How To Select A Rice Cooker

Rice cookers are intriguing inventions, ones that have substantially changed the lives of millions of people. Purists might insist that rice is best parboiled and then left to slow-cook, lid tightly on, over a wood fire–which gives the traditional, rustic guoba (rice crust). But rice-cooker rice is really fantastic.” Don't buy a large unit than you need because the rice cooker is designed to operate properly with a specific amount of rice and water.

A rice cooker and be a very useful and versatile kitchen appliance.

A rice cooker is also perfect for people who don’t cook often or who don’t enjoy it. (Roger Ebert wrote a book on this kind of rice-cooker cooking called The Pot and How To Use It.) It’s also an order of magnitude easier to clean a rice cooker than a cooking pot. If you cook rice perfectly, then it’s not too hard to do the washing up. How to Choose the Right Rice Cooker for You?

What size do I need?
To be absolutely clear, not everyone needs a high-end rice cooker or a rice cooker when a pot will do. When choosing a rice cooker, consider how much rice you want to prepare. If you plan to prepare rice just for yourself, buying a large-capacity rice cooker might create a poor-tasting final product. For some brands, there are 4-cups and 8-cups available. Each cup of raw rice will yield two bowls of cooked rice. 

For example, a 5-cup rice cooker can make up to a maximum of 10 bowls of cooked rice, and a 10-cup rice cooker can make up to 20-bowls of cooked rice. If you only cook on a daily basis, about 1-2 cups of rice, usually a 3-cup rice cooker would be the most suitable size for you. If you cook around 2-5 cups of rice, a 5-cup cooker would be most suitable. And finally, if you cook any more than 5 cups, then a 10-cup cooker would be most suitable. Also, if you only cook a small amount of rice in a large rice cooker, the heat is not evenly distributed and the rice will not come out as well.

One person eats about 1/2 to 1 cup of uncooked rice (1 to 2 cups of cooked rice) per meal, so if you are cooking rice for one meal and:

•     1 – 2 persons, you need a 3-cup rice cooker
•     3 – 4 persons, you need a 4-cup to 6-cup rice cooker
•     5 – 6 persons, you need a 7-cup to 8-cup rice cooker
•     7 – 8 persons, you need a 10-cup rice cooker

If you only eat rice infrequently (and especially if you don’t cook brown rice) a $45 model will do 80% of the job—more than enough for most people. Brown and white rice are technically the same thing. It’s just that brown rice has had just the outer husk removed, whereas white rice also has the bran and germ stripped away. Brown rice is more healthful than white rice, but it’s also harder to prepare and it spoils more easily.

Types of Rice Cookers
Although there seem to be many options out there there are only a few basic types of cookers:

The super basic ones
On/Off Rice Cooker. These tend to be affordable, fast, and very simple to use. It doesn’t have advanced technology so you will need to measure rice and water correctly to cook good and tasty rice. The rice cooks, reduces the heat when the rice is done then maintains it at a "warm" temperature (duration varies). The way you shut these off is to unplug it. We find these cookers to be some of the most flexible at a reasonable price.

Higher-end ones
Fuzzy Logic Rice Cooker. A very sophisticated machine with some great features like settings for soup or porridge, brown rice, rice texture (hard or soft) and even a sushi rice setting. Much more complex. Powered by “fuzzy logic” and full-on microprocessors running behind the scenes, they are capable of a more nuanced view on temperature, adjusting it variably over the cooking cycle. These machines are great but very pricey and way more machine than the average US household would use.

Price

A basic unit will probably cost you less than $50 and lack bells and whistles. A smart rice cooker, on the other hand, can be had for anything from less than $100 to an astonishing $800. In our tests, the biggest difference we found between the low-end and high-end rice cookers was how well they cook brown rice. When it came to white rice, low-end and high-end cookers were pretty close in quality, but for brown rice, the expensive ones did a massively better job.

Also, all computerized rice cookers come with a timer that allows you to preset a cooking time for when you want your rice to be cooked and ready. Some models will have a count down timer, so you would calculate in how many hours you want to eat your rice.

Brands

Many brands which are made from many different places: Japan, Thailand, Malaysia, and China. I would say that the Japanese brands (Panasonic, Tiger, Zojirushi) are the ones with better designs, better quality, and better durability.  I hope at this point you would have an idea on how to choose a rice cooker suitable for your needs.

Recommend
We recommend the $45 Hamilton Beach Digital Simplicity Deluxe Rice Cooker/Steamer for people who cook rice once in a while. $150 Zojirushi NS-TSC10.

Best Rice Cooker for Cooking

My pick for:

•     brown rice & sushi rice – Zojirushi ZCC10
•     congee – coming up
•     sous vide – coming up
•     grains – coming up

More top picks:

1.     Panasonic SR-DE103
2.     Hamilton Beach Digital Simplicity Deluxe Rice Cooker/Steamer
3.     Panasonic SR-G06G
4.     Zojirushi NS-LAC05
5.     Cuisinart CRC-400