Originally Posted by
clarence5ybr
I cooked tasty rice on a stovetop with no major incidents for 17 years, but I love my rice cooker. Similar examples: I can do arithmetic just fine, but I typically use a calculator to balance my checkbook; I've used a "manual" saw, but I often use a powered circular saw.
Reasons for using a rice cooker include:
-Free up burner on stove for cooking other items
-A good rice cooker "holds" the rice so it's well-textured, hot, and tasty for hours after it's done
-It's trouble free--every so often when I used the stovetop method, I wouldn't keep as close an eye as I should have on the pot during the initial heating phase, and it would boil over, creating a mess on the stove that I'd have to clean up. Doesn't happen with a rice cooker
-Timer function--have rice ready when you walk in the door from work, have steel-cut oats ready as soon as you wake up in the morning, etc.
Also, it doesn't just cook rice--all grains can be cooked in it, and lost of people cook meals--search for 'rice cooker cookbook' on Amazon, and you'll find books with recipes for full meals done in a rice cooker.
There are so many reasons for items such as rice cookers some of which you touch on.
Many home cooks try their best to cook to the standards they experience in the fine restaurants they visit. But there's one element they overlook and I've not seen discussed. The plate of food they experience in the restaurant has possbily been prepared by several different people preparing elements at the same time to a "point". Preparing a meal in the kitchen therefore presents several challenges for the home cook about how to have everything ready at "the point" at the same time - but doing it all themselves with no help. Help such as intelligent rice cookers provide some assistance.
The best example in my view of such items are the new breed of sous vide baths which allow the home cook to produce proteins to a very high and consistant quality that can be finished when everything else is "at the point".
Breadmakers provide something different. For example I'm normally up at around 6am and I like an expresso and some French bread. Without the bread machine I need to get up somewhat earlier than 6am!
There seems to be an undercurrent or implication amongst some non-users that the use of these aids imasculates the cook. That real men hand knead their dough and wimps don't. Or bread makers don't make proper bread. Not so.
There's another thing. Almost every one of them I didn't "need" before I bought them but once I had them most of them I wouldn't do without. The list is endless, toasters, kettles, vacuum machines, electic slicers, electric knives, sous vide, pizza oven, mini ovens, beehive oven, slow cooker, microwaves, waffle machine, panini toaster, magimix, stick blender, hand whisk, fruit juicer ...... oh I could go on ..... and now the Zoji.