The rice cookers we examined fell into three free classes: small, inexpensive gadgets, midrange multicookers and specialised, high-end rice cookers.
Every mini rice cooker we examined, together with the $19 Imusa 3-cup the $25 Sprint mini 2-cup rice cooker (presently out of inventory) and the $20 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 prepare dinner only one cup of white. All of them struggled with brown rice and blended rice, although.
The marginally bigger 6-cup Oster (our funds choose) and the $60 Zojirushi rice makers carried out almost identically, making excellent 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. We’d gleefully suggest both one as a strong 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 looks like an excellent deal for the dimensions, however its rice was inconsistent, with severely undercooked, dry rice sections. Zojirushi’s 3-cup choice additionally disillusioned 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 we used this typical rice cooker and Black and Decker’s bigger mannequin leaked onto the counter, necessitating vital cleanup.
When it got here to the midrange multicookers, we discovered the cooking time to be gradual and the outcomes constantly a bit off. An 8-cup Aroma rice cooker and meals steamer, Instantaneous Pot’s Zest cooker and a five-cup Panasonic obtained us excited with the assorted features out there on their interfaces, however all three produced overcooked, barely mushy rice, probably as a result of gradual cooking. We additionally examined the $140 Cuisinart’s bigger Rice Plus Multicooker and whereas it could actually maintain numerous rice and produced first rate batches of white and brown, cooking rice took longer than every other machine to take action at nicely over an hour and a half for brown rice.
If you end up cooking a great deal of several types of grains, considered one of these could also be a viable choice since they’ve so many area of interest settings. However for rice, there are higher choices out there. You may additionally discover you get extra bang to your buck with a real multicooker that features a strain cooker perform. I might direct you to CNET’s listing of finest Instantaneous 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 provides a bit little bit of personalization as to the way you need your white rice cooked, which is good if you happen to’ve obtained of us with completely different rice texture preferences residing below the identical roof.
The Tiger, nonetheless, is lower than half the value of its counterpart and cooked rice extraordinarily nicely quicker than any others. It might not have all of the bells and whistles of the Zojirushi, which nabs our high choose for customized rice, however it’s our high general selection for the very best rice cooker in 2024.