I put the suman in there and let it stay warm. The Philippines has a lot of rice desserts - like suman, which is sticky rice wrapped in banana leaf. Sometimes I’ll use it for other dishes as well. It has a little basket that can steam veggies over the rice. “It can be on all the time and stay warm. That’s what I grew up with in a Filipino household,” he says. “I’m not a high-tech kind of person, and this only has a few settings. The Panasonic is another simple model, the one that food photographer Neal Santos has also used for a decade - both personally and at his Philly-based Filipino pop-up, Lalo (which unfortunately closed due to the pandemic). “You get a consistent texture with a margin of error.” Another particularly appealing feature is the ability to preset when you want your rice to cook: For example, if you’re braising something that takes three hours, you can time it so that the rice is done simultaneously.įinally, though perhaps not the most imperative to the rice itself, Zojirushi’s machines play music when you start them (an adaptation of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”) and when they’re done cooking - and it’s clearly delightful enough that everyone who recommended the brand (again, more on the rest of those folks, below) made mention of the jingles.Ĭapacity: 5 or 10 cups | Settings: Quick cook/steam, white rice, brown rice, porridge/soup, keep warm The standout reason is what Zojirushi calls “fuzzy technology,” or a built-in microcomputer that can sense how your rice is cooking and adjust the time and temperature so that “even if you add too little or too much water, it will self-correct,” says Wright-Ruiz. “I’m sure people have said this before, but it really is the Lamborghini of rice cookers,” she says. It has a fancier model with even more settings that multiple experts mentioned (you can read about that one further down the list), but this one - especially given that it’s less than half the price of the other - makes for an all-around great buy.įood writer and recipe developer Kiera Wright-Ruiz had to leave hers behind when she recently moved to Hawaii she told me it’s the thing she misses the most.
In my reporting, Zojirushi came up more than any other brand. But the bottom line is, if you eat rice even a couple times a week, a rice cooker may be well worth a spot on your countertop.Ĭapacity: 5.5 or 10 cups | Settings: White/sushi, mixed, porridge, sweet, brown, cake, steam, and quick cooking I spoke with a bunch of experts about their favorite models, which ranged from cheap and straightforward contraptions to more high-tech machines. They can either be incredibly simple, with just two settings to “cook” and “keep warm,” or they can be quite advanced, with presets for all different types of rice (brown, long grain, sushi, and more) as well as preparations like congee, porridge, and even pressure-cooking (which is, yes, one way in which all those electric cooking tools can overlap).
They’re basically a targeted type of electric cooker, similar to a pressure cooker or slow cooker, only they excel at making plump, perfectly cooked rice.
Sometimes the grains turn to mush sometimes they’re hard in the middle and all too often they’re stuck to the bottom of the pot (in my house, the ultimate “let it soak overnight” culprit - never a fun thing to wake up to).Įnter rice cookers, which, for many, save the day. And yet so often - no matter if you’re an amateur in the kitchen or consider yourself pretty accomplished - the final result is a letdown. Making rice is deceptively easy: Measure, rinse, add water, simmer, steam, and less than a half an hour later, you’re done.
0 kommentar(er)
