Rice is nourishing, filling and inexpensive, making it a superb food for people on any finances. Making rice in a rice cooker is much easier and requires a lot much less of your consideration. You possibly can cook rice in an ordinary pot, but you probably dwell a busy life and can’t spend an excessive amount of time perched over a pot like a gargoyle, which is why it’s best to consider investing in a rice cooker. Briefly: Rice cookers totally rock. It’s an amazing staple food, and is a component of different international diets and culinary traditions.
Getting the most effective rice cooker 2023 has to offer would possibly sound like a giant ask, with so many on the market, but a quality rice cooker will whip up completely fluffy rice out of any grain or strain of the stuff without any guesswork, freeing you up to do different things. And rice cookers even have come a good distance by way of functionality, they can perfectly prepare any type of rice — sushi, long-grain, or wild. It’s true that you can find rice cookers in just about any dimension, from tiny two-cup mini rice cookers all the best way up to large machines that will make enough rice for a small army. Sure, while cooking completely tender grains of rice is still the primary obligation, a few of the most effective rice cookers (and sluggish cooker fashions designed with rice in mind) are outfitted to cook other grains including bulgur, quinoa and oatmeal.
Another thing to love a few rice cooker is how simple they are to scrub, largely by way of the nonstick cooking containers and timers that shut the machine off when the rice is completed to avoid burning. Some rice cookers even have warming timers that keep your rice at the perfect temperature (and moist too) after it is completed cooking. If you have ever burned rice on the stove, you realize what a nightmare it may be to de-gunk.
Now we have some suggestions under to help you find a terrific rice cooker for your house. To search out the perfect rice cooker for 2023, we even put a number of of the most popular fashions to the last word take a look at.
Greatest rice cookers
Tiger 5 1/2-cup Electric Rice Cooker
Best rice cooker overall
This Micom rice cooker mixed velocity, precision, ease of use and price range-friendliness to seize the highest spot within the rice cooker kitchen equipment showdown.
The Tiger cooked white rice nicely, if not just barely al dente, in simply 21 minutes and about half the time of a few of the opposite, bigger machines. It additionally made the most effective brown rice of any of the cookers we tested in roughly 50 minutes.
This model additionally clocks in at a really affordable $79, which considering its excellent efficiency in both cooking tests feels like a steal. It also has quite simple controls and just 4 settings: white rice, brown rice, slow cook/steam and a synchronized cook setting that allows you to cook two issues concurrently. This rice cooker comes with an instruction guide, recipe book, rice measuring cup, and rice paddle.
This model each appears to be like nice and performs at a high level. For wonderful rice in a rush, this is the perfect rice cooker to purchase.
Oster DiamondForce 6-cup Rice Cooker
Finest rice cooker for the value
This price range-friendly rice cooker took the top spot in our original round of rice cooker testing. In a retest, the Oster DiamondForce stays the clear choose for an easy rice cooker below $50.
Good white rice is nearly a paradox: It is moist, however not mushy; toothsome, however not chewy. No, the rice isn’t perfect — brown rice, specifically, got here out just barely underdone and a bit chewy. That good fluffy rice is tough to capture, so the standard output for this Oster rice cooker’s $25 price tag is wholly impressive. It has a tempered glass lid with a vent and comes with a steamer basket and won’t crowd the counter. That stated, this primary rice cooker is head and shoulders above other small cookers below $50.
The Oster is quick and may also be used as a grain cooker. The small rice cooker whipped up a cup of white rice in beneath 20 minutes and brown rice in 25 minutes. It also did not have any of the spillage or mess of a few of the opposite fundamental budget rice cooker choices, so cleanup was simpler, too.
In the event you love rice and want to eat great rice usually, however don’t desire to break the bank, the Oster is a fantastic choice.
Zojirushi 5 1/2-cup Neuro Fuzzy Rice Cooker and Hotter
Best rice cooker for custom rice
Zojirushi is a household title for rice cooker elitists, and this Japanese rice cooker brand’s fame is earned. The $172 Neuro Fuzzy rice cooker not only produces good rice in fairly large quantities, but it surely also lets you personalize your rice, in case you favor it dryer or moister, along with effectively-calibrated settings for brown rice, sushi rice, porridge and different grains.
This Zojirushi rice cooker has a couple of downsides: Its value tag is intimidating, it takes up a major quantity of area and it takes its time making rice (a cup of white rice, for instance, takes over 40 minutes to cook). That stated, uncooked pace of a rice cooking kitchen equipment is less necessary in lots of cases than a gadget’s ability to keep rice heat and perfectly fluffy for extended periods of time, and Zojirushi is an unmatched rice maker in that regard.
If you are in search of the best customized rice, no matter price, Zojirushi is our advice.
How we examined rice cookers
We tested 12 rice cookers aspect by facet, cooking 1 cup of white rice and 1 cup of brown rice in each, following the individual directions and utilizing every machine’s standard settings for both. Almost each device recommended allowing the rice to steam for an additional quarter-hour after the cook accomplished and that i allowed that time for every one.
We each fluffed and tasted rice from every cooker at the 15-minute mark (which, in addition to the cooking time, ranged from 28 to 56 minutes), and then again after about an hour on the “warm” setting.
Because some of us favor their cooked rice at barely completely different levels of moisture, we targeted on the problems in each rice cooker’s yield, be it inconsistency in cooking, any uncooked rice, kernels that weren’t cooked through or ones that had lost their distinction and grow to be mushy.
We additionally saved observe of how long it took for each machine to make white and brown rice because when you are busy or working late, cooking rice dish velocity can be crucial factor of all.
The Tiger cooked wonderful white rice faster than the rest of the sector and made the very best brown rice of any cooker we examined.
The rest of the sphere: Other rice cookers we tested
The rice cookers we tested fell into three free classes: small, affordable gadgets, midrange multicookers and specialised, high-finish rice cookers.
Every mini rice cooker we tested, together with the $19 Imusa 3-cup the $25 Dash mini 2-cup rice cooker and the $25 Black & Decker 3-cup rice cooker supplied decent, small servings of white rice — although the Sprint took a painfully long 35 minutes simply to cook only one cup of white. All of them struggled with brown rice and combined rice, although.
The slightly bigger 6-cup Oster (our funds pick) and the $60 Zojirushi rice makers carried out almost identically, making excellent pots of white rice in 19 and 20 minutes respectively and excellent brown rice — albeit perhaps simply slightly underdone — in a lightning-quick 22 minutes. We’d gleefully advocate either one as a stable house-saving rice cooker option. Whereas the Zojirushi does appear barely extra solidly constructed, it is greater than double the price of the Oster, which gives the Oster our ultimate nod.
The easier Oster and Zojirushi rice makers carried out almost identically in our testing.
The $50 8-cup Hamilton Seaside rice cooker looks as if a good deal for the scale, however its rice was inconsistent, with severely undercooked, dry rice sections. Zojirushi’s 3-cup possibility additionally dissatisfied with rice that was too wet and barely damaged down, losing the distinction of nicely-cooked white rice.
Cuisinart’s 4-cup and Black and Decker’s 7-cup rice cookers have been a few of our least favorites as a result of they were each so messy. Cuisinart’s boiled each time we used this conventional rice cooker and Black and Decker’s larger model leaked onto the counter, necessitating significant cleanup.
When it got here to the midrange multicookers, we discovered the cooking time to be slow and the outcomes constantly slightly off. An 8-cup Aroma rice cooker and meals steamer, On the spot Pot’s Zest cooker and a 5-cup Panasonic received us excited with the assorted features obtainable on their interfaces, but all three produced overcooked, barely mushy rice, possibly due to the sluggish cooking. We also tested the $140 Cuisinart’s bigger Rice Plus Multicooker and whereas it could actually hold lots of rice and produced decent batches of white and brown, cooking rice took longer than another machine to take action at well over an hour and a half for brown rice.
If you end up cooking a great deal of several types of grains, one of those may be a viable possibility since they’ve so many area of interest settings. But for rice, there are higher choices out there. You might also discover you get extra bang in your buck with a real multicooker that includes a pressure cooker function. I might direct you to CNET’s checklist of best Immediate Pots for 2023 for a bit more on that.
Somehow I did not blow a fuse.
Lastly, the upper-finish, specialized rice cookers from Tiger and Zojirushi have been both spectacular, as famous above. It’s clear these gadgets are rigorously calibrated; Zojirushi even offers just a little bit of personalization as to the way you want your white rice cooked, which is right if you’ve received of us with completely different rice texture preferences living below the same roof.
The Tiger, nevertheless, is lower than half the worth of its counterpart and cooked rice extraordinarily effectively sooner than any others. It could not have all of the bells and whistles of the Zojirushi, which nabs our top decide for customized rice, but it is our prime total choice for the perfect rice cooker in 2023.
Which rice cooker is right for you?
If you like rice, however it’s not a staple of your eating regimen, I wouldn’t recommend buying a rice cooker. Cooking rice is not troublesome and you may get nice outcomes with good technique in a pot of boiling water. Choose a standard rice cooker with 5 cups which isn’t too small and too massive to make your cooking straightforward. That stated, if you happen to eat numerous rice, a cooker can really streamline that cooking course of and prep, allowing you to focus on the opposite parts of the meal.
There was a shocking amount of variance in efficiency across the rice cooking devices that we tested and frankly, some disappointment in some of them. But if you happen to pick any of our top three, whether for the value, the cooking pot size (large households can eat quite a lot of rice) or just because you want the most effective rice you will get every time, you need to be fully glad.
Rice cooker FAQs
Is a rice cooker worth it?
Should you love rice however have hassle cooking it, then a rice cooker is definitely well worth the investment. Rice can be made in a normal pot but it surely takes precise measuring of water and rice and meticulous attention to cooking time and the way much the water is simmering to get it excellent. Plus, some wonderful rice cookers price as little as $30 and take up no more space within the cupboard than a small saucepan.
How to clean an electric rice cooker?
Cleansing a rice cooker is simple. The primary cooking container and lid are typically the one elements that get dirty and might virtually at all times be hand washed within the sink or run by way of the dishwasher. The main body of the rice cooker might experience some dripping and smudging however can easily be wiped down with a sponge and warm water.
Are rice cookers safe?
Utilizing a rice cooker is safer than cooking it on an open stovetop. A high quality rice cooker is aware of when the rice is finished (water is gone) and shuts itself off mechanically. As a result of they’re self-contained and use electric heating parts, there’s less threat of hearth than with a gasoline-powered or even an electric stovetop. Conversely, making rice on a stove requires constant consideration. Leaving rice in a pot for too lengthy after it’s finished cooking will cause it to burn and can even result in kitchen fires.
