Are rice cookers an unnecessary modern convenience or do they really simplify the task of cooking rice?
I’ve never cooked rice and I’m hoping to cook more in my life and most of the stuff involves rice.
Eh, it’s really easy to make rice on the stove top. Rice cookers just make it even easier. You can put in the ingerdients and forget about it and, if you eat rice a lot, that’s really convenient. Most of them have timers, so you can fill them up in the morning, and then come home to freshly made rice. Plus, they have warmers to keep the rice warmed up for a while. Mine (which is a fancy Japanese model) even has a porridge setting so I can wake up to freshly cooked oatmeal evey morning.
You’d be surprised. 
I can cook meat and veggies okay, but whenever I cooked rice in a pot it’d always come out too soggy or too undercooked and crunchy, and I could never fix it, plus having to pay attention to the rice meant I screwed up the meat as well. I got a fancy Japanese model too, and I can be assured of consistently good rice without any trouble now. It’s done a lot for making it easier for me to cook at home instead of eating out all the time.
If you have a microwave, you don’t need a rice cooker. Unless you want one for warming up soup.
Directions on back of Mahatma Jasmine rice:
In a 2-quart casserole dish, combine 1-3/4 cups of water and 1 cup rice. Cover and microwave on High for 5 minutes. Reduce to 50% for 10 minutes. Let stand 5 minutes.
Best rice EVER!
Uh-huh. I am quite a good cook, could use improvement of course but I can learn almost anything and have taught myself 3-4 different cooking styles in the past few years. And I cannot cook rice. i started a thread here asking about it, I asked my SO and my family, I still couldn’t do it. i have given it up as a bad job. I either burn it or put too much water. I love my rice cooker and you can pry it from my cold dead hands.
Rice is VERY hard to cook, IMO.
Theres a reason why there are chinese villagers who’se only electrical appliances are a TV, a satellite dish and a rice cooker…
I was the same way, until I tried the method I posted. It comes out perfect every time. But if you already have a rice cooker, that’s great. I just wanted to find a method that worked so I wouldn’t have to buy one.
I think the smallest rice cookers have a minimum capacity of two cups, so I think they are overkill if you only need one or two servings.
Here’s my no-fail recipe for stovetop rice (shamelessly stolen from the back of a bag of basmati rice):
Rinse the rice until the water runs clear. To make one serving of rice, put 4 ounces of rice and 6 ounces of water in a heavy saucepan. Bring to a boil, stir once and cover. Set the heat to low and leave it alone for ten minutes. Then take the saucepan off the heat and leave it, covered, for five minutes.
**Dewey Finn’s ** , I want to emphasize what you say about **heavy ** saucepan. This is the key. It should be about the weight of a cast-iron skillet, and nonstick is a big plus. As far as I know it is impossible to cook good rice in a cheap pan. Matter of fact, my rice cooker was undoubtedly less expensive than any of the pans I cook rice in. Brown rice is harder to get right than white rice. In a pan I use 1 cup brown rice, 3 cups water, bring to a boil and then reduce to a simmer for 40 minutes. In a rice cooker, I use 1 cup brown rice to about 1.5 cups water.
We recieved this rice cooker from our bridal registry and love it. I thought cooking rice on the stovetop was easy enough until I botched it a few times and now I don’t think I’ll ever go back.
Good. A little al dente for lack of a better term; I’ll have to adjust the time to out microwave, but very promising.
This sometimes produces perfect rice. I add a little more water. And I feel so cool rinsing the rice! 
Somtines I lightly fry unrinsed rice and use the ratio of 1:2.
I’ve screwed up stovetop rice more times than I can count, especially brown rice. That crap is hard to cook! But when my friend got divorced, I was helping him and his wife move out, and they gave me the rice cooker they got as a wedding present. It’s a cheaper model, but makes a world of difference. Of course, switching from boring bland brown rice to jasmine rice helps a bit too.
OK, I let the microwaved Jasmine stand for thirty minutes and it’s perfect.
I hate it when things are easy… 
OK, I"ll confess that I’ve never actually made rice on the stovetop. My mom makes it look easy and everytime there’s a rice cooker thread, a bunch of people invariably post about how silly rice cookers are and how easy the stovetop method is that I assumed it was pretty easy.
I’ve only ever used rice cookers. I first had one of the cheapo models (I think I paid $15). Made great rice but was kinda a pain to clean. Now I’ve got this Zojirushi which uses fuzzy logec to cook the perfect rice every single time and is really easy to clean. (BTW, I got a better deal going through ebay) Plus, as I mentioned before, it’s simply brilliant for making steel cut oatmeal. I just load it up the night before and I have hot, fresh, perfect oatmeal every morning for breakfast.
Since most of the stuff you cook involves rice then yeah I’d recommend a rice cooker. A lot of them come with steamer trays now so you can cook vegies with the steam from the rice. I also like to bury some Chinese pork sausage in the cooked rice for an easy meal.
Hot oatmeal in the morning sounds cool. What’s the smallest batch you can make in the rice maker (i.e., can you make just a single serving)?
I also thought that a rice cooker was an unnecessary appliance when I got one for our wedding, until I actually pulled it out and learned to use it. It works just fine; I use about a 2:1 ratio of water to brown rice (the bag says 1:1, I think, but the rice always came out too hard that way), and the rice is great. It is nice to put the rice and water in and go off and do other stuff and forget about it; I do, however, have minute rice on hand, too, for our last-minute rice needs.
So, long story short, yeah, rice cookers are good. (Get yourself a good garlic press, too - they’re indispensable for tasty cooking.)
I usually make 1/2 cup dry which winds up being maybe a cup and a half cooked? But you use the Zojirushi supplied measuring cup which is smaller than a regular cup (I think it’s about 3/4 cup). I tried making it with 1/4 cup dry and it actually came out just fine but it wasn’t enough to keep me from getting hungry. I think I figured out I get about 225 calories per half cup (dry) serving which is a decent sized single serving.
Thanks. I’m tempted, although that machine seems kind of pricey, especially compared to the $15 rice cookers available elsewhere. But then I have a 12-year-old nephew who likes porridge. I wonder if I should get it for his family for Christmas. I’m trying to imagine where they’d put it, though, since their kitchen is small and crowded.
I make basmati rice in a $10 pot on top of the stove. Rinse a cup of rice well. Throw 2 cups of water, a little butter and salt and the rice in the pot. Bring to a boil, turn down to simmer, cover and simmer for about 10 minutes. Done. As I’ve said before in these threads, it’s nearly impossible to screw up basmati. And let’s not start up the nonsense about how it’s difficult to cook because my motherblahblahblah. It simply isn’t so.