Come back in March at me favorite trade showThe guy at the Cuckoo rice cooker stall appreciates the new model and favors the one with more bells and whistles.
“Wait,” I asked, “can we go back once?”
Reluctantly, he did, and it was like catnip to me: a rice cooker that uses induction heat with a pressure cooking option.
In my book, the rice cooker is one of the most convenient kitchen gadgets, helping to cook delicious rice, keep it warm and ready for a long time. Pressure cooker rice became the craze of the Instant-Pot crowd a few years ago because it was able to produce distinct grains without being mushy. It’s really good rice. Induction heating generates heat extremely efficiently and consistently. These are all the bells and whistles I need.
against cereals
Chez Joe, we’re the kind of household with the same good rice cooker, in the middle of the street for 12 years. It could be said that our machine cooked rice or stayed warm for more than half of that time, so I was excited to pick up the Cuckoo CRP-MHTR0309F (aka. CRP-MH03) for one rotation. It’s a 3-cup model from Cuckoo’s “Fuzzy Kitchen Series” and I wanted to see how it performed compared to Zojirushi was similarly appointed which I reviewed in 2020.
Rather than drag you on a boring ride through my extensive testing, I’ll just say I’ve had a bunch of lackluster results. I will give you the top summary.
After more than a month of testing and consuming featured heavy rice with different types of rice on various settings, the results were… so weird… that in the end I just went back and graded each round on a 10-point scale. in the margin. , then view the results. Yes, my taste tests are subjective and the fact that the Cuckoo costs so much – around $400 – counts towards the score a bit, but the sad truth is that only a quarter of all the lots I tested scored higher than 5. Normally, at this part of the story, I would go into the core detail of all its possibilities, but with such a low score, won’t. has many meanings.
Let’s start with a compliment. I would say it cooks brown rice very well on the “Super Turbo” setting the first time I cook it, but subsequent tests on the same setting with different amounts of rice made it very soft and a little sticky. . And al dente next time.
The first batch of white rice I made was cooked to such a paste, my wife Elisabeth says it reminded her of what her Japanese schoolmate roommate called “rice for the sick”. Every test of white rice, pressed or not, gives a score of 4 or less. Even the short grain white on non-pressure settings, which should be the North Star for all rice cookers, appears all over the map; it’s fine, but definitely not the $400 list price rice cooker. In an issue that will draw attention to many rice cooker purists, there is sometimes the phenomenon of just-cooked rice turning brown at the bottom, and some of it is due to the keep-warm function.
I checked with a Cuckoo representative to make sure I was using the correct rice, as some manufacturers use specific brands of rice to calibrate their machines. It’s also a dead end, as Cuckoo has no fancy brands, saying the machine’s intelligent algorithms will yield the perfect rice.
Photo: Cuckoo
