A place to share practical, durable and quality made products that are made to last, with an emphasis on upcycled and sustainable products!
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Things that are well-made and durable (even if they won't last a lifetime) are A-Okay!
Unlike that other BIFL place, Home-made and DIY items are encouraged here, as long as some form of instruction is included in the body of the post.
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A limited amount of self-promotion is accepted, IF the item you are selling aligns with this criteria:
doesn't easily get nasty AF
Background? What the hell are you doing with your rice cooker?!
I have a Japanese zojirushi I bought about 8 years ago. Fuzzy logic, induction, etc. Still going strong and I don't find it hard to clean. Every one I used (such as my first year in Japan at a sharehouse) worked well and lasted.
Married into an Asian family so rice cookers are used all day. We tried a few of the 50 dollar ones. They were OK but the rice tended to overcook and sometimes even burn on the bottom. Then I got my wife a zojirushi neuro fuzzy. I don't recall any household item that has pleased her more than this cooker in our 22 years together. Perfect rice every time, easy to clean. The only issue we had was the inner lid gasket wore out. But we really do abuse this cooker. It is used so much. Zojirushi customer service shipped us a new inner lid for a reasonable price.
I've been reall happy with the Sage/Breville brand. I have both a blender and a pressure cooker/rice cooker from them and they are really well build. Sturdy and super easy to clean and use.
I use a regular steel pot, works great :D
Usually rice cookers are used in Asian countries on daily basis, it's like one of few things that won't ever break, even the cheapest
Technology Connections (YouTube channel) did an examination on rice cookers.
Spoiler: you only need one of the cheapest rice cookers out there to make perfect rice every time, so long as you get the water ratio correct.
I just watched the whole thing and he didn't say a single thing about how to get the water ratio right and I just wasted ten minutes of my life
Look up that ratio. For any given altitude that ratio is going to be the same whether you make your rice in one of these pots, an expensive Zojirushi, or in a plain pot on the stove.
Is that what he meant? So the fact that I live at 800m is what's fucking up my rice?!?
Yeah, I saw that and followed his advice. My rice is great, but cleaning the cooker is a pain.
Get a duo pressure cooker. You will be able to have whute rice ready in about 20 min and you can cook almost anything in it, not just rice
My normal rice cooker makes rice in 15 min. $25 Oster.
Ok but can you cook a roast in it, or a soup, or roasted potatoes?
I bought a cheap Xiaomi because it has wifi, the remote control and monitoring interest wore off but its a great device in it's own right. Produces excellent rice and is very easy to clean. Quick wipe of the non-stick bowl, run the steam chimney under the tap, done.
Cuckoo. It's a Korean brand, probably better than the Japanese brands imo. If you have an H-mart near you they'll have a couple models on the floor you can look at, but I bought mine on amazon. It's big, fast, can cook all types of rice with special settings, and everything that comes in contact with the rice pot is removable for cleaning. It's been going strong for about 5 years and I use it at least once a week.
You can also cook anything in there. It comes with a steamer tray too for vegetables or sweet potatoes. Apparently mine can cook a whole chicken but I have yet to try that. Oh and it talks too, plus it makes a cute choo-choo train sound to signal it'll vent steam in a second.
It's a Korean brand, probably better than the Japanese brands
Citation? My Japanese one is > 8 years old and still going strong making perfect rice. My in-laws have had theirs longer. I've never used a Korean one to compare anything, but no complaints with mine.
lol, you wanna fight? Mine is better than yours, source is your mom. I made her rice when she was over last. She was impressed. :::
What kind of response is this? If there were actual facts to present, then it would be useful to the thread and the concept of this community.
Maybe do your own research? I was the only person to mention a non-Japanese cooker. It does more and lasts as long. Go look it up.
Stainless steel pan. Never felt the need to get a dedicated rice cooker.
Yeah, this was me. I was happy with using a saucepan for decades. Then some friends were moving back to India and gave me theirs. A rice cooker is a game-changer. Two cups of rice, three cups of water, hit the switch. That's it. You can now go do whatever you are doing and know that the rice is taken care of. It's almost as simple as a toaster.
I don't know what brand of rice cooker I have, It's a simple one that does the job. I don't know how old it is, but I assume it was 10 years old when we got it 5 years ago, as our friends were in the country 10 years.
I've had a super cheap, simple rice cooker for ages and it's awesome. IIRC, it was only $10. The bowl is removable and easy to clean and it's so super basic, there's very few points of failure.
The brand is Ouyou or something like that. Not home rn to see.
Edit: Oster. That's the brand.
+1 for cheap rice cookers. Dead simple cooking mechanism, no seals or gaskets that get super gross, it's great
Do you care about exposure to potentially toxic/carcinogenic materials? Asian (especially Japanese) rice cookers such as Zoujirushi do an excellent job, but AFAIK they all utilize non-stick pots (Teflon).
It looks like you can buy aftermarket inner pots that don't have teflon. I tried poking around the website here in Japan and it looks like the new ones use a different coating (there was something in the news about teflon a couple years ago so this is entirely possible), but I can't be sure without downloading and pouring through manuals. You could probably do the same on Zojirushi's US website.
Yeah, I’m not super into teflon. This is the only piece of teflon cookware that I have left. Makes me think that I might want to try something like a ceramic or stainless rice cooker.
I've had a stainless steel rice cooker for about a year now. Works well with the two types of rice I tend to cook and is easy to clean. Would recommend
Aroma has stainless steel stuff. Tiger has a ceramic one.
I'd say an InstantPot. Stainless steel pot, very easy to clean, versatile, built like a tank, and a fraction of the cost of a Zojirushi.
We've had an 8 quart model that gets used more than once a day on average, and we paid under $100 Canadian back in 20217. Never had a problem with making rice in it.
This is a silly but ...
I had planned on using the instant pot as a rice cooker, but 90% of the time I want rice, it is to go with the thing cooking in the instant pot , so I end up making rice on the stove.
Had nothing but problems making rice in my instant pot. Either it’s too hard, or too soft.
Tried different salt amounts, different water ratios, rinsing, draining, using the rice mode, using the manual mode.
Never had perfect rice from it.
That's because the rice setting is a bit of a sham. The rice mode just sets a timer for the rice to cook, assuming you are just using cheap, commodity-level white rice, but any other type of rice, you have to adjust. You can make good rice in an instant pot, it just takes more work. You need to know the right amount of time and pressure for that specific type of rice.
Rice cookers have one or more sensors that detect when the rice is done (e.g., when the pot gets hotter than the boiling temp of water, so it knows all the water is absorbed). That makes purpose built rice cookers more foolproof.
That's a shame. I've made all kinds of rice in ours, from delicate Jasmine rice to parboiled, and even wild rice. We just use the rice setting and let it cook.
We do have a small rice cooker for 1 or 2 servings, too. It has a nonstick pot and I wouldn't consider it a BIFL product because of that. It's also not as versatile as the IP.
But, really. Use whatever gets the results you want. I'm not a fan of wasted/ruined food 😖
Instant Pots aren't a fad anymore, either, so you can probably pick one up used cheap or on a buy nothing group.
I don't use my instant pot for rice because a saucepan is simpler and easier to clean, but I'm happy with it and I'm sure it would work just fine for rice.
I use mine for rice but it also gets used as a slow cooker and steamer (also, soft boiled eggs are super easy) when necessary
I use mine for rice, and it works well. No issues with cleaning, just throw it in the dishwasher.
Zojirushi. Bifl and their website you can buy replacement parts if needed iirc. I bought a replacement lid for a 10 year old water boiler from their website.
I had to replace my bowl because my kids used metal spoons on it so much the coating was coming off. Annoying but great that I could buy a part for a 12 yo machine.
My single annoyance is the non replaceable battery. It lasted a decade, but I had to desolder it from the board to replace it. I ended up replacing the battery with a battery holder I got off ebay, so in several years when I have to replace it again I won't have to solder anything.
