An Ode to the Rice Cooker

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!

<i>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.</i><p>Is there any inherent reason that &quot;fuzzy-logic&quot; rice cookers are a luxury item? I&#x27;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?

I bought this microwave rice cooker at TJ Maxx, that was marketed by Jamie Oliver for awhile.<p>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.<p>I tend to use that thing more than my rice cooker, it&#x27;s easier to clean.

I&#x27;ve used several different rice cookers over the course of years, but finally I just don&#x27;t see the point.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;m cooking rice, I&#x27;m also cooking something else, so it isn&#x27;t a hardship to be in the kitchen to notice the timer.<p>This technique never fails to produce tasty rice. If one has a stove, why does one need a rice cooker? I&#x27;ve also cooked tasty rice over a coleman propane single-burner before, so you don&#x27;t actually need a stove either.

Also see Roger Ebert&#x27;s blog post (eventually turned into a book), The Pot and How to Use It.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rogerebert.com&#x2F;rogers-journal&#x2F;the-pot-and-how-to-use-it" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rogerebert.com&#x2F;rogers-journal&#x2F;the-pot-and-how-to-...</a>

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

The author talks about fuzzy logic as being probabilistic and having to do with natural language, and that fuzzy logic is &quot;the kind of logic we most often use here at FiveThirtyEight.&quot; However, the rice cooker is not probabilistic at all, and takes discrete input (not natural language):<p>&gt; 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. <i>Generally using what are essentially if&#x2F;then statements</i>, [emphasis mine] it can fine-tune the process.<p>Anna, what is your reader supposed to think when your only example doesn&#x27;t meet the requirements you set out for it yourself? It is especially alarming here since the thing you&#x27;re trying to illustrate is the way your organization thinks.<p>&gt; “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.”

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 &quot;good enough&quot; has.

Fuzzy logic is back again? It used to make the headlines in the 90s for being the next revolution in industrial control (of furnaces).<p>I use rice cookers since 35 years (I am 43) I don&#x27;t care about brown rice or whatever the fuzzy logic. I just adapt according to my own experience.<p>But I guess people don&#x27;t want to have experience any more and prefer to be assisted as a hero of Wall-e?

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.<p>1. Fill sauce pan at most half way with water<p>2. Create perfect cone from bottom of pan to the center, just pierce the surface<p>3. Boil in this config for 1 minute<p>4. stire rice thoroughly, breaking apart clumps, add smidge of olive oil<p>5. turn down to low heat for 12-15 minutes<p>To get drier rice, add more above water line, to get more al dente, don&#x27;t cook for as long.

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.

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&#x27;t meet the right utility&#x2F;space ratio to find a place in my smallish kitchen.

Hasn&#x27;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).

I have a rice cooker from Amazon that was less than $100 and works perfectly. I don&#x27;t know if it uses fuzzy logic or not. Is there an easy way to tell?