Saturday, January 06, 2007

Rice Monster

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So there's the photo of the day over at the photo365 blog, and maybe it requires a bit of explanation. I used a little bit of Christmas money to get it and so far I'm really really happy.

One of the things I'm trying to do more is cook at home, which oddly enough seems a lot easier when I don't have to run all over campus all day long. We'll see how much I'm cooking next week when school starts up.

Anyway, back to the rice monster. It's a Zojirushi NS-ZCC10. I did a fair amount of research before choosing this one, but lemme tell you, trying to figure out which rice cooker is like asking a room full of 14 year olds if the PS3 is going to be better than the Xbox 360. It'll only end in tears, with each side retreating to prepared fortifications of bias and loathing. It looked like most of the big brands were all reliable and honestly pretty much the same. I ended up with the Zojirushi partially because I love their little elephant icon. (that's not entirely a joke)

I've only used it a couple of times so far, both with a nice jasmine rice, and each time the rice turned out wonderful - fluffy and fragrant and just perfect. So far, the rice has been a nice part of a kung pao chicken (so-so, I used a pre-made sauce. tsk tsk.), a couple iterations of fried rice (lessons learned - eggs in a carton: not bad! ginger - very strong, I really didn't need to put so much in) and as a base for a chili. So far, all very nummy. I would have taken pictures for you all, but frankly, none of them were particularly photogenic.

I'll post a little more about it once I try some more rices and get a feel for all its extra settings.

3 comments:

zerodoll said...

if you try quinoa, please let me know if it works; my simple rice cooker (on/off is all it does) burns it.

sheepish said...

Just how good is it? Good or great?

I've been thinking about getting one for a long time, but it seems a bit excessive to spend money on a single-use item when I have a pot that would do basically the same thing.

Overread said...

I'm not sure how to put this, Sheepish. It is just a one use item, and I'll bet that if you're used to cooking rice up in a pot, it might not be worth the money.

I will say that the rice really does taste great, but I'm the kind of guy who only cooked microwave or boil-in-bag rice before. It does taste a lot better than that to me anyway. The other big thing is that it's turn on and forget, which I really like. Also, you can leave rice in there for awhile and have it whenever you need it.

I'll probably have a better idea about how worth it it is after a few months or so.