Hacker News Reader

Comment by jessaustin | Hacker News Reader

I've used several different rice cookers over the course of years, but finally I just don't see the point.

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.

View on HN

Time. I use the delayed start feature on mine along with a slow cooker to have meals ready when I get home (I go home after work, set up the cooking, go to the gym, return home to a nearly done meal).

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.

I feel like we all dogpiled on you. You're right.

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...

There is that. But you can always use it for cooking other things. I've used mine for cooking other grains and pastas (mixed results), and just meats and vegetables. It's a lot faster than my slow cooker, and generally cleaner/easier than a pot on the stove (less monitoring the temperature and reduced concern of things like boiling over, helps that mine is probably too large for a single person but I also try to cook up 3-4 days of food at once for work lunches).

For cheaper meats and many vegetables, a pressure cooker is better than a regular pot, a crock pot, or a rice cooker.

Care to share some recipes you use? Or where to find them online.

At least one other link in this thread has some good ones.

Mostly I just do some sort of meat and rice + vegetables combo. A very simple (and customizable) chicken recipe:

Can't recall exact amounts, but you can play with the ratios of meat:rice.

2 chicken breasts, cubed (1"-2"), marinade

0.5-1 cup rice

Sautee the chicken (don't need to finish cooking it, just get it white on all sides), put it in the rice cooker. Add the rice, stir it in. Possibly some vegetables (steamer tray for this as well). Add 1-1.5 cups water (depending on amount of rice). Turn on the rice cooker. Wait. Eat.

You should be able to do this with other meats but you may want to cook it more prior to adding to the rice cooker to make sure it's done (I've done this with sausage, haven't tried pork yet).

Easily customizable, just add your favorite spices and vegetables.

Soy sauce + hoisin sauce makes a nice marinade, sauté some garlic and ginger before sautéing the chicken. Water chestnuts and a bit of sesame oil when cooking.

Okay, now tell your SO or a friend or roommate to make the day's rice.

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.

Even once or twice a week. Once you've prepped the ingredients, stir fry usually only takes a few minutes to cook. I find it super-handy to prep my stir fry and turn on the rice cooker. When I'm ready to eat, the rice is ready and making the rest is 5-10 minutes work. Making rice isn't hard but it does require at least a modicum of supervision.

I'm admittedly something of a kitchen gadget person, but my rice cooker is something that I genuinely use a lot.

I can't say I've ever been successful making stir fried rice with immediately cooked rice. It works much better if you make rice then store it in the fridge overnight.

For fried rice, yeah, day old is best. But nothing beats stir fry of meats/non-meats (tofu)/vegetables over hot, fresh rice.

I may have been unclear. I was talking about making fresh rice for fresh stir fry--not fried rice.

> Okay, now tell your SO or a friend or roommate to make the day's rice.

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.

Can confirm, none of those people know how to cook rice in my world.

But... we just told them how! I'm imagining someone saying, "sorry, I never learned how to wash the dishes... I won't be able to help you with that task."

Wait, now we don't need a rice cooker, or a stove?

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?

You can make a lot more than rice with a rice cooker. It's just smart enough to set and forget for a great deal of different dishes, which was great in college when I wanted to come back to a warm meal.

A quick search results in this, for example: http://greatist.com/eat/super-surprising-rice-cooker-recipes

In my case, I was in a dorm and couldn't afford a microwave, and was forbidden from having a burner or hot plate. You can heat up a lot of things in a rice cooker (especially a cheap one, which is little more than a heating coil with a bucket over it.)

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.

Cheap rice cookers are useful, but expensive ones: a) have more settings for things other than rice b) have options for delayed start, etc c) come with better materials (ie, teflon-free nonstick pan) d) it's a device that will last years - spending $200 vs $30 is often easily justifiable.

I'm surprised you couldn't afford a microwave - they're like $50-100 these days for something that has crazy high utility.

> in a dorm

I think that implies college student who didn't have a lot of money to spend

I did get one eventually - but I was hilariously poor in college at times.

Why would you buy a $50,000 BMW when a $20,000 Toyota will take you everywhere you want to go just as well?

Well, I drive a used Ford Escort without a working air conditioner that cost much, much less than $20,000, so... indeed?

The answer is that it has various nonessential luxury features that make it nicer, if you can afford it.

fair enough.

Do you have kids or a large family? Are you cooking for more than yourself? How much rice do you cook per day? Do you cook rice every single time you want it?

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 cook for more than myself, but it isn't a "large" family. I don't cook rice every day, but it is probably 90% of the days on which I cook. (Other household members typically prefer to cook other starches.) I often store rice in the fridge. I find that pouring some water with refrigerated rice into a glass bowl, covering, and nuking for two minutes restores it to an edible and tasty state. I have never cared to eat rice on four consecutive days, although when I lived in Asia and in Hawai'i that was often the case.

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.

I'd also comment on how consistent does the rice taste? When I made rice on the stove, it was really easy to cook too long and have it be mushier than I like.

I think self-timing shutoff will soon be a normal feature of new stoves. There are already some specialty heating elements that incorporate that.

I can make tasty bread without a bread machine, too, but there's a place for bread machines. Experts appreciate the convenience of not having to be right there on the spot to take anything off the stove (or out of the oven) and novices appreciate that it's really hard to mess up.

In my experience, your method of cooking rice doesn't come out as tasty as rice cooked with a good rice cooker. You can get the same results with a stovetop but it is more more involved (ie tweak the heat every 2-5 minutes).

But then again personal tastes for rice may vary.

By the same token, why do I need a car? I can simply walk wherever I would like to go.

Not quite the same. It's more like, cooking rice takes 20-30 minutes of time and attention (not total attention). A rice cooker turns it into 1 minute of attention (pour in rice, water, wait, remove), but takes about the same time.

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.

I don't do it quite daily, but often enough that I am glad to have one.

The cognitive and physical effort required to make decent rice in the rice cooker is roughly 1/10th that of manually doing it.

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.

I don't know, why would someone prefer a 2 stage process (put rice and water in cooker, take rice out of cooker) to a 4 stage process.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com