Receive push notifications from your rice cooker
shkspr.mobi
shkspr.mobi
Extensible to other important sounds like smoke alarm, oven timer beeping, and a catch-all that sends notif("weird sound in kitchen, best investigate").
Plugin architecture to allow other contributions for waveforms to recognise different brand gear, eg the beeps from GE being different from Zojirushi.
Something like $8-16 dollars depending on how incompetent your power company is - well under the threshold for anyone who knows how to do this kind of work to worry about. Again, worst case; I’d bet you can do constant listening half that.
With multiple outdoor microphones I'd love to build a ShotSpotter, but I'm not good enough at audio to know how practical that is.
I like simple solutions to simple problems
I have one in the kitchen (which is near the laundry), and another one in my office (where I cannot hear the things in the kitchen).
When things beep, the one in the office says "beep beep".
And if things beep for a long time -- I think it's 2 minutes or something -- it also notifies my phone.
My Echo devices go further, and can even provide a slice of Internet for the Alexa-enabled TVs that my neighbors may think have no network connection.
...and I'm OK with all of this. :)
This can detect an inductive load like an AC/fridge/freezer compressor or washing machine motor. Something small and purely resistive like a rice cooker might be more challenging, but certainly a Sense does get you a long way.
I'd expect that it would work the same for either resistive or inductive loads -- after all, AC current on a wire is AC current on a wire, however it came to be present.
My understanding of Sense is that it measures the top-level current consumption somewhat blindly and then uses the inductive monitoring and other inference to attribute that consumption to different known devices— like oh here's 4kW of resistive heating going on, I can tell whether that's your dryer or your hot tub based on whether I see the drum or circulation pump running. Whereas if it can't find an inductor then it will basically just assume it's your kettle, toaster, or a fanless space heater, with more emphasis on the device doing unique things as it starts up, see [2].
[1]: https://eng.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Electrical_Engineerin...
[2]: https://blog.sense.com/articles/how-does-sense-detect-my-dev...
The current transformers used by Sense are inductive by their very nature, but that property does not suggest preferential detection of specifically inductive loads.
It can detect inductive loads as being unique, but it can also detect largely-resistive loads as being unique -- as well as many other things that present a particular signature.
The toaster presented in the blog is an excellent example of a largely-resistive thing that still behaves in unique ways.
The Emporia Vue is half the price and has a clamp for each circuit.
In this case though, the wall plug monitoring is definitely the right solution.
Sense, theoretically, can.
- toaster oven on
- rice cooker on
- both on
- both off
I would be extremely surprised if the sense was able to detect a rice cooker accurately.
I thought that the point was a notification when the rice was done cooking, and I provided a mechanism by which this may be accomplished by some here that might not involve any monetary expense at all because the hardware might already be sitting there [spying from there] already.
(But if you want to implement it in some other way, then: By all means, please provide your own suggestion.)
"I don't want my rice-cooker sending all my rice-cooking habits back to the manufacturer - so even more yes."
It is safe to assume that people who don't want their rice cooker to send their cooking habits to the manufacturers would not be willing to send it to Amazon.
I hope you ask people you invite home for permission to record and send your conversation with them to a third party before letting them in. Most people don't.
I hope you ask the people you interact with for permission to record and send your conversations with them to a third party before engaging with them with your own pocket supercomputer in your pocket. Most people don't.
Now it seems to be mostly associated with rice cookers. They must do an amazing job, since it still seems to be people's favorite rice cooking tech!
If I head to head my zojirushi vs a bargain rice cooker with temperature detector, would I be able to tell the difference?
Could you do the job with a cheap one? Sure, but you can always make rice on the stovetop as well if savings/space are a big priority. This is a convenience appliance, and the convenience of the fancy ones is a significant improvement over the basic ones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_logic
However, it was demonstrated that it had no additional power over conventional logic, so interest faded as quickly as it rose. Which is not to say it is useless, but that rather than a revolution it became just another tool in the belt. It can be more convenient to formulate certain systems in fuzzy logic rather than binary logic, but it doesn't really create new possibilities. And programmers in the trenches were doing this sort of thing already anyhow, less formally, but generally effectively.
It was weird how loud it was for sure. New forms of logic don't generally get the red carpet treatment like that.
I don't know why a rice cooker would particularly care about "fuzzy logic" other than a bizarre marketing spandrel [1].
[1]: Since this seems an obscure usage of an already-obscure term: https://www.scienceabc.com/pure-sciences/what-are-spandrels....
[1] Also known as "classical mechanics". Despite widespread belief that relativity is a 20th century idea, the first person to describe relativity wasn't Einstein -- it was Galileo. Einstein himself saw his work on relativity as extending what Galileo had done.
In hindsight, I wouldn't want to install HA for the sole purpose of running one smart plug. HA is one of the best pieces of software I've worked with but it has a learning curve and it does require some tinkering every now and then.
So why is everyone using special cookers? What's the secret?
Maybe the difference is this.
Boiled rice gives you one type of rice. It is relatively easy, but I know a lot of people tend to want the softer fluffier rice cooked using the absorption-method.
Rice cookers are doing absorption-method cooking. This is slightly more technically complex - the exact ratio of water to rice is important, as is controlling temperature.
I consider myself a reasonably competent home cook. I cook rice fairly regularly on a stove top, but getting the exact ratio of water to rice correct is something I find is very easy to mess up.
Additionally, my current stove is fiddly, and hard to control the exact temperature. Sometimes I will end up with a situation where the rice has fully used all of the water, but is not cooked through, other times I will end up with rice that is fully cooked, but is still quite wet.
When trying to time this with other dishes, it's painful.
I don't have anywhere convenient to store a rice cooker, so I don't have one - but when I renovate my kitchen in the future it will be one appliance I end up getting.
https://health.osu.edu/wellness/exercise-and-nutrition/how-t...
https://www.livsmedelsverket.se/globalassets/publikationsdat...
The first article mostly marketing material for a paper and seems to actively avoid actually mentioning real numbers or details.
I think there's a reason for this -- the paper does not do any original research, and only relies on evaluating other papers. They also seem to be talking about the effect on some kind of brown rice for their % reduction numbers.
The second seems better, IMO, but also for some reason adds salt into the mixture. They don't test the salt for the amount of arsenic in it, only noting it's a common household product in Sweden. This alone could be the cause for a significant difference in the boiled-dry vs poured-off results (i.e salt in solution will be partly removed).
I'd want to see better research on this before coming to any significant changes in how a major food staple is consumed.
Maybe a rice cooker can make exact measurements, but again I would have to wonder: who was the superhuman tester who detected the perfectly cooked rice, that everyone on earth will indisputably recognise as perfect? For me, cooking is not science and I think I'd feel a bit silly having a scientific instrument for rice cooking. So, I guess, it's not for me.
1. Put rice in 2. Put water in. 3. Press a button. 4. Come back whenever you want (exact duration doesn‘t matter since a good rice cooker will keep the rice warm and moist).
To be clear, when I'm saying more precise, I mean in the sense of "a cup of something is whatever fits into the cup in my cupboard", not using ISO standards with accuracy +/- 1 millilitre.
> who was the superhuman tester
Again, I'm talking about the difference between "This is clearly uncooked" dry rice, and "this is no longer rice, it's just vaguely rice-coloured mush".
Both states are relatively easy to achieve with absorption method cooking, because you have a lot more variables to consider. It depends not only on the rice, but the cooking vessel, the stove and it's performance, and a bunch of other things.
Perhaps you don't have this issue and are naturally skilled at this. If this is true then I'm happy for you.
Please, however, do understand that there are many many people however who do have this, and find using a rice cooker a much more convenient tool. Some of them would find cooking rice on a stove with a pot would either be difficult or stressful.
This is the answer to your question: "Can someone explain? Why is a rice cooker needed?"
Life with $400+ high end rice cooker:
Load up big batch of rice when convenient, rice cooks at set schedule. No minding the stove.
Keep warm option can keep rice 95% tasty for 3-4 days vs storing/reheating rice that gets dry. Rice quality also consistently good.
Depending on how much rice you eat, this will save you multiple hours a week. Hundreds of hours over a few years. It's really no brainer investment.
It's like asking why do people have toasters when they can fry up or bake bread every time. Except high end toasters have nothing on high end rice cookers. Imagine a toaster that can be loaded with bread and you can open it whenever and have perfectly toasted bread for days. I imagine frequent bread eaters would pay stupid money for that.
E: if your clumbsy, never accidentally burn a pot again, which adds up.
You can definitely toast bread using a pan but you'll find it difficult to get the same consistency and it's also more hassle and cleaning.
That being said, is there really much difference between a 100$ vs 400$+ rice cooker? I've been trying to find a reason to upgrade my cheap(ish) Panasonic to something like a Zojirushi but every time I look into it I just can't justify the expense.
The sarcasm is how I stop myself from getting too angry over the ridiculous US food safety guidelines that discourage people from cooking and encourage waste. Sadly those are treated as gospel all over the Western Internet. I can imagine the comments on TKG...
The contamination (spores) come in the rice you buy.
I enjoy cooking and I don't think of it as a waste of time, like "hundreds of hours over a few years". Those are hundreds of hours where I get to do something I love and that I find rewarding, physically so. My average time spent on cooking is about an hour, or an hour and a half, depending on the dish, I reckon. But then I'll eat that for a couple of days, so it's an hour for four meals; for two people. My partner also cooks so it's not always me spending that time.
Of course for some lunches I'll just make myself a toastie or puff up some noodles and eat them with tuna. Maybe give them a quick fry if I really feel like it.
Anyway I guess this thread has helped convince me I don't need a rice cooker in my life. I do have a toaster though :)
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[1] Except for beans and chickpeas. Not if I can buy a can of perfectly boiled chickpeas at 0.45 p. The power to cook that on a stove will cost me more and it's probably better for the environment given the people who put the chickpeas in the can boil them in batches of several hundreds of kgs, not 1kg as I'd do.
The boiling time depends on the quantity and on the oven, but it is unlikely to exceed 15 minutes (preferably after soaking them for a half day in acidified water, then rinsing them) (by acidified I mean adding a little lemon or lime juice, or vinegar or citric acid; such acid soaking removes much of the phytic acid from seeds or nuts).
I even bake my bread or my cakes in a microwave oven, because it is much faster and more reproducible than in a traditional oven. Thus I have stopped cooking for multiple days, because cooking any dish takes much less than a half hour (the wall clock time may be greater, but it includes times when the food is either in the oven or it must rest, but it is unattended and I can do other activities).
For instance my oven has 6 power steps, the maximum is 1000 W and the minimum is 100 W. This is enough to be able to choose for any food how fast or how slow to be cooked, within a large range. However, even the equivalent of slow cooking is much faster when done in a microwave oven, because the heat is introduced directly inside the food, so it is heated uniformly in all its volume.
On the other hand if you like food done by sauteing, a microwave oven is not helpful for that. A microwave oven is optimal for replacing boiling, steaming, roasting or baking for any kind of vegetables or meat (also for dough, cakes, creams, eggs). The vegetables that contain much water, e.g. potatoes, sweet potatoes or quinces, are more tasty if they are not boiled but just baked in a closed glass vessel, without adding anything to them. Meat is also done best by roasting in a closed glass vessel without anything added.
A microwave oven is not useful for replacing frying or sauteing.
Nevertheless, in my opinion, these are bad habits. As a general rule, it is useful to heat only the parts of food that consist of proteins and carbohydrates.
Heating any kind of fat cannot provide any useful effect from a nutritional point of view, it only degrades the fat and it makes it harmful, even if many people are addicted to the taste of burned fat.
I have transitioned from cooking with a traditional oven and kitchen stove to using only a microwave oven a few years ago, but I had stopped heating any kind of oil or fat many years earlier.
I add to the food the various kinds of oil that I use or any other kind of fat only after the food has been cooked and it has cooled down.
Except if the taste of burned oil is desired, there is no need for using oil or fat when cooking in a microwave oven, because when using closed glass vessels it is possible to heat anything of interest without the risk of the food sticking to the vessel or becoming burnt.
In our house plain rice is a staple eaten with almost every meal and often associated with non-time-intensive meal prep (like reheating leftovers or eaten with eggs and some other toppings). So we like being able to start the rice and walk away.
Using our rice cooker makes "making rice" a 1 minute labor effort with absolutely no monitoring needed. You can't burn it. You're welcome to forget about it. You can barely mess it up.
In our case the rice maker is a 25 year old simple magnet kind. Not one of the expensive pressure cookers. This style of rice maker can be bought for as little as ~$30 and is super-convenient if you eat a lot of rice. Just don't get the non-stick pots if you buy one - they aren't needed and they don't last for more than a couple of years.
In Asian households it's common for us to be eating rice everyday, with side dishes. So it's also really common for us to have rice cookers for convenience.
Cannot believe it took me so long to buy a rice cooker and wish I’d done it sooner. It just makes it way easier and more reproducible to make perfect rice. Plus some have a steamer tray and other features.
Knowing how to make it stove top is a good skill but prefer a rice cooker now.
It’s funny though - my family is mixed race with some being Asian and others being from Spain/Western Europe. Rice Can be prepared in so many different ways - paella has its own pan and cooking method that’s just as valid as a rice cooker.
They’re just different but rice cooker for daily use for me.
And you can also do dishes in it. E.g. put some pork ribs on top of the rice. You get a complete meal in one step.
the secret is labor saving devices. if you don't do a ton of that sort of labor, it doesn't make sense. My rice cooker spends more time with rice in it that I eat, than not.
A while ago I met a guy from Argentina (on the night train from Paris to Venice, where you meet all sorts of interesting folk) and he was complaining about the plain white rice he eats in China, where he goes often for work. He told me he absolutely loves rice and when he went to China for the first time, he was thinking to himself "oh boy, here I'll eat the best rice!". And was very disappointed to find out that the Chinese eat their rice plain white. I thought he should have gone to Iran, where they really go the distance when it comes to cooking rice, and making it a very special thing.
So I guess if you are coming from the more far-east side of Asia then a rice cooker makes sense, but if you're used to pilafs, tahdigs and biryanis and things like that, then it's probably not very useful.
Don't need a fancy rice cooker to try either, they've had decades to perfect them so a cheap one that's big enough is totally fine.
The way they cook rice is: put rice and water in a pot, boil water until there's no water left, take it off the heat. Because of that property, making a rice maker is extremely cheap. It's just a heating element and a thermostat that switches the element off when the temperature is 101 degrees C (because while there's water, it will only ever be 100 degrees C).
I was always under the impression that rice cookers worked on a timer basis, but from the article it sounds like it's more of a thing where the appliance will tell you when the rice is cooked - is that right?
I'm intrigued to get one now, although it's unclear to me what the difference is between a £40 one and the one mentioned in the post (which looks to be about £100 now on Amazon)
Rice cookers (usually) make clever use of 1) alloys whose magnetism depends on temperature and 2) the fact that boiling water occurs at a fixed temperature. With a "trigger" temperature just above the boiling point of water, the rice cooker automatically turns off the heating element when all the water is gone (and thus the temperature starts to rise above boiling point).
More detail here: https://youtu.be/RSTNhvDGbYI
Canadian nickels were made of nickel until 1981. Assuming you have a magnet that's heat resistant, you can do a cool demo with a torch or gas stove: pick up the coin with the magnet and dangle it in the flames. You'll know when it hits the Curie temperature. It'll fall off the magnet.
I presume the more expensive ones are better at avoiding overcooking but it seems to me hard to conceive of a conduction-heat system that doesn't suffer this problem to some degree.
Does that involve a humidity sensor in your microwave? Because if you're just talking about power level and time, then how do you account for variation of water temperature? I guess you could use room temperature water (or a fridge pitcher) which would be plenty stable, but tap temperature varies wildly based on the season, at least where I live.
I explained all that to say, I adapted that technique for a microwave and it worked great right away. Microwaves vary a lot in power and timing, so I can't really give a how-many-minutes recipe, but the technique just works.
As to whether this is worth the extra cost, it depends on your budget and how frequently you cook rice.
It takes 3 times longer to cook however yet has not burned my rice when sitting on warm yet. I get happy when I smell the fresh cooked rice several times per week so I'm definitely in the worth it category.
Super simple, works good.
I also have my automated cat pan hooked up, which incrents a counter and once that counter hits a threshold we get a notification that it's time to change the box.
It's all spelled out in the click-thru ToC...you have noone to blame but yourself for not reading all 132 pages.
/s
It is only worth it because it lets you play with gadgets.
Otherwise, one can only have so much attention span. I would go nuts if my home appliances started sending me push notifications. This is just a dumb trend in my opinion. Just because you can does not mean you should.