It also boasts a delayed-start-time function and the ability to slow-cook or steam vegetables, meat, beans, soups, and stews. The downfall of all the Zojirushi cookers we tested is their slowness, and the Neuro Fuzzy is no exception. It took a long time to make a batch of white rice, 44 to 46 minutes for a 3-cup batch, compared with 38 minutes in the hamilton beach and 29 minutes in the Cuckoo. And the Neuro Fuzzy was the slowest for brown rice by a landslide, taking 1 hour 38 minutes, almost twice as long as the Hamilton Beach and the Cuckoo.
Although the Instant Pot is a masterful multipurpose cooker, its rice just isn’t as good as what you can get from the Cuckoo CRP-P1009. The Tiger JAX-T10U was one of the strongest performers in our previous tests. It has a nice thick inner pot, a stainless steel exterior, and a detachable inner lid. It cooked on a par with the winning Zojirushi when making sushi rice, which is why it moved forward into the latter rounds of testing. But we were not impressed with its brown rice, long-grain results, or quick rice. Overall, it isn’t as intuitive to use as more traditional rice cookers like the Zojirushi or Cuckoo.
This kind of heft is wonderful if you cook batches of rice for many people, but it’s needlessly cumbersome if you’re cooking for one or two. The Cuckoo CRP-P1009S has a removable inner lid like the Zojirushi, making it easy to clean the starchy film that collects as the rice cooks. Of our three picks, we think this lid is the easiest to remove and put back on, with a simple pull tab design.
The length of grain, the level of starch, and other inherent qualities of a type of rice, paired with your preference for soft or chewy, call for adjustments in water level, cook time, and technique. Overall, we found that rice cookers brought out the best in short- and medium-grain rice. We also found that rice cookers from Japan and Korea (such as the Zojirushi and Cuckoo brands) are optimized for gelatinizing short-grain and sushi rice. If you prefer your short-grain rice al dente and almost mochi-like, you might seriously consider our upgrade pick, the Cuckoo CRP-P1009. For people who eat rice infrequently (and especially people who almost always eat jasmine rice), an inexpensive model under $50 will be just fine.
Few electric rice cookers specialize in cooking long-grain rice. The cookers we tested all did well on jasmine rice, but almost all of them struggled to produce good basmati. If you primarily cook basmati rice, a rice cooker is not your best bet.
Rao loves the flexibility of this control, as she can add a few spoonfuls of water if the grains seem dry or she can allow water to evaporate if the grains look wet. For a pot, she recommends anything with a heavy bottom and a fitted lid. For more specific steps on cooking stovetop rice, read her guide for NYT Cooking. The Rice and Hot Cereal Cooker offers tremendous functionality for a low price. In our tests, it made sushi and jasmine rice as delicious as what we got from some models costing three times as much.