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Comment by nosborn | Hacker News Reader

I was told by a rice cooker salesperson (in Asia) that Korean brands should be avoided if you plan to cook brown rice. Apparently brown rice isn’t eaten in Korea so the machines don’t have a brown rice setting.

I don’t know if the former is true but the latter seemed to be on the ones I saw.

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Korea here. Brown rice is fairly common, and every rice cooker I've seen (except the very cheapest) has a setting for brown and/or mixed rice.

If the salesperson wasn't lying, he was probably referring to other cultivars of rice, not just brown rice. For example, long grain rice obviously requires different settings than short grain rice. Southeast and South Asia have much more diversity of rice than Northeast Asia.

Funny cause I got a cuckoo based on an Amazon review that said it cooked the best brown rice. YMMV I guess.

My Cuckoo definitely has a brown rice setting. It works pretty well fwiw

i’m no rice expert but i really don’t think you need a special cooker for brown rice in my experience. just a different ratio of water to rice. it isn’t special

Brown rice takes significantly longer to cook, so the rice cooker might not be programmed to do that.

With the simplest rice cookers, there's no programming. When the water is gone, it is gone.

yep, i just add more water and the brown rice turns out fine. though i’m sure fancy 200 dollar zojirushi ones probably do it better, i’m happy with simplicity

Why would the rice cooker need to be programmed for it, though? For any given quantity of rice, the two variables during cooking is the amount of water and the power of the heating element[1].

It is known that brown rice requires a different ratio of water, but this is something that can be replicated with any method. Does the special brown rice setting change the heat output of the rice cooker?

[1]: Fancy rice cookers use non-constant power, or so I've heard. Not sure how much it influences the taste, though.

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