Rice Cooker Machine

[Divina Milliken]

Anymeal without rice in that house was just NOT a complete meal, so you can bet everyone living there got a lot of practice making rice. Repeated practice has now made me particular about how my rice is cooked!

But if you eat rice just about every day, a dedicated rice cooker with a simple interface and keep warm function should deserve some consideration. If you have an Aroma rice cooker, you should check out my Aroma Rice Cooker Instructions post.

First things first, you need to choose the type of rice you want to eat. While there are plenty of different types of varieties of rice, there are 3 main sizes of rice grains and the type you choose can greatly affect the proportion of water you need to use:

If you care about consistency, accuracy, or being able to tweak this ratio for other kinds of rice, you should be using a measuring cup. Please note, I use the same measuring cup for BOTH rice and water in order for the ratios below to work.

For any type of grain size (short, medium, or long) you can follow a 1:1 ratio of water to rice. If you want to add more rice, you can adjust the recipe in a similar way, 2 cups of rice to 2 cups of water. This should produce fluffy, but slightly sticky grains of rice when cooked, and works well for up to 3 cups in our rice cooker.

This ratio gives me perfectly fluffy rice every time. You may need to tweak them a tiny bit to your taste and specific brands of rice, and possibly even your rice cooker (see adjusting section below).

Note that these ratios are different than when cooking rice on a stovetop or cooking white rice in the microwave. This recipe also differs from cooking brown rice in the microwave and brown rice in a rice cooker.

Then open the lid, use a rice paddle to fluff it up a bit before serving. This is a Mickey rice paddle a friend got for us, but any other type will do too :). To learn how to properly eat rice with chopsticks, you can read my chopstick tutorial.

Thank you so much for posting this method of making rice in a rice cooker! I have been making rice on the stove all my life, but recently moved to an apartment with a finnicky stove top. I have tried countless ratios of rice to water as well as burner temperatures to no avail. I resorted to microwavable packets. Meh! Not to mention very disappointing to my Cuban husband. Lol. No more awful rice for us!!

Thank you so much for posting this explanation and clear reasons, for cooking albeit something so simple. My 13yr old was so disappointed with 2 attempts with his brand new rice cooker. So when I read through this articulate and funny post I made the 3rd attempt and voila happy boy!

The Sur La Table multifunctional Rice Cooker does so much more that cook amazing rice. With induction heating technology, this machine heats up quickly and more evenly that traditional rice cookers. Not only can it cook a variety of rice and grains, but it can steam, slow cook and even cook hot cereal! And the touchscreen display makes this a one touch wonder machine in the kitchen!

This sleek rice cooker comes with a steamer basket, a non-stick spatula for scooping rice, and a measuring cup that corresponds to the lines on the inside of the pot. Use the basket to cook veggies and rice simultaneously for easy weeknight dinners, or steam puddings like flan or crme brle when you need a dinner party dessert pronto.

Not too long ago, I tested Zojirushi's high-end pressure induction rice cooker, an expensive but impressive machine, which made me a little jealous that I didn't own one. But until our little LAC-05 kicks the bucket, we'll be just fine.

About two years ago, I also looked at Zojirushi's "multicooker," a roomy, six-quart slow cooker that can be controlled to the degree and can even sear meats. Slow cooking is what it's made for, but it can also make rice and yogurt and can even steam food. It's nothing like typical slow cookers and functions better than most of them, especially for control freaks.

Zojirushi's press materials promised that the new Umami married some of the better characteristics of those two machines: a rice cooker that can slow cook. While I was confident that the rice end of things would be just fine, that idea that you could make a huge pot of rice but only slow-cook 1.8 liters (two quarts) of food made no sense.

To borrow a few lines from Hugh Acheson's excellent cookbook, The Chef and The Slow Cooker, "Some slow cookers are big, up to seven or eight quarts and some are wee tiny, like two quarts. I recommend a reasonably big one, four quarts or larger." Wee tiny, indeed.

Personally, I'd recommend at least six quarts, as cooking in volume is part of slow-cooking's charm. Not only can you put a pork shoulder in a six-quart model at the beginning of the day and have luscious tacos for dinner, but you can also make low-effort chili for friends and stick a yogurt container's worth of leftovers in the freezer when they head home.

On a whim, I also made the Umami manual's recipe for chicken dry curry where the uncooked rice is combined with curry powder, cumin, garlic powder, and sake, then cooked underneath a layer of chicken thighs and vegetables. The recipe uses the jasmine rice setting, not the slow cook function. I also made brown rice and shiitakes cooked with rice wine, mirin, and soy, on the brown rice setting, though I couldn't bring myself to put salmon in there for the full 104-minute cycle. As Elisabeth put it, "It sounds like it it'd be really cooked at that point."

I'd learned a few things in my testing to this point. First, the inherent ratio in this machine is way off: You can make a ton of rice in it, but with the max-fill line on the large model at 1.8 liters, this is not a practical slow cooker. Second, if you want that sort of generous-size one-pot meal out of your rice cooker, the recipes that can be made on the regular-old rice settings will feed a lot more people. It's a niche thing, but if that's your bag, the reference for such a technique is The Ultimate Rice Cooker Cookbook, by Beth Hensperger and Julie Kaufmann.

This all makes recommending the Umami difficult. If you leave out the company's "conventional" models, you can roughly categorize Zojirushi's American rice-cooker offerings into three groups: the lower-end Micom like I own, the higher-end Micom like the Umami, and the truly high-end induction and pressure-induction models. The prices rise precipitously as you progress through that last sentence.

Unless you're quite curious about the extra features that the Umami offers, I would recommend Zojirushi's more basic models, especially considering their more affordable prices. If you really want to see a difference in your rice, save up and get the pressure-induction model. And, of course, if you are interested in a fancy slow cooker, get the one they put out a couple of years ago, call a bunch of friends, and have them over for dinner. You'll have plenty of food.

When I make sushi at home, I leave the cooking up to my rice cooker. And as long as you have a somewhat decent machine, the results should definitely be more than satisfactory for delicious sushi rice!

This basic rice can be used for your favorite sushi roll (I love California rolls and Philly rolls), or even for rice bowls topped with raw fish and your favorite simple ingredients and veggies. Enjoy!

I know this is a long-ago comment but I think what she meant was for six rolls of sushi? Where you still have to cut it into pieces. So for whatever size of seaweed you have, with rice and whatever fillings, it would make six. Then you would cut it.

I measure out the amount of rice suggested by the little cup thingy. I rinse it with a bowl and a strainer until the water is clear while rinsing. Then I put the rice in and fill it to the appropriate line in my Rice Cooker with fresh water. After cooking for a little while, it immediately begins to boil over and nasty bubbles start popping out of the little hole in the top, dumping yucky, sticky water all over the place.

Put a little bit of butter in before cooking. The fat on the top will prevent the bubbles from surviving for too long and therefore not allow it to boil over. The olive oil should work as well, but I don't know if that has the required amount of fat needed.

I just talked to a pro rice cooker person, he says forget about the instructions, prep the rice as usual, put it in the rice cooker, then add just enough water to cover the rice, turn on the rice cooker, and voila, perfect, fluffy rice every time!

maybe just try reducing the water by a little amount at a time, each time you make it, until it works out right? seems odd to me that even though you are rinsing & measuring your rice, and adding the recommended water, that this would be happening. my rice cooker is foolproof when i follow the directions like that!

This happens to me, too...in fact that is exactly why I am here, because I was googling for a solution! I will try a more through rinsing of the rice and the butter thing next time. BUT I think the real answer is the quality of the rice itself. When I used a higher quality rice (when I first got my rice cooker) I didn't have this problem, of late I have not bought the better rice and I have a mess on my hands. So maybe the more aggressive rinsing will help.

Varieties or preparations of rice use different amounts of water, sometimes varying by quite a bit - I've seen them from just under one-cup-per-cup-rice, to three-cups-per-cup-rice. Your rice cooker can't change the lines to suit the rice, and may be making assumptions that don't fit the rice you're using.

Beyond that, you should probably try reducing water, even if your rice recommended amount of water is fairly close to the rice cooker's. You clearly have too much of it for your rice - the amount of water making your rice come out right plus the amount that gets dumped out the vent. And rice is a biological rather than processed product, like flour or tea or vegetables, where different weather, different years, and other minutely different factors in growth, production, and usage means that one batch of even the same variety of rice may end up being different from another batch - so you may need to tweak recommendations to fit what's actually going on.

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