5 ms·

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-gr

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?

stavros 3y ago
I can't be arsed watching the pot.
- dtgriscom 3y ago
  Concise, accurate, and to the point.
- YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
  And how do you make dolmades avgolemono re man?
  - stavros 3y ago
    In a rice cooker, of course!
paranoidrobot 3y ago
> 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.
- sorenjan 3y ago
  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-to-reduce-arsenic-in-rice https://health.osu.edu/wellness/exercise-and-nutrition/how-t... https://www.livsmedelsverket.se/globalassets/publikationsdatabas/rapporter/2016/how-you-cook-rice-influence-rapport-7-2016.pdf https://www.livsmedelsverket.se/globalassets/publikationsdat...
  - former-aws 3y ago
    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.
  - Dwedit 3y ago
    Also helps to avoid rice grown in the southern US in favor of rice from California.
  - paranoidrobot 3y ago
    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.
- YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
  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.
e0 3y ago
Convenience. Rice cookers are very much fire-and-forget systems.
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
maxglute 3y ago
You have family or are lazy. Life with $400+ high end rice cooker: Load up big batch of rice when convenient, rice cooks at set schedule. No minding the stove. Keep warm option can keep rice 95% tasty for 3-4 days vs storing/reheating rice that gets dry. Rice quality also consistently good. Depending on how much rice you eat, this will save you multiple hours a week. Hundreds of hours over a few years. It's really no brainer investment. It's like asking why do people have toasters when they can fry up or bake bread every time. Except high end toasters have nothing on high end rice cookers. Imagine a toaster that can be loaded with bread and you can open it whenever and have perfectly toasted bread for days. I imagine frequent bread eaters would pay stupid money for that. E: if your clumbsy, never accidentally burn a pot again, which adds up.
- koyote 3y ago
  I like the toaster comparison! You can definitely toast bread using a pan but you'll find it difficult to get the same consistency and it's also more hassle and cleaning. That being said, is there really much difference between a 100$ 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.
  - bobthepanda 3y ago
    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.
  - woleium 3y ago
    Yes. Price is quickly forgotten but quality endures.
  - maxglute 3y ago
    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.
ydant 3y ago
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.
- YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
  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.
kccqzy 3y ago
Why do you need a kettle when you can boil water in a pot?
yen223 3y ago
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.
dieselgate 3y ago
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.
jwrallie 3y ago
A rice cooker also frees one burner in your stove, it is a huge difference when you have only one or two burners total.
- YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
  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.
odiroot 3y ago
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.
- YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
  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?
  - odiroot 3y ago
    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.
fragmede 3y ago
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.
- YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
  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.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    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.
hn92726819 3y ago
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).
searealist 3y ago
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.

stavros 3y ago

I can't be arsed watching the pot.

dtgriscom 3y ago
Concise, accurate, and to the point.
YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
And how do you make dolmades avgolemono re man?
- stavros 3y ago
  In a rice cooker, of course!

paranoidrobot 3y ago

> 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.

sorenjan 3y ago
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-to-reduce-arsenic-in-rice https://health.osu.edu/wellness/exercise-and-nutrition/how-t... https://www.livsmedelsverket.se/globalassets/publikationsdatabas/rapporter/2016/how-you-cook-rice-influence-rapport-7-2016.pdf https://www.livsmedelsverket.se/globalassets/publikationsdat...
- former-aws 3y ago
  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.
- Dwedit 3y ago
  Also helps to avoid rice grown in the southern US in favor of rice from California.
- paranoidrobot 3y ago
  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.
YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
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.

e0 3y ago

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

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

maxglute 3y ago

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.

koyote 3y ago
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.
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  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.
- woleium 3y ago
  Yes. Price is quickly forgotten but quality endures.
- maxglute 3y ago
  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.

ydant 3y ago

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.

YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
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.

kccqzy 3y ago

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

yen223 3y ago

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.

dieselgate 3y ago

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.

jwrallie 3y ago

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

YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
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.

odiroot 3y ago

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.

YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
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?
- odiroot 3y ago
  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.

fragmede 3y ago

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.

YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
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.
- fragmede 3y ago
  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.

hn92726819 3y ago

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).

searealist 3y ago

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.