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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Do you REALLY struggle to understand that?
- 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 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 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.
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.
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.
It's awesome.