 5 cups and eat over multiple days.

Not sure it’s faster but at least for me I can start the rice then go off and do other things while it cooks and the rice cooker will keep it warm when it’s done.

… with my rice cooker I put the rice and water in and press a button

Do you REALLY struggle to understand that?

I do. Usually I’m cooking rice as a component of a meal. So I’m already at the range cooking other things and I can’t leave to do something else anyway. Since I’m already there, I may as well set a timer for 20 minutes to let the rice cook.

Try it... you're making things harder on yourself.

- Rice cookers are like $10-$20

- You save precious stovetop space

- You can start cooking rice and leave the house, e.g., to pick up other last-minute groceries

- Once it's cooked, it keeps your rice warm/wet until you're ready to eat it

I’m not saying that’s bad, but it’s a lot more work than a rice cooker. Set it and forget it is important to me as I already hate cooking. I also have a ninja foodi xl which perfectly grills meat using a probe, so it makes cooking faster, easier, and more consistent

That and the consistency of the rice cooker. I try not to buy one use kitchen utilities as a frequent home cook. But I’d be hard pressed to ever give up my rice cooker

A rice cooker may be needed for cooking large quantities of rice, but perfect consistency and no effort is achieved by cooking the rice in a microwave oven, which needs only 10 to 15 minutes, depending on the oven and on the amount of rice.

>Do you REALLY struggle to understand that?

I do. Cooking rice in a pan is so easy I'm struggling to understand why you would buy a gadget to do it for you.

A rice cooker is even easier than that, but most importantly: you can throw the rice on in the morning, go to school/the office, and come home to hot rice, ready-and-waiting in the evening.

It is true that rice cooker make life easier, no need dedicated time to cook it. And we have always-warm rice.

Recently a family member told me that eating a-room-temperature rice help in reducing the glucose* amount in the rice. So in that case always-warm rice is not a good feature.

*) maybe it is not the correct term

You should warn your family member that keeping rice at room temperature is a really, really good way to give yourself serious food poisoning - it's an ideal breeding ground for Bacillus cereus. Google "fried rice syndrome".

Yes - it’s important rice is either hot or cold, not kept warm for long periods (five or so hours) and then eaten.

Rice cookers are inferior in flavor/texture and they take longer to cook, but you can safely leave them unattended and they also save space on the stove. Not every apartment has a range, and not every range actually works, so they can help there too.

Zojirushi rice cookers do not have inferior texture. That’s why people pay so much money for them!

My Zojirushi makes rice with better consistency and texture than any rice I've had outside of a sushi restaurant - but then again it's possible I just don't know anyone who knows how to make good rice on a stove

It's totally understandable that you don't get it; I didn't either, until I finally bought one. First of all it's the amazing consistency of the rice you get. Second, it's so forgiving. Too much water? Not enough? Machine adjusts and your rice is perfect anyway. Not ready to use the rice yet, because the rest of the dinner is behind schedule? No problem. Leave it in there. For hours if you have to. Keeps it warm and ready. Need to leave the house for a while? Set the timer, it will have the rice ready when you get back. Even if that's 10 hours later.

It's awesome.

Besides the timer there are settings for brown rice, which may take a while to attend to if done by hand. Also some models have pressure. Others let you give feedback as to the final product and will take that into consideration for future batches. I use mine for oatmeal. I put all the ingredients in at night and its ready in the morning. Steel cut or full groat would take a while doing it by hand.

Rice is really easy to master, especially small portions like 1-2 cups of rice.

Convenience of rice cooker life is if you have to feed family of 4+ and don't want to fuss or worry about water boiling over because you forget to check stove. Throwing in 4-5 cups of rice, and have keep warm feature preserve rice for 3-4 days. Extra perk with fancy induction rice cookers which gives bump in rice taste but takes 3x more time to cook - 50-60 minutes, which isn't worth the effort for small portions, but worth a little planning if you're doing multipe days worth. Slightly high end models are solid $300-400 appliance (msrp in JP) investment, steep if you're paying 500+ elsewhere. Super high end 800+ hard to justify. Especially when there's instant pot. But instant pot fussy with measuring. Beauty of dedicated rice cookers is you just dump in bunch of rice and eyeball water and it'll generally manage very consistent results. Easily worth the convenience if you're eating rice every day.

Edit: ultimate lazy / easy rice for small portions is a $20 microwave rice cooker with dialed in settings. Joseph Joseph has one that's very easy to clean - there's drain basket for cleaning rice, it's plastic so don't have to worry about accidental sticky bottom, and post cooking clean up takes a minute. Paired with my (lol) $700 inverter microwave, makes very solid cup rice in 13 minutes.

Keep warm for 3-4 days? That’s insane. Rice stored in the fridge starts to go bad after three days. Not to mention you’d end up with a dry block of rice. Have you actually done this?

They recommend the “keep warm” feature is used for no longer than 4-12 hours. You’re exposing yourself to serious food poisoning going longer than that, especially if your cooker isnt very good at keeping the entire bowl at >60C.

The rice cookers are very good at keeping things at a safe temp. The good ones will have power failure detection.

I regularly make a (work) weeks worth of rice on Sunday night and eat through it until Thursday or Friday or so. Been doing this for well over a decade so far.

The first two days you probably can't tell the difference unless you are a rice snob. After that the taste tends to suffer a bit, but infinitely better than reheating rice from the fridge.

Keep in mind that the only good way to make good fried rice is to start with yesterday's rice from the fridge.

Then again, a rice cooker with metal or ceramic-coated surface doesn't infuse your grains with microplastics.

Purely convenience at expense of personal health. I don't feed others plastic cooked rice because it freaks people out.

Hario (HARIO XRCN-2-B) has a $7 glass microwave rice pot in JP . Still has some plastic components that do not make contact with the food. But it's like $60 to import to NA. There's also ceramic versions which I've never tested.

Rice cooking is kind of complex, because you should boil away most water and not cook any longer, and you are not really able to inspect the level of water.

20 minutes works in your setup, but will it work on different stove with different power levels, in a pot with different geometry, or with a different kind of rice?

Rice cooker solves that issue with a simple feedback.

I do 20m as well.

Ultimately, a rice cooker is a small luxury, but:

- A rice cooker frees up a burner on the stove, which is useful for those with small apartments or other situations where there are few or no burners available.

- Rice cookers are very consistent and virtually foolproof, even the cheap ones. Add water and rice, set it, and forget it. I can say I’ve over or under cooked rice on the stove at least a few times, but not once in a rice cooker.

- Decent rice cookers make far better rice than I’ve personally ever made on the stove (and I have cooked rice on the stove plenty).

- More expensive models keep rice hot (at a food-safe temperature) for hours, so you can prep well in advance of a meal. I put rice on to cook and can leave the house for hours without worrying about it, and have rice for the whole day in one batch, if needed.

- Rice cookers also cook other things and some handle different kinds of rice. Brown rice needs to be cooked significantly differently than white rice, for example.

> long grain rice

Maybe you’re not the target audience. Cooking short grain rice seems to require more care, and a high end rice cooker is the easiest way to get perfect rice.

I've gone through three cheap rice cookers in recent years and am back to doing it in a pot on the stove. None of them have been consistent in their temperature control. I replaced #1 (cheap from amazon) when it burned the rice. #2 (cheap from local walmart) came was "non-stick" but was actually just bushed aluminum. I used it once and needed a scouring pad to clean the thing. #3 is just too messy, spraying rice water all over the counter within a foot of the thing.

After reading comments here I find myself hovering over the "buy now" button for a 300$ rice cooker but I have been burned too many time. Pots. Steel pots. They work. They are cheap. They last. They aren't e-waste.

I'm firmly in the steel pot camp, for any marginal benefit you can get from a timer or auto start feature, it just takes five minutes to cook some rice in a pot.

Strong recommend for investing in a Zojirushi.

You will get consistently great rice and the devices are known to last decades when properly cared for.

My household rice cooker is a Tiger (also a higher end brand, not as flash as the Z). The people here swearing that cooking rice on a stovetop is fine don't take their rice seriously enough (although if it works for them etc). I've had cheapies before but they can't do my favoured preparation of half and half white and brown rice properly.

Unserious rice for unserious people.

Joking aside, I'm genuinely surprised that nobody mentioned Uncle Roger's rice cooking explainers [at least as far as I saw].

Oh man, when I spent 3 days in bed with covid earlier this year I managed to kill a great deal of time getting deeply into Uncle Roger's rice cooker based comedy. It's only funny because it's all true!

To be honest, I should do a little bit of experimental steaming rice in my stove top pressure cooker and see how that goes.

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