I never understood the need for a rice cooker, anyways.
Written: Feb 12 '07
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Pros: Design; detailed instruction booklet.
Cons: Messy to cook with/clean up; instructions not worth following.
The Bottom Line: I do not recommend at all. Use the stove and save some money (and hassle)
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| hyundai_fan's Full Review: Salton RTC10 10-Cup Rice Cooker |
Since December, I have owned a 10-cup rice cooker by Salton. I love rice, no matter is it's instant rice or "normal rice", and without me knowing it my mother happened to mention to my Aunt that I liked rice. So this is what I got last Christmas.
Design
The Salton 10-cup Rice Cooker looks similar to a crock pot, and its white exterior and blue-gray trim make it look modern and sleek, so it in no way reduces the visual appeal of your kitchen overall. There is just one button, a Warm/Cook switch, and two lights showing what mode the cooker is in.
How It Works
The directions say that for every one cup of rice you put in, the same amount of water must be poured in with it. For brown rice or other types, the amount differs. It is recommended to rinse the rice in advance in order to remove most of the starch, the goal being to reduce the stickiness of the rice during cooking.
So, you do what it says and put your rice and water into the removable bowl. The bowl is then placed inside the rice cooker. After pressing the button on the front, the heater underneath the bowl heats up the water. The temperature sensor inside the cooker "knows" that water boils at approximately 100*C (212*F). In most circumstances, water cannot achieve any higher a temperature without turning into vapor. When the sensor detects a temperature above 100*C, it "knows" that most of the water has been boiled off and so the cooker automatically shuts off the Cook mode and enters Warm mode, which keeps the rice warm until served. There is no official "Off" mode so it is only completely shut off when you remove the plug from the electrical outlet.
The instruction booklet says that it takes the rice 25-30 minutes to cook, longer or shorter depending on what type of rice used and how much you put in.
Features
Included with the rice cooker, other than the rice cooker itself and the non-stick bowl, is a small spatula for stirring and removing rice, a measuring cup, a rack to allow veggies to cook above the water (if you're cooking rice with vegetables), a clear glass cover with a ventilation hole, and an instruction booklet which is surprisingly detailed and full of interesting facts about rice.
My Experiences
My first try involved one cup of rice with one cup of water. It took about half an hour to cook, and when it shut off I realized the rice didn't even cook half way. It took another twenty minutes and a couple more cups of water to fully cook. However, the bowl had lots of starch stuck on the sides of it, the starch more or less feeling like thin plastic flakes, and it was everywhere. The rice did not taste good with all this filmy starch.
I tried again, this time with two cups of water per one cup of rice. Again, the rice did not fully cook and starch dried up and became flaky. I added more water, restarted the device, and had it cook another ten to 15 minutes before it had any appearance of being done.
On the third try I put in three cups of water for every one cup of rice, and as with the other tries, the rice was starchy and stuck together so it had a hard time cooking thoroughly. All three times I had rinsed the rice beforehand, so I didn't understand what was going on.
For the next three tries, I had rinsed the rice much more carefully and cleansed it by hand in a separate bowl so I was sure all the starch was washed off. I had also used the plastic spatula to stir the rice every five minutes while cooking, which in the past I had let it cook on its own (that was what the instructions recommended). The rice (predictably) did not cook correctly, and starch still became noticeable and flaky on the sides of the bowl. I felt like giving up, to be honest.
In other experiments, I had put in too much water. When the rice was cooked, there was still water left to be boiled and thus made the rice mushy. If I kept the rice in there cooking, there would be too little water, leaving me with clumpy, dry rice as usual.
But what I hated most was the messy cooking process that plagued my bad luck. As the rice cooked during each session, vapor came out through the ventilation hole in the lid and starchy water condensed on top of it. Because of the pressure inside the cooker, the boiling water actually produced a bunch of suds that kept rising and rising, causing large water droplets to spill out the ventilation hole. I had to make sure that each time I used it I had the hole next to the kitchen sink so it didn't make a mess on the counter.
It was very annoying that, whatever I tried to do, nothing whatsoever made the rice cook any better. I figured I spent more time keeping track of it and babying it than I would if the rice was cooked in a regular pot on the stove.
Clean-up was equally messy. Starch would stick inside the bowl, on the lid, and on the spatula, and it required me to spend more time cleaning than it did setting up. The bowl itself is supposedly "non-stick", however the starch seemed to stick just fine. It became so hard to clean that I decided to put in ten cups of water by itself and allow the pot to cook the water, assuming that the water would soften and remove the starch from the bowl. That didn't work too well, either. It just softened up the starch and it re-dried. Plus, the water that evaporated caused rings around the bowl, making it just as hard, if not harder, to clean.
It quickly became apparent that it'd be much easier to just cook rice on the stove, and the fact that they don't recommend cooking with instant rice clearly had me thinking that the rice cooker was made to take up space. I really feel bad for not liking it because it was a Christmas gift from my Aunt, and she's expecting me to bring it to her house one day and make them some sticky rice.
Let's just hope she thinks I'm a bad cook.
~Scott
Recommended:
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Epinions.com ID:
hyundai_fan
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Member: Scott K
Reviews written: 107
Trusted by: 26 members
About Me:
A gay, Subaru-driving Vermonter.
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