Second this. There's a reason you find them and nothing else in all corners of Asian society. I fucking love mine and rarely needs to be cleaned heavily outside the Teflon pot

Micom

Interesting that thing looks like it has a pretty tight seal around the interior pot. How is it with getting rice water crust around the hinge the plastic channel around the lid? Mine is always getting nasty, and it's hard to get into those tight spaces to clean.

We have a simple one (push a single button and walk away style) and love it. It's not that much different from the cheap $20 we got at the store, but the quality of the insert is much higher.

I had to replace my bowl because my kids used metal spoons on it so much the coating was coming off. Annoying but great that I could buy a part for a 12 yo machine.

My single annoyance is the non replaceable battery. It lasted a decade, but I had to desolder it from the board to replace it. I ended up replacing the battery with a battery holder I got off ebay, so in several years when I have to replace it again I won't have to solder anything.

This is a silly but ...

I had planned on using the instant pot as a rice cooker, but 90% of the time I want rice, it is to go with the thing cooking in the instant pot , so I end up making rice on the stove.

Had nothing but problems making rice in my instant pot. Either it’s too hard, or too soft.

Tried different salt amounts, different water ratios, rinsing, draining, using the rice mode, using the manual mode.

Never had perfect rice from it.

Instant Pots aren't a fad anymore, either, so you can probably pick one up used cheap or on a buy nothing group.

I don't use my instant pot for rice because a saucepan is simpler and easier to clean, but I'm happy with it and I'm sure it would work just fine for rice.

I feel ya. That's the trade off. Less time paying attention to the rice, but more time cleaning the stupid thing.

The non-stick interior isn't my biggest complaint, it's all the groves around the seals gaskets that icky with rice water.

I find that, to clean it, I need to wrap a paper towel around a sharp chopstick or toothpick to get in to all the little corners. And when I look at all of my friend's rice cookers, they have the same problem. Rice water crustys all around the seals that are hard to hit with a disk sponge.

Edit: mine is pretty clean right now, but I just spent a good amount to time getting into all the little crevices. Of all then stuff in my kitchen, its one of the more annoying things to clean.

It's all the other parts that might get dirty. Mine has a tendency to form bubbles, which means starchy foam can get around this metal disk above the pot and starches everything. I have to disassemble everything to get it really clean again.

Yeah, that's what I have as well. An Aroma with the plastic seals. They're super annoying to clean. I've been considering one of those simple glass top versions simply because they don't have a ton of tight spaces that collect rice water crust.

Seconded.

For the past couple of years, I've been using an Aroma rice cooker as well (ARC-753SG if you're curious), and have been very pleased with it. It was one of the few rice cookers I could find with a stainless steel pot instead of Teflon. Makes perfect rice every time, easy to clean, and shows no signs of wear so far.

We own a Tiger and it's fine. Does what it's supposed to.

It looks like you can buy aftermarket inner pots that don't have teflon. I tried poking around the website here in Japan and it looks like the new ones use a different coating (there was something in the news about teflon a couple years ago so this is entirely possible), but I can't be sure without downloading and pouring through manuals. You could probably do the same on Zojirushi's US website.

Yeah, I’m not super into teflon. This is the only piece of teflon cookware that I have left. Makes me think that I might want to try something like a ceramic or stainless rice cooker.

My normal rice cooker makes rice in 15 min. $25 Oster.

+1 for cheap rice cookers. Dead simple cooking mechanism, no seals or gaskets that get super gross, it's great

It's a Korean brand, probably better than the Japanese brands

Citation? My Japanese one is > 8 years old and still going strong making perfect rice. My in-laws have had theirs longer. I've never used a Korean one to compare anything, but no complaints with mine.

I just watched the whole thing and he didn't say a single thing about how to get the water ratio right and I just wasted ten minutes of my life

Yeah, I saw that and followed his advice. My rice is great, but cleaning the cooker is a pain.

Yeah, this was me. I was happy with using a saucepan for decades. Then some friends were moving back to India and gave me theirs. A rice cooker is a game-changer. Two cups of rice, three cups of water, hit the switch. That's it. You can now go do whatever you are doing and know that the rice is taken care of. It's almost as simple as a toaster.

I don't know what brand of rice cooker I have, It's a simple one that does the job. I don't know how old it is, but I assume it was 10 years old when we got it 5 years ago, as our friends were in the country 10 years.