Why You Can Trust CNET Best Rice Cookers of 2023
Making perfectly cooked rice can be tricky, but it doesn't have to be. We've evaluated top rice cooker brands to find the best cooking gadget.
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Rice is nourishing, filling and inexpensive, making it an excellent food for people on any budget. It's a great staple food, and is part of different global diets and culinary traditions. You can cook rice in a standard pot, but you likely live a busy life and can't spend too much time perched over a pot like a gargoyle, which is why you should consider investing in a rice cooker. Making rice in a rice cooker is far easier and requires much less of your attention. In short: Rice cookers totally rock.
Getting the best rice cooker 2023 has to offer might sound like a big ask, with so many on the market, but a quality rice cooker will whip up perfectly fluffy rice out of any grain or strain of the stuff without any guesswork, freeing you up to do other things. It's true that you can find rice cookers in just about any size, from tiny two-cup mini rice cookers all the way up to massive machines that will make enough rice for a small army. And rice cookers also have come a long way in terms of functionality, they can perfectly prepare any type of rice -- sushi, long-grain, or wild. Sure, while cooking perfectly tender grains of rice is still the primary duty, some of the best rice cookers (and slow cooker models designed with rice in mind) are equipped to cook other grains including bulgur, quinoa and oatmeal.
One more thing to love about a rice cooker is how easy they are to clean, mostly by way of the nonstick cooking containers and timers that shut the machine off when the rice is done to avoid burning. If you've ever burned rice on the stove, you know what a nightmare it can be to de-gunk. Some rice cookers even have warming timers that keep your rice at the perfect temperature (and moist too) after it's finished cooking.
We have some suggestions below to help you find a great rice cooker for your home. To find the best rice cooker for 2023, we even put a few of the most popular models to the ultimate test.
Best rice cookers
This Micom rice cooker combined speed, precision, ease of use and budget-friendliness to capture the top spot in the rice cooker kitchen appliance showdown.
The Tiger cooked white rice well, if not just slightly al dente, in just 21 minutes and about half the time of some of the other, bigger machines. It also made the best brown rice of any of the cookers we tested in roughly 50 minutes.
This model also clocks in at a very reasonable $79, which considering its excellent performance in both cooking tests feels like a steal. It also has very simple controls and just four settings: white rice, brown rice, slow cook/steam and a synchronized cook setting that allows you to cook two things simultaneously. This rice cooker comes with an instruction manual, recipe book, rice measuring cup, and rice paddle.
This model both looks great and performs at a high level. For excellent rice in a hurry, this is the best rice cooker to buy.
This budget-friendly rice cooker took the top spot in our original round of rice cooker testing. In a retest, the Oster DiamondForce remains the clear pick for an easy rice cooker under $50.
Perfect white rice is almost a paradox: It's moist, but not mushy; toothsome, but not chewy. That perfect fluffy rice is tough to capture, so the quality output for this Oster rice cooker's $25 price tag is wholly impressive. No, the rice isn't perfect -- brown rice, in particular, came out just slightly underdone and a little chewy. That said, this basic rice cooker is head and shoulders above other small cookers under $50. It has a tempered glass lid with a vent and comes with a steamer basket and won't crowd the counter.
The Oster is fast and can also be used as a grain cooker. The small rice cooker whipped up a cup of white rice in under 20 minutes and brown rice in 25 minutes. It also didn't have any of the spillage or mess of some of the other basic budget rice cooker options, so cleanup was easier, too.
If you love rice and want to eat great rice regularly, but don't want to break the bank, the Oster is a fantastic option.
Zojirushi is a household name for rice cooker elitists, and this Japanese rice cooker brand's reputation is earned. The $172 Neuro Fuzzy rice cooker not only produces perfect rice in fairly large quantities, but it also allows you to personalize your rice, if you prefer it dryer or moister, along with well-calibrated settings for brown rice, sushi rice, porridge and other grains.
This Zojirushi rice cooker has a few downsides: Its price tag is intimidating, it takes up a significant amount of space and it takes its time making rice (a cup of white rice, for instance, takes over 40 minutes to cook). That said, raw speed of a rice cooking kitchen appliance is less important in many cases than a device's ability to keep rice warm and perfectly fluffy for extended periods of time, and Zojirushi is an unmatched rice maker in that regard.
If you're looking for the best custom rice, regardless of price, Zojirushi is our recommendation.
How we tested rice cookers
We tested 12 rice cookers side by side, cooking 1 cup of white rice and 1 cup of brown rice in each, following the individual directions and using each device's standard settings for both. Almost every device recommended allowing the rice to steam for an additional 15 minutes after the cook completed and I allowed that time for each one.
We both fluffed and tasted rice from each cooker at the 15-minute mark (which, in addition to the cooking time, ranged from 28 to 56 minutes), and then again after about an hour on the "warm" setting.
Because some folks prefer their cooked rice at slightly different levels of moisture, we focused on the problems in each rice cooker's yield, be it inconsistency in cooking, any uncooked rice, kernels that weren't cooked through or ones that had lost their distinction and become mushy.
We also kept track of how long it took for each machine to make white and brown rice because when you're busy or running late, cooking rice dish speed can be the most important factor of all.
The Tiger cooked excellent white rice faster than the rest of the field and made the best brown rice of any cooker we tested.
The rest of the field: Other rice cookers we tested
The rice cookers we tested fell into three loose categories: small, affordable devices, midrange multicookers and specialized, high-end rice cookers.
Each mini rice cooker we tested, including the $19 Imusa 3-cup the $25 Dash mini 2-cup rice cooker and the $25 Black & Decker 3-cup rice cooker offered decent, small servings of white rice -- although the Dash took a painfully long 35 minutes just to cook just one cup of white. All of them struggled with brown rice and mixed rice, though.
The slightly larger 6-cup Oster (our budget pick) and the $60 Zojirushi rice makers performed nearly identically, making perfect pots of white rice in 19 and 20 minutes respectively and very good brown rice -- albeit perhaps just slightly underdone -- in a lightning-fast 22 minutes. We would gleefully recommend either one as a solid space-saving rice cooker option. While the Zojirushi does seem slightly more solidly built, it's more than double the price of the Oster, which gives the Oster our final nod.
The simpler Oster and Zojirushi rice makers performed nearly identically in our testing.
The $50 8-cup Hamilton Beach rice cooker seems like a good deal for the size, but its rice was inconsistent, with severely undercooked, dry rice sections. Zojirushi's 3-cup option also disappointed with rice that was too wet and slightly broken down, losing the distinction of well-cooked white rice.
Cuisinart's 4-cup and Black and Decker's 7-cup rice cookers were some of our least favorites because they were both so messy. Cuisinart's boiled each time we used this conventional rice cooker and Black and Decker's larger model leaked onto the counter, necessitating significant cleanup.
When it came to the midrange multicookers, we found the cooking time to be slow and the results consistently a little off. An 8-cup Aroma rice cooker and food steamer, Instant Pot's Zest cooker and a five-cup Panasonic got us excited with the various functions available on their interfaces, but all three produced overcooked, slightly mushy rice, possibly due to the slow cooking. We also tested the $140 Cuisinart's larger Rice Plus Multicooker and while it can hold a lot of rice and produced decent batches of white and brown, cooking rice took longer than any other machine to do so at well over an hour and a half for brown rice.
If you find yourself cooking loads of different types of grains, one of these may be a viable option since they have so many niche settings. But for rice, there are better options available. You might also find you get more bang for your buck with a true multicooker that includes a pressure cooker function. I'd direct you to CNET's list of best Instant Pots for 2023 for a bit more on that.
Somehow I didn't blow a fuse.
Finally, the higher-end, specialized rice cookers from Tiger and Zojirushi were both impressive, as noted above. It's clear these devices are carefully calibrated; Zojirushi even offers a little bit of personalization as to how you want your white rice cooked, which is ideal if you've got folks with different rice texture preferences living under the same roof.
The Tiger, however, is less than half the price of its counterpart and cooked rice extremely well faster than any others. It may not have all the bells and whistles of the Zojirushi, which nabs our top pick for custom rice, but it's our top overall choice for the best rice cooker in 2023.
Which rice cooker is right for you?
If you like rice, but it's not a staple of your diet, I wouldn't recommend buying a rice cooker. Cooking rice isn't difficult and you can get great results with good technique in a pot of boiling water. That said, if you eat a lot of rice, a cooker can really streamline that cooking process and prep, allowing you to focus on the other elements of the meal. Choose a standard rice cooker with 5 cups which is not too small and too large to make your cooking easy.
There was a surprising amount of variance in performance across the rice cooking devices that we tested and frankly, some disappointment in some of them. But if you pick any of our top three, whether for the price, the cooking pot size (big families can eat a lot of rice) or simply because you want the best rice you can get every time, you should be fully satisfied.
Rice cooker FAQs
Is a rice cooker worth it?
If you love rice but have trouble cooking it, then a rice cooker is definitely worth the investment. Rice can be made in a standard pot but it takes precise measuring of water and rice and meticulous attention to cooking time and how much the water is simmering to get it just right. Plus, some excellent rice cookers cost as little as $30 and take up no more space in the cupboard than a small saucepan.
How to clean an electric rice cooker?
Cleaning a rice cooker is simple. The main cooking container and lid are typically the only components that get dirty and can almost always be hand washed in the sink or run through the dishwasher. The main body of the rice cooker may experience some dripping and smudging but can easily be wiped down with a sponge and warm water.
Are rice cookers safe?
Using a rice cooker is safer than cooking it on an open stovetop. Because they are self-contained and use electric heating elements, there's less risk of fire than with a gas-powered or even an electric stovetop. A quality rice cooker knows when the rice is done (water is gone) and shuts itself off automatically. Conversely, making rice on a stove requires consistent attention. Leaving rice in a pot for too long after it's finished cooking will cause it to burn and can even lead to kitchen fires.
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