Again in March at my favourite commerce present, the man on the Cuckoo rice cooker stand glossed over a brand new mannequin in favor of 1 with extra bells and whistles.
“Wait,” I requested, “can we return one?”
Reluctantly, he did, and it was like catnip for me: a rice cooker that makes use of induction warmth with an choice to cook dinner it with stress.
In my e-book, rice cookers are among the many most handy of kitchen home equipment, making good rice and protecting it heat and prepared for an prolonged time frame. Strain-cooker rice turned an Immediate-Pot crowd craze a number of years again as a result of it could possibly create distinct grains with no mushiness. It’s actually good rice. Induction heating makes for extremely environment friendly and constant warmth. These have been all of the bells and whistles I wanted.
Towards the Grain
Chez Joe, we are the form of family that is had the identical good, middle-of-the-road rice cooker for occurring 12 years. It is secure to say that our machine has been cooking rice or protecting it heat for greater than half that point, so I used to be excited to take the Cuckoo CRP-MHTR0309F (confusingly aka CRP-MH03) for a spin. It is a 3-cup mannequin that is a part of Cuckoo’s “Fuzzy Sequence” of cookers, and I needed to see the way it carried out towards a equally appointed Zojirushi that I reviewed in 2020.
As a substitute of dragging you on a boring journey by means of my intensive testing, I am going to simply say that I had a fuzzy sequence of outcomes. I’ll provide the top-line abstract.
After greater than a month of heavy rice testing and consumption that includes several types of rice on many various settings, the outcomes have been so … peculiar … that on the finish, I simply went again and graded every spherical on a 10-point scale within the margin, then seemed on the outcomes. Sure, my style exams have been subjective, and the truth that the Cuckoo prices quite a bit—round $400—factored into the rating a bit, however the unhappy fact was that solely 1 / 4 of all of the batches I examined scored increased than a 5. Usually, at this a part of the story I would go deep into the nitty-gritty of all of its capabilities, however with scores that low, there’s not a lot level.
Let’s begin with a praise. I’ll say that it cooked brown rice very properly on its “Tremendous Turbo” setting the primary time I made it, however subsequent exams on the identical setting with completely different portions of rice left it very al dente as soon as and by some means sticky and al dente the subsequent time.
The primary batch of white rice I made was cooked into such mushy submission, my spouse Elisabeth stated that it reminded her of what her Japanese grad-school roommate known as “rice for sick folks.” Each white rice check, stress or not, scored a 4 or beneath. Even short-grain white on the non-pressure setting, which ought to be the North Star for all rice cookers, was all around the map; it was fantastic, however actually not $400-list-price rice-cooker fantastic. In a ding that may trigger many rice-cooker purists to show up their noses, there was sometimes browning on the underside of just-cooked rice, and a few attributable to the keep-warm operate.
I checked with a Cuckoo rep to ensure I used to be utilizing the precise sorts of rice, as some producers use particular manufacturers of rice to calibrate their machines. That was additionally a lifeless finish, as Cuckoo has no most popular manufacturers, saying its machine’s sensible algorithms ought to yield good rice.
{Photograph}: Cuckoo