Adult Experiments

One of our wedding gifts from our registry was a rice cooker. Some of my friends from college pooled money together and purchased it for us. We used it for the last ten years and it has been a wonderful part of our household cooking preparation. 

In the last month or so, we realized we were cooking rice every single day. Yes, we naturally consume a lot of rice as part of our weekly meals, but having to cook rice everyday was a bit overkill and excessive. Alas, our little 5-cup rice cooker was no longer making do for our growing family. 

We already own an 8 qt Instant Pot and I've blogged about how we love it. This was the concluding post to  tracking my small appliance usage in 2022. One of the features of the Instant Pot is its rice cooker function. We've actually never tried it, but in the past few weeks, we did, because we were wondering if we needed to purchase a new rice cooker. 

We looked up some recipes online about how to cook rice in an instant pot. This recipe was the starting point of our testing. The recipe itself is fine. If followed correctly, it makes great rice. But there was one main issue with this recipe - you have to stop the cooking at a precise time in order to yield the best rice texture. This means the IP will pressurize, cook for 3 minutes, and then naturally release for 10 minutes. In minutes, this means after approximately 33-35 minutes, you will need to return to the IP and release the rest of the pressure. For our household, it's not always possible for me to be at home and available to stop the cooking after 35 minutes. I love the feature about designated rice cookers where you can keep warm in the appliance for days!

My husband and I experimented with this a few times to see if we could play with the proportions. We tried a shorter cooking time (1 minute) and letting it naturally release longer (we tested up to about 2 hours) and with less water in the recipe. All our tests yielded very mushy, soft rice. Although edible and arguably the same taste, the texture just wasn't right. 

So we came to the conclusion that we need an actual specialized rice cooker to cook our rice because it will cook, finish, and keep warm for days if we needed it to, and the texture of the rice is unaffected. 

So much more counter space...but I will sacrifice 
the space for well-cooked non-babysat rice. 😅

 

Luckily, we found this new 10-cup rice cooker for less than $150 at the time we purchased. The current list price has gone up significantly.  Originally we were looking into the Zojirushi brand which always costs around $200. We ended up deciding on the Cuckoo because it seemed comparable in quality at a lower price point. We'll let time tell us if we made the right decision or not. 

Who knew 20 years after high school we'd still be using constants, variables, and reading results in our own way. 😏