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.
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.
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...
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.
I'm admittedly something of a kitchen gadget person, but my rice cooker is something that I genuinely use a lot.
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.
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?
A quick search results in this, for example: http://greatist.com/eat/super-surprising-rice-cooker-recipes
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.
I'm surprised you couldn't afford a microwave - they're like $50-100 these days for something that has crazy high utility.
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!!!
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.
But then again personal tastes for rice may vary.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Call it by its alternate name of Multivariate Logic and it seems less... fuzzy.
If rice_is_not_done_yet is more than 90% false and rice_is_overcooked is more than 10% true stop cooking it!
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.
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.
http://www.thekitchn.com/cooking-rice-do-you-use-the-first-k...
> 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.”
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."
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.
As for the if/then statements, even fuzzy logic needs cutoff points.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Any other gadget should aim to be as useful, fault-tolerant and straightforward as a rice cooker (microwave is close 2nd).
http://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/the-pot-and-how-to-...
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?
