An Ode to the Rice Cooker

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/an-ode-to-the-rice-cooker-the-smartest-kitchen-appliance-ive-ever-owned/?ex_cid=538fb

by szx • 10 years ago

74 88 10 years ago

fivethirtyeight.com

kris-s• 10 years ago

Stuff like this always reminds me how much room there is for making a product that makes an inconspicuous everyday activity better, but also how much staying power "good enough" has.

IvyMike2• 10 years ago

Also see Roger Ebert's blog post (eventually turned into a book), The Pot and How to Use It.

http://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/the-pot-and-how-to-...

sitkack2• 10 years ago

I have nailed making rice by hand with no measuring, the nice thing about cooking it manually is that one can modify the parameters, soggy, fluffy, al dente, all easily achievable and the rice is done in 12-15 minutes.

1. Fill sauce pan at most half way with water

2. Create perfect cone from bottom of pan to the center, just pierce the surface

3. Boil in this config for 1 minute

4. stire rice thoroughly, breaking apart clumps, add smidge of olive oil

5. turn down to low heat for 12-15 minutes

To get drier rice, add more above water line, to get more al dente, don't cook for as long.

IvyMike2• 10 years ago

Also see the "One Knuckle" method, which has never failed me yet, despite using different pots and varying quantities of rice.

http://www.thekitchn.com/cooking-rice-do-you-use-the-first-k...

goelakash• 10 years ago

It basically boils down to a 2:1 ratio for general case, the same as my mother told me to do a few years go.

cortesoft2• 10 years ago

The main benefit of rice cookers is that it does its own thing, while you can cook the rest of the meal. This requires interaction.

maloney• 10 years ago

I've been cooking rice like this for the last 15 years. I recently bought a Zojirushi rice cooker and I now regret not getting one sooner. The Zojirushi makes far superior rice than I ever managed and it makes it perfect every time. Not to mention it also cooks mixed/brown/sushi/grits/steel cut oats perfectly as well. Throw in the fact that I can use the timer to have steel cut oats ready when I wake up in the morning make it worth every penny.

sitkack2• 10 years ago

I get that, I used to own a couple rice cookers, both a super low end $20 version and a higher end version from japan that required a transformer (very old, like from the mid 90s I think).

I might go back someday, but I have new found love for portable skills, no machine necessary. If I ate more rice, I'd probably get one again.

jessaustin6• 10 years ago

I've used several different rice cookers over the course of years, but finally I just don't see the point.

I eyeball the rice I pour into my pot, I eyeball the water I pour in next (without washing!), I crank up the stove until the water starts to boil, and then I turn it down, cover, and set a timer for 20 minutes. When that's up I turn off the stove and look at the clock so I know when five or ten more minutes have elapsed so I can uncover and give the whole mess a stir to prevent sticking to the pot. If I'm cooking rice, I'm also cooking something else, so it isn't a hardship to be in the kitchen to notice the timer.

This technique never fails to produce tasty rice. If one has a stove, why does one need a rice cooker? I've also cooked tasty rice over a coleman propane single-burner before, so you don't actually need a stove either.

NDizzle• 10 years ago

Do you have kids or a large family? Are you cooking for more than yourself? How much rice do you cook per day? Do you cook rice every single time you want it?

Have you ever wanted to cook enough rice to last 4 days, at once, and have it kept perfectly for the entire 4 days? If so, you should get a rice cooker!!!

taude2• 10 years ago

I'd also comment on how consistent does the rice taste? When I made rice on the stove, it was really easy to cook too long and have it be mushier than I like.

jessaustin6• 10 years ago

I cook for more than myself, but it isn't a "large" family. I don't cook rice every day, but it is probably 90% of the days on which I cook. (Other household members typically prefer to cook other starches.) I often store rice in the fridge. I find that pouring some water with refrigerated rice into a glass bowl, covering, and nuking for two minutes restores it to an edible and tasty state. I have never cared to eat rice on four consecutive days, although when I lived in Asia and in Hawai'i that was often the case.

I think we have a rice cooker in the back of some cupboard, and I certainly have at least one more in storage. I rarely need more than four burners on the stove at one time, so it's just easier to use the pot that's already hanging next to it rather than taking up valuable counter space and electric outlets with a single-purpose appliance. YMMV.

Jtsummers4• 10 years ago

Time. I use the delayed start feature on mine along with a slow cooker to have meals ready when I get home (I go home after work, set up the cooking, go to the gym, return home to a nearly done meal).

Not just for rice. A lot of one pot meal recipes you can cook in a rice cooker faster than they'd cook in a slow cooker, and unlike my stove (more expensive to replace), it can switch to a "warm" setting automatically.

For me, it boils down to this:

I'm a single guy, living alone. I work from 7ish-4ish each day with a 30-minute commute. I go to the gym from 5:30-7:30 most days of the week. I tend to go out of town on the weekends or have plans with friends in town. This means I really only have weeknights to do most of my chores (cleaning, laundry, attend to bills and such). I really like home cooked meals, and a device like this allows me to have that with minimal attention so that my cooking becomes: 5-10 minutes prep, 10-30 minutes of chores, 1-5 minutes of serving/storing/clean-up.

EDIT: I feel like we all dogpiled on you. You're right. Fundamentally, it's not needed. But it does have some very practical use-cases depending on your situation. If I had a live-in partner who I could divide tasks with, I'd be less inclined to use such a device. But that's not my situation so I have to optimize and this is a good spot to optimize and still have tasty home-cooked meals.

belltaco2• 10 years ago

Care to share some recipes you use? Or where to find them online.

jessaustin6• 10 years ago

I feel like we all dogpiled on you. You're right.

Haha, I love a good dogpile. Lots of people have strong feelings about their appliances, and that's wonderful. I worry a bit about eating too much rice, so I value some friction in the process. De gustibus...

krapp4• 10 years ago

In my case, I was in a dorm and couldn't afford a microwave, and was forbidden from having a burner or hot plate. You can heat up a lot of things in a rice cooker (especially a cheap one, which is little more than a heating coil with a bucket over it.)

I don't know why people have expensive rice cookers, however. I remember a comment by patio11 where he mentioned his wife buying a $600 rice cooker. Rice in Japan is probably the most serious of serious business but I can't even fathom how anyone gets that much value from a rice cooker.

cheap rice cookers are quite handy.

emodendroket6• 10 years ago

Why would you buy a $50,000 BMW when a $20,000 Toyota will take you everywhere you want to go just as well?

r00fus2• 10 years ago

Cheap rice cookers are useful, but expensive ones: a) have more settings for things other than rice b) have options for delayed start, etc c) come with better materials (ie, teflon-free nonstick pan) d) it's a device that will last years - spending $200 vs $30 is often easily justifiable.

I'm surprised you couldn't afford a microwave - they're like $50-100 these days for something that has crazy high utility.

turtlebits• 10 years ago

In my experience, your method of cooking rice doesn't come out as tasty as rice cooked with a good rice cooker. You can get the same results with a stovetop but it is more more involved (ie tweak the heat every 2-5 minutes).

But then again personal tastes for rice may vary.

faitswulff• 10 years ago

You can make a lot more than rice with a rice cooker. It's just smart enough to set and forget for a great deal of different dishes, which was great in college when I wanted to come back to a warm meal.

A quick search results in this, for example: http://greatist.com/eat/super-surprising-rice-cooker-recipes

pnut• 10 years ago

Wait, now we don't need a rice cooker, or a stove?

I can throw rice and water into my rice cooker, go grocery shopping, come back 90 minutes later, and have perfect rice nice and hot, waiting for me.

I don't see the point of all the minimalism. It's a tool, an almost perfectly refined one. I can afford it, it has lasted 15 years and running, is energy efficient, and small enough.

Good on you if you want to dedicate an inordinate amount of your life energy to making rice, I guess?

thedz• 10 years ago

Okay, now tell your SO or a friend or roommate to make the day's rice.

Rice cooking isn't terribly difficult, but a good rice cooker makes a very regular part of my meals something that is routine to prepare. And more importantly for me, makes it something that anyone can prepare, without supervision or trial and error.

Plus, there are a few other benefits: a good keep warm function that can keep rice in a pretty decent state for hours on end, timers, can cook brown rice unattended, lowering/increasing heat as needed, etc.

If you only eat rice once or twice a week, the counterspace a good rice cooker takes up probably isn't worth it. But if rice is a daily process? Then yeah, for me, a good rice cooker pays for itself pretty rapidly.

ghaff4• 10 years ago

Even once or twice a week. Once you've prepped the ingredients, stir fry usually only takes a few minutes to cook. I find it super-handy to prep my stir fry and turn on the rice cooker. When I'm ready to eat, the rice is ready and making the rest is 5-10 minutes work. Making rice isn't hard but it does require at least a modicum of supervision.

I'm admittedly something of a kitchen gadget person, but my rice cooker is something that I genuinely use a lot.

mapleoin• 10 years ago

Okay, now tell your SO or a friend or roommate to make the day's rice.

Erm, all of those people know how to cook rice on the hob (and would probably be taken aback when asked to use a rice cooker) And I'm not even Asian. We must live in very different worlds.

ksenzee• 10 years ago

I can make tasty bread without a bread machine, too, but there's a place for bread machines. Experts appreciate the convenience of not having to be right there on the spot to take anything off the stove (or out of the oven) and novices appreciate that it's really hard to mess up.

emodendroket6• 10 years ago

By the same token, why do I need a car? I can simply walk wherever I would like to go.

Jtsummers4• 10 years ago

Not quite the same. It's more like, cooking rice takes 20-30 minutes of time and attention (not total attention). A rice cooker turns it into 1 minute of attention (pour in rice, water, wait, remove), but takes about the same time.

So the question is, is it worth it to get in my car and drive 6 blocks, park, and go into the shop, or just walk the 6 blocks? For that distance, it's almost break even on time, but the driving technically requires less effort on my part. Anything less than that, walking is clearly better, anything more than that and driving is clearly better (well, in my case there's nothing after 6 blocks from my place that I'm interested in that isn't at least a mile away so 20+ minutes walking versus 5 minutes driving/parking).

If you use a rice cooker strictly for cooking rice, and don't do it daily, it may not be worth the cost/space.

gohrt• 10 years ago

I don't know, why would someone prefer a 2 stage process (put rice and water in cooker, take rice out of cooker) to a 4 stage process.

dekhn2• 10 years ago

The cognitive and physical effort required to make decent rice in the rice cooker is roughly 1/10th that of manually doing it.

Crank up the stove until the water starts to boil- several minutes at least

timer for 20 minutes: does not account for any variation in the cooking process as a function of the ingredients. I see variation in my rice over the time I go through a single bag as the humidity varies

give the whole mess a stir to prevent sticking: not really a problem with rice cookers, although they can optionally make the bottom toasty since some people want this.

It's all about saving time for other things.

yborg• 10 years ago

I swear by my Zojirushi cooker. There will be a host of comments here on how it is possible to cook excellent rice without the gadget. These people are all correct. What the cooker brings to the counter is it is fully fire and forget ... until it plays its jaunty tune on completion, and then maintains the rice at serving temperature for hours if desired without requiring me to do anything but walk over to it with a rice bowl. All hail the elephant!

taude2• 10 years ago

I also like that on the Zoji there's an hot cereal setting, and unlike my prior rice cooker, where cooking steel-cut oats made a big mess with it boiling over, the Zoji gets it perfect, no fuss.

c0nsumer• 10 years ago

Which one do you have? There's so many different ones I'm not sure which to start considering...

LanceH• 10 years ago

And the absolute winner of a function of telling it what time you want the rice or oatmeal to be ready -- it will figure it out from there. Have oatmeal ready in the morning or rice ready in the evening when I walk in the door, it's incredible.

rcurry• 10 years ago

I just dig that they play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star when you fire them up. It's just such an oddball thing, that I get a kick out of it every time I use it.

fluxquanta3• 10 years ago

I've had my Zojirushi rice cooker for probably 3 years now and use it at least 4 times per week. It's bulletproof. The bowl is starting to show its wear, but I'm still in love with the thing.

In addition, I have a Zojirushi countertop water heater for tea and I don't know I lived without that, either. These are expensive gadgets but boy are they convenient.

Next stop, bread maker!

wavefunction• 10 years ago

I have a Zojirushi tiffin/lunch set and have looked at their rice-cookers before. What a pleasure of industrial design their products all seem to be!

compumike• 10 years ago

Would you "fire and forget" other meal items if you could? (disclaimer: building it)

personjerry2• 10 years ago

So fuzzy logic is just a bunch of if statements? That seems pretty traditional logic to me.

mayank• 10 years ago

The trick is putting the right stuff in the if conditions.

personjerry2• 10 years ago

Isn't that what you want in traditional logic? Could you elaborate?

VMG• 10 years ago

It isn't. I remember it being sort of an interesting way to describe linear relationships.

giardini2• 10 years ago

Fuzzy logic is not a "bunch of if statements".

Fuzzy logic differs from classical logic. In fuzzy logic one can model arbitrary (linear or nonlinear) functions.

In particular, in fuzzy logic the law of the excluded middle does not hold. So truth values can be true, false or something in-between. Typically the categorical (true, false) is replaced by the the closed interval [0, 1], with 0 meaning "absolutely false", 1 meaning "absolutely true", and an infinity of possible valid values in between, each to some degree true and to some degree false.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_logic#Overview

HeyLaughingBoy3• 10 years ago

Part of the problem is the name. The late Bob Pease (google him: fascinating character even if you're not an EE) in particular trashed Fuzzy Logic/Fuzzy Control every time he had a chance.

Call it by its alternate name of Multivariate Logic and it seems less... fuzzy.

saint_fiasco2• 10 years ago

There is such a thing as a fuzzy if. Even fuzzy sets have cutoff points.

If rice_is_not_done_yet is more than 90% false and rice_is_overcooked is more than 10% true stop cooking it!

Sakiina_• 10 years ago

I bought this microwave rice cooker at TJ Maxx, that was marketed by Jamie Oliver for awhile.

Love the thing. It has ridges in the ceramic to mark the measurements. I put in the rice, fill to the line with water, microwave for 5 minutes, let stand for 10, and boom, perfect rice.

I tend to use that thing more than my rice cooker, it's easier to clean.

r00fus2• 10 years ago

While the ridges and 5/10m cook/stand time sounds perfect, we are often using the microwave for reheating takeout or leftovers (or bringing milk up to room temps for the kiddos). And we have rice (or quinoa) almost every day.

Any other gadget should aim to be as useful, fault-tolerant and straightforward as a rice cooker (microwave is close 2nd).

srcreigh2• 10 years ago

The author talks about fuzzy logic as being probabilistic and having to do with natural language, and that fuzzy logic is "the kind of logic we most often use here at FiveThirtyEight." However, the rice cooker is not probabilistic at all, and takes discrete input (not natural language):

In my current fuzzy-logic [sic.] cooker, however, I tell the machine what kind of rice I’m using [white or brown] and how long it has been soaking [a decimal value]. It takes that [discrete] information and decides what temperature it should reach, and for how long. Generally using what are essentially if/then statements, [emphasis mine] it can fine-tune the process.

Anna, what is your reader supposed to think when your only example doesn't meet the requirements you set out for it yourself? It is especially alarming here since the thing you're trying to illustrate is the way your organization thinks.

“Fuzzy theory is wrong — wrong and pernicious,” Kahan said. “The danger of fuzzy theory is that it will encourage the sort of imprecise thinking that brought us to so much trouble.”

emodendroket6• 10 years ago

Your "sic" is gratuitous; it's being hyphenated because it's being used attributively/as an adjective.

I guess you could describe the rice cooker as "taking a much larger number of inputs than a traditional rice cooker" but that doesn't seem to work as a marketing slogan as well as "fuzzy logic."

dave2000• 10 years ago

The "sic" is fine if it really is just being used as a marketing term.

srcreigh2• 10 years ago

It's not a fuzzy logic rice cooker. I've used [sic] because it's an incorrect characterization of the item.

I agree with your marketing observation. Maybe they could have called it sophisticated logic (or something like that)? The history of fuzzy logic (which was cool) could be replaced with stories of sophisticated problem solving.

saint_fiasco2• 10 years ago

How long it has been soaking is probably a fuzzy measure, unless you want to make the user of the rice cooker to use a chronometer or make the rice cooker itself soak the rice.

As for the if/then statements, even fuzzy logic needs cutoff points.

nkurz2• 10 years ago

Fuzzy-logic rice cookers are a luxury (online they range in price from $50 to more than $700), but the awe mine inspires nearly matches the quality of the rice.

Is there any inherent reason that "fuzzy-logic" rice cookers are a luxury item? I'd think that the increased cost of manufacture over a simple mechanical rice cooker would be minimal. Is it more difficult than it seems? Is the market for cheap smart rice cookers too small for anyone to bother?

emodendroket6• 10 years ago

I mean, Zojirushi isn't passing the code out for free to anyone who wants to manufacture a rice cooker, right?

nkurz2• 10 years ago

Maybe I'm underestimating, but the code seems trivial. There's lots of examples of PID control for Arduino that one could use as a staring point: https://learn.adafruit.com/sous-vide-powered-by-arduino-the-...

Someone who knows what they are doing could probably write rice cooking logic that works pretty well in a couple days, and a beginner (like me) could almost certainly get something working in a couple weeks. There'd always be room for refinement after that, but I can't see that the code would be a limiting factor.

But likely you've hit on the real reason there isn't much competition on the low end: making an inexpensive fuzzy logic rice cooker is easy, but if it started selling well you'd probably be sued out of business for patent infringement. I now feel silly for overlooking this obvious explanation.

dragonne• 10 years ago

I think that the low-end market for rice cookers is already dominated by the primitive on/off models. I doubt a smart model can compete on price with a thermal switch.

I'd disagree with the OP that a $50 smart rice cooker is a luxury. These models also serve as slow cookers, vegetable steamers, etc. so they are quite a value in money and space compared with buying each appliance individually. If you don't have a proper kitchen you can do most of what you need in one.

unicornporn• 10 years ago

Hasn't the arsenic in rice news been a big thing in the US? Here in Sweden the FDA equivalent discourages people to eat rice too often (the recommendations are a bit vague).

ghaff4• 10 years ago

I found it online now that you mentioned it. But, no, this hasn't been a big thing in the US and I for one had never even heard about it.

julie1• 10 years ago

Fuzzy logic is back again? It used to make the headlines in the 90s for being the next revolution in industrial control (of furnaces).

I use rice cookers since 35 years (I am 43) I don't care about brown rice or whatever the fuzzy logic. I just adapt according to my own experience.

But I guess people don't want to have experience any more and prefer to be assisted as a hero of Wall-e?

smelterdemon• 10 years ago

Rice cookers would impress me more if they had some kind of built in stirring mechanism, and even more if they dispensed liquid at a certain rate- then they could crank out perfectly consistent, effortless risotto. As it stands they don't meet the right utility/space ratio to find a place in my smallish kitchen.

lisivka• 10 years ago

I use microwave oven to cook Rice and Buckwheat. Half of cup rice, then cup of water. Wait at least 15 minutes for rice and about 3 minutes for Buckwheat for water to soak in (important step). Then I program oven to cook 4:10-4:50 at full power (800W), then 11-15 minutes at 40% power. Piece of chicken, or one or two eggs (at then end of cooking) are welcome.

wagglycocks• 10 years ago

I have a rice cooker from Amazon that was less than $100 and works perfectly. I don't know if it uses fuzzy logic or not. Is there an easy way to tell?

An Ode to the Rice Cooker

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