Rice Cooker Buying Guide

My rice cooker arrived today! I bought the Zojirushi NP-VC10 and it seems pretty nifty. It was pretty well reviewed on Amazon, but I haven't cooked with it yet - that'll be later this week.

In my quest, I couldn't help but notice the lack of buying guides in English for rice cookers. So, I decided to make a small one to help those looking for such a fantastic invention.

First and foremost, knowing a bit of Japanese will definitely come in handy when buying a rice cooker from Japan. Because the manual and buttons will all be in Japanese, unless you somehow get one specially made. It also helps to ask questions when at the store.

The first thing you need to think about is if you want a macron heating element, an induction heating element or a pressure cooker. The cheapest rice cookers have a macron heating element, but I was told it heats rather unevenly because it's essentially just like heating over a stove. The middle range rice cookers tend to use the induction heating method. The pot and the element are both metal and it heats pretty evenly. Pressure cookers tend to be the most expensive and cook the rice using steam.

I opted for an IH (induction heating) rice cooker, because I was able to find a really good deal.

The next thing you need to look at is pot thickness. It will usually be advertised in millimeters (mm), so you should be able to spot it even if you can't read Japanese. I didn't place heavy value in this, but the thicker the pot, the longer the rice will stay warm and moist (so I was told). In my quest, the thickest pots (3.5-4.0) were always considerably more expensive than the ones that measured 1.5-2.0 mm thick.

If I remember correctly, my pot is 1.7 mm thick.

Those are the important points I was told at the two places I asked. Other things you might want to consider when looking for rice cookers are:

- What functions are you looking for? Plenty of rice cookers can make other things as well. Boiling eggs, baking bread/cake, and making soup are just some of the functions I've seen.

- How much rice do I need to make? (usually made for 3, 5 or 10 servings)

- How much electricity does it use?

- How big is it/how heavy is it?