Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Okay. I'll give it five stars based on the rice it produces and easy of use and design. It does indeed make pretty much perfect rice, white, brown, wild, etc. as well as other grains. It comes with a little measuring cup. The water level marks inside (none too easy to see, are calibrated for the number of these little cups of grain you use. But the cup is about 3/4 cup, Why? Because that's 1-gou, the standard Japanese rice serving measure. But that's no big deal. Nor is it a problem that the water marks inside are hard to read. Just use one measure of water to one measure of rice. I know. That's different from your usual ratio for stovetop rice. There's a little bit of learning to do at first. I use more water with brown rice, more like 1.5 water to one brown rice. And some rice is drier than other rices, and need more water. I find that you can have a little more water, but you don't want to have too little, because the rice will be less than fully prepared. For instance, I forgot about the little measuring cup and absentmindedly used a full one cup measure but added water to the line for two gou. I got slightly underdone rice. Remember that the cooker knows when the water has been absorbed. Rice cookers work because, so long as there is free water in the pot, the temperature cannot rise above 212F (at sea level). So all the pot need do is stop cooking and reduce temperature to warm when the pot temperature rises about 212F. That's why it works for all grains. And that means the cooker doesn't really know when the rice is done, only when the water is gone. Now, you will see all sorts of different ratios recommended by rice cooker recipes and for different cookers. Lots of people use 1.5:1 for white rice. Quinoa is happier with a 2:1 ratio. Anything reasonably close will work, so long as you use enough water for the grain to be fully cooked when the water is gone. If you use a little more water than you needed, it will go on cooking until absorbed. The worst that will happen is that it might get a little softer than you'd like. And you can even fix it when you open the pot and find it isn't quite done. Just add a bit more water and start the cycle again. The cooker will still know when that water is absorbed. That's the lovely thing about a rice cooker. It can sort of peak under the lid for you, plus it doesn't have to be watched.