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The battle to invent the automatic rice cooker

atlasobscura.com

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Re: The battle to invent the automatic rice cooker

#3
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We often use the timer in our rice cooker such that when you come back home the rice is ready, and it also maintains the temperature after it's done. I wouldn't want to leave a stove at high heat while not at home.

Re: The battle to invent the automatic rice cooker

#4
post #2

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So measure water and rice, monitor boiling status, modify cooking temperature...

Yep, needs more automation and less human thought. We need single-serving-sized pouches of rice, and single-serving-sized bottles of water. Feeding four people? Use four packets and four bottles. The cooking device can monitor its own temperature and sing a ditty when it’s done.

Re: The battle to invent the automatic rice cooker

#5
post #2

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As the article states, the challenge is already lower for you because you can turn the heat to low, unlike the old days.

Rice can vary, high starch to low starch, short-grain to long-grain, sticky, non-sticky, raw to parboiled. They're used as a base for other dishes including sushi, fried rice, pudding, biryani and porridge. All these require different amounts of consistency.

While cooking at home, if you just mess it up a little bit, the dish will still serve its purpose. But that's not true if you're cooking an Asian dish with perfectly good rice used just as a base.

Re: The battle to invent the automatic rice cooker

#6
post #2

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So measure water and rice, monitor boiling status, modify cooking temperature... Yep, needs more automation and less human thought. We need single-serving-sized pouches of rice, and single-serving-sized bottles of water. Feeding four people? Use four packets and four bottles. The cooking device can monitor its own temperature and sing a ditty when it’s done.

Ricero!

Re: The battle to invent the automatic rice cooker

#7
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I’m not sure how you could read the article and miss the historical context. In postwar Japan, many women were not cooking with saucepans on gas or electric ranges with high-quality, industrially processed rice:

>For centuries, most Japanese cooks made rice with a kamado, a box-shaped range topped with a heavy iron pot. It was painfully tricky. Cooking rice this way, says columnist and food writer Makiko Itoh, takes heat modulation: high heat until the water and rice boils, then low heat, then high heat again. “And that, with a wood-burning stove, is very difficult.” Each day, Japanese women rose at dawn and labored for several sweaty hours to make rice.

The engineer who made the first, widely successful design relied on his wife’s expertise in this traditional cooking method to perfect it.

Re: The battle to invent the automatic rice cooker

#8
post #2

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So measure water and rice, monitor boiling status, modify cooking temperature... Yep, needs more automation and less human thought. We need single-serving-sized pouches of rice, and single-serving-sized bottles of water. Feeding four people? Use four packets and four bottles. The cooking device can monitor its own temperature and sing a ditty when it’s done.

Zoujirushi rice cookers already sing you a song when they’ve finished cooking:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CMN0jAENzIg

Re: The battle to invent the automatic rice cooker

#9
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Jo Koy has a bit about cooking rice on his newest special that points out an even easier trick. Put as much rice as you want to cover the bottom of the pot, then put your index finger on the rice and fill the water up to the first knuckle.

...But for the next step I'm using my instapot while I do something else.

Re: The battle to invent the automatic rice cooker

#10
For people that regularly eat rice, buying a decent rice cooker is really a no-brainer. Cooking rice in a pan is possible and you can obtain good results if you're careful and turn the heat down at the right moment before the rice starts to stick to the bottom of the pan and burn, it's easy to miss though. A rice cooker makes this process so much easier though: Put in the rice, the adequate amount of water, press a button, wait, eat (usually) perfectly cooked rice.

I started with a German brand a few years ago but finally mustered up the courage to buy a good Japanese one (Zojirushi seems to be the market leader these days). I imagine that it tastes a bit better now but honestly even most of the cheap rice cookers produce quite good results. Recently Xiaomi introduced a series of rice cookers which have really nice induction heating and a really heavy, solid cooking pan, unfortunately they have littered them with "smart" functionality, so it's nothing that I want in my kitchen.

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