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Comment by YeGoblynQueenne | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain? Why is a rice cooker needed? Like, why a special pot to cook rice, specifially? I eat plenty of rice -basmati, brown basmati, brown long-grain, carolina, bomba paella, arborio, etc etc. I boil it in a simple pot where I also boil everything else. It cooks just fine. I make pilafs (in my French oven!), Greek stuffed veg, egg fried rice (with last day's rice obviously), risotto, Persian tahdig with saffron, you name it. I really don't think there's ever any problem with my rice.

So why is everyone using special cookers? What's the secret?

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> I boil it in a simple pot

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.

It should be noted that it is recommended to boil rice in plenty of water and to pour away the excess to remove a lot of the arsenic in rice.

https://health.osu.edu/wellness/exercise-and-nutrition/how-t...

https://www.livsmedelsverket.se/globalassets/publikationsdat...

Not just arsenic but also to remove the starch. Most folks don’t cool down the rice before eating so it’s preferable to remove the starch before eating.

Also helps to avoid rice grown in the southern US in favor of rice from California.

It's not obvious to me how much concern one should generally have about this.

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.

Thanks for the insight. I didn't know what "absorption-method cooking" is so I looked it up online and it's how I cook rice, or at least how I cook rice when it's not part of a dish that has to be cooked as one. A couple of guides I found online even use a normal pot, with a more or less precise measurement of water. In my experience, exact measurements are not something a human palate can do, and I think there is a lot of posturing in recipe writers who insist on such, most of the time - with the exception of baking and emulsions, although even there the variability in the ingredients themselves introduces a lot of uncertainty.

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.

Just try it. It just a lot more convenient and results are great.

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).

Don't I have to "0. Buy rice cooker" first? :P

> exact measurements are not something a human palate can do, and I think there is a lot of posturing in recipe writers who insist on such

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?"

You have family or are lazy.

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.

I like the toaster comparison!

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.

Zojirushi has very high build quality. I wouldn’t be surprised if mine lasted more than a decade. And also they are pretty good on parts availability; I had to toss a different $100 rice cooker I used to own because I needed a new pot and they didn’t make them anymore.

Yes. Price is quickly forgotten but quality endures.

Apart from extended keepwarm because better sensors (?), my experience with higher end rice cookers is they're designed to vent moisture better, less cleanup for frequent activity always good. I think there's also satisfaction knowing you're having the best reasonable quality of (for me white) rice, since a bunch of japanese engineers spent decades making it in a sense, a solved problem. That's just like... nice to think about, or not worry about (even if placebo effect) whenever eating rice, which is always. I'm the least buyitforlife kind of guy, not interested in $200 pants or $400 boots or $800 jackets that last a decade, because I don't like dealing with wear and tear after a few years, but as long as the rice cooker is working, which they seem to for like 10 years, you're getting best rice. It's a nice reoccuring feeling for $40 a year.

You can also use special programs that will make healthier rice - search for low sugar rice cookers.

As tempting as it is, according to food safety guidelines you shouldn’t leave rice in the rice cooker for more than 12 hours, even on “keep warm”.

My model recommends the warming function for up to 40 hours, but I'm sure Japanese people who eat rice every day get poisoned all the time, and we should all follow FDA guidelines that say to throw out all of our food if it is in the fridge for longer than 2 days or out at room temp for 4 hours. No wonder people think that cooking or grocery shopping are intimidating with that mentality...

No need to be sarcastic :) I just thought 3-4 days was really stretching it

I wouldn't leave it for that long, but mostly because of degradation in texture.

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...

Yeah 4 days is stretching it, was more commentary on rice taste/quality vs rice stored in fridge and reheated. As for 12 hours, I know it's the guidelines, but plenty of people I know grew up eating multiday room temperature stored rice. IIRC China released data on bacillus cereus outbreaks a year ago, and they had <10 deaths and a few 1000 hospitalizations over 10 years from a billion rice eaters - cause was primarily poor food handling in cafeterias. Risk:reward wise, 2-3 days works for me, but I also have pretty strong stomach when travelling.

I would wonder if room temperature is better or worse conditions than the keep warm temp

But it's just spent 30-45 minutes at boiling point. If you keep the cooker closed and only use clean utensils to remove rice I'd say the risk is pretty low.

My understanding is the Bacillus cereus spores aren't guaranteed to be entirely killed off in typical rice cooking times (also, 30-45 minutes boiling seems long for cooking even 4 cups of rice in my rice cooker). If not killed, the remaining spores become a problem.

The contamination (spores) come in the rice you buy.

I see, thanks for the insight. Well, you're replying to someone who makes her own bread, and her own everything else [1] so I at least understand why I don't have a rice cooker now!

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 :)

______________

[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.

I like myself a fresh loaf as well. I think there's more joy/ritual in bread making/baking. There's more types of bread to experiment with. It's a hobby. Some bakers I know spend more money on mixers and cast iron baking pans and other contraptions than a fancy rice cooker. No one makes rice for a hobby or bring plain rice to potluck. Your chickpea comparison is apt. Imagine if your normal staple is just chickpeas. It's a chore made for automation. East Asian rice consumption is pretty boring, people stick with their brand rarely even switch up grain types. Other cultures put stuff in their rice, spice it up, cook it with stuff and have more one pot raw rice recipes. But if your rice diet is 95% white rice consumed the same way, splurging on a "unitool" like a rice cooker to save time brings joy.

Lentils, chickpeas or beans can be boiled in a perfectly reproducible way and with minimum energy consumption in a microwave oven.

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).

That's interesting to know. Unfortunately I don't have a microwave oven. Just a traditional one. I do make lots of dishes that need sauteeing and slow cooking in a French oven. How does that work with a microwave?

Slow cooking is very easy in a microwave oven, but only if it is a good oven that has a power control with many steps, which allows the selection of a power much smaller than the maximum.

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.

"Addicted to the taste of burned fat"? Can you please tell me more about that?

Convenience.

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.

Thanks! I think one reason why I don't feel the convenience is because I usually don't cook rice on its own. Most of the time it goes in casseroles, pilafs, risottos, stuffed veg and things like that where it doesn't make sense to boil the rice separately (although sometimes it makes sense to parboil it). I did use to eat plenty of plain rice in the past, but I got into cooking more and more over the years and I don't eat plain rice that much anymore.

Grew up with a rice cooker in the house and it was used frequently. I actually didn’t buy a rice cooker as an adult until two months ago - and always made it stovetop. Was resistant and proud to just make it on the stove.

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.

The secret is it's cultural. Asian people eat a lot of rice. when you do, it makes sense to optimize the boring part, which is watching rice cook. this frees you to cook delicious entrees to go with the rice. Or cook means in the rice cooker. For whiter audiences that don't eat as much rice, but do eat bread, a toaster is the equivalent device. you could toast bread in a pan, why don't you? you could load it up with all sorts of stuff that way. But most people have a toaster.

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.

I think a pan is for frying bread, not toasting it. Or to make flat breads. Anyway I see the point, thanks. I do eat lots of rice, btw, except not plain and this thread has given me to understand that this is an important detail I've been missing.

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.

You're totally right about Iran cuisine focusing more on rice dishes. Chinese fried rice is what you do with leftovers, not an entree, way back when, anyway. Still, don't let the focus on white rice stop you from trying a rice cooker out as a modern fusion food thing. They're plenty capable of cooking delicious dishes full of spices. I throw chicken and vegetables on top of rice, and throw in a bevy of spices to get something more than plain white rice.

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.

Convenience. Rice cookers are very much fire-and-forget systems.

I can't be arsed watching the pot.

Concise, accurate, and to the point.

And how do you make dolmades avgolemono re man?

In a rice cooker, of course!

For the same reason why someone might have a toaster just for bread.

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.

Rice cooker is a "fire and forget" thing. It's much harder to mess up rice using a dedicated cooker.

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.

Thanks, I didn't know that. How do you clean the cooker afterwards though? Doesn't it make more of a mess if you add more ingredients?

The main part is usually a teflon-coated metal bowl. Quite easy to wash by hand or in a dishwasher. Depending on the design, cleaning the top/cover might be a challenge.

I imagine another reason why rice specifically is the physics behind it. Water has a property where it won't get hotter than it's boiling point while it's boiling.

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).

A rice cooker also frees one burner in your stove, it is a huge difference when you have only one or two burners total.

Yeah, I've definitely live in some places :cough Paris cough: where two stove heads are the norm. I can see the point in having an extra place to cook in that case.

Why do you need a kettle when you can boil water in a pot?

Speaking of the cheap $25 ones: It's easy. You add water and rice, and it automatically turns off when all the water is gone.

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