The rice cookers I examined fell into three free classes: small, inexpensive gadgets, midrange multicookers and specialised, high-end rice cookers.
Every mini rice cooker I examined, together with the Imusa 3-cup, the Sprint mini 2-cup rice cooker, and the Black & Decker 3-cup rice cooker supplied first rate, small servings of white rice, though the Sprint took a painfully lengthy 35 minutes simply to cook dinner simply 1 cup of white. All of them struggled with brown rice and combined rice.
The marginally bigger 6-cup Oster (our funds choose) and the Zojirushi rice makers carried out almost identically, making good pots of white rice in 19 and 20 minutes respectively and excellent brown rice — albeit maybe simply barely underdone — in a lightning-fast 22 minutes. I might gleefully advocate both one as a stable space-saving rice cooker choice. Whereas the Zojirushi does appear barely extra solidly constructed, it is greater than double the value of the Oster, which supplies the Oster our last nod.
The less complicated Oster and Zojirushi rice makers carried out almost identically in our testing.
The $50 8-cup Hamilton Seashore rice cooker (Replace: Out of Inventory) looks as if an excellent deal for the scale, however its rice was inconsistent, with severely undercooked, dry rice sections. Zojirushi’s 3-cup choice additionally disenchanted with rice that was too moist and barely damaged down, dropping the excellence of well-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 have been each so messy. Cuisinart’s boiled every time I used this standard rice cooker and Black and Decker’s bigger mannequin leaked onto the counter, necessitating important cleanup.
When it got here to the midrange multicookers, I discovered the cooking time to be gradual and the outcomes have been constantly slightly off. An 8-cup Aroma rice cooker and meals steamer, On the spot Pot’s Zest cooker and a 5-cup Panasonic bought us excited with the assorted capabilities obtainable on their interfaces, however all three produced overcooked, barely mushy rice, probably because of the gradual cooking. I additionally examined Cusinart’s bigger Rice Plus Multi-Cooker and whereas it may possibly maintain numerous rice and produced first rate batches of white and brown, cooking rice took longer than another machine to take action at properly over an hour and a half for brown rice.
If you end up cooking a great deal of various kinds of grains, one in every of these could also be a viable choice since they’ve so many area of interest settings. For rice, there are higher choices obtainable. You may also discover you get extra worth with a real multicooker that features a stress cooker perform. I might direct you to CNET’s checklist of finest On the spot Pots for 2024 for a bit extra on that.
By some means I did not blow a fuse.
Lastly, the higher-end, specialised rice cookers from Tiger and Zojirushi have been each spectacular, as famous above. It is clear these gadgets are rigorously calibrated; Zojirushi even affords slightly little bit of personalization as to the way you need your white rice cooked, which is good if you happen to’ve bought people with totally different rice texture preferences residing beneath the identical roof.
The Tiger is lower than half the value of its counterpart and cooked rice extraordinarily properly; quicker than any others. It could not have all of the bells and whistles of the Zojirushi, which nabs our prime choose for customized rice, but it surely’s our prime general selection for 2024.
