Buy Tiger Rice Cooker

One more thing to love about a rice cooker is how easy they are to clean, mostly by way of the nonstick cooking containers and timers that shut the machine off when the rice is done to avoid burning. If you've ever burned rice on the stove, you know what a nightmare it can be to de-gunk. Some rice cookers even have warming timers that keep your rice at the perfect temperature (and moist too) after it's finished cooking.

buy tiger rice cooker

The Tiger cooked white rice well, if not just slightly al dente, in just 21 minutes and about half the time of some of the other, bigger machines. It also made the best brown rice of any of the cookers we tested in roughly 50 minutes.

This model also clocks in at a very reasonable $79, which considering its excellent performance in both cooking tests feels like a steal. It also has very simple controls and just four settings: white rice, brown rice, slow cook/steam and a synchronized cook setting that allows you to cook two things simultaneously. This rice cooker comes with an instruction manual, recipe book, rice measuring cup, and rice paddle.

Perfect white rice is almost a paradox: It's moist, but not mushy; toothsome, but not chewy. That perfect fluffy rice is tough to capture, so the quality output for this Oster rice cooker's $25 price tag is wholly impressive. No, the rice isn't perfect -- brown rice, in particular, came out just slightly underdone and a little chewy. That said, this basic rice cooker is head and shoulders above other small cookers under $50. It has a tempered glass lid with a vent and comes with a steamer basket and won't crowd the counter.

The Oster is fast and can also be used as a grain cooker. The small rice cooker whipped up a cup of white rice in under 20 minutes and brown rice in 25 minutes. It also didn't have any of the spillage or mess of some of the other basic budget rice cooker options, so cleanup was easier, too.

Zojirushi is a household name for rice cooker elitists, and this Japanese rice cooker brand's reputation is earned. The $172 Neuro Fuzzy rice cooker not only produces perfect rice in fairly large quantities, but it also allows you to personalize your rice, if you prefer it dryer or moister, along with well-calibrated settings for brown rice, sushi rice, porridge and other grains.

This Zojirushi rice cooker has a few downsides: Its price tag is intimidating, it takes up a significant amount of space and it takes its time making rice (a cup of white rice, for instance, takes over 40 minutes to cook). That said, raw speed of a rice cooking kitchen appliance is less important in many cases than a device's ability to keep rice warm and perfectly fluffy for extended periods of time, and Zojirushi is an unmatched rice maker in that regard.

We tested 12 rice cookers side by side, cooking 1 cup of white rice and 1 cup of brown rice in each, following the individual directions and using each device's standard settings for both. Almost every device recommended allowing the rice to steam for an additional 15 minutes after the cook completed and I allowed that time for each one.

We both fluffed and tasted rice from each cooker at the 15-minute mark (which, in addition to the cooking time, ranged from 28 to 56 minutes), and then again after about an hour on the "warm" setting.

Because some folks prefer their cooked rice at slightly different levels of moisture, we focused on the problems in each rice cooker's yield, be it inconsistency in cooking, any uncooked rice, kernels that weren't cooked through or ones that had lost their distinction and become mushy.

Each mini rice cooker we tested, including the $19 Imusa 3-cup the $25 Dash mini 2-cup rice cooker and the $25 Black & Decker 3-cup rice cooker offered decent, small servings of white rice -- although the Dash took a painfully long 35 minutes just to cook just one cup of white. All of them struggled with brown rice and mixed rice, though.

The slightly larger 6-cup Oster (our budget pick) and the $60 Zojirushi rice makers performed nearly identically, making perfect pots of white rice in 19 and 20 minutes respectively and very good brown rice -- albeit perhaps just slightly underdone -- in a lightning-fast 22 minutes. We would gleefully recommend either one as a solid space-saving rice cooker option. While the Zojirushi does seem slightly more solidly built, it's more than double the price of the Oster, which gives the Oster our final nod.

The $50 8-cup Hamilton Beach rice cooker seems like a good deal for the size, but its rice was inconsistent, with severely undercooked, dry rice sections. Zojirushi's 3-cup option also disappointed with rice that was too wet and slightly broken down, losing the distinction of well-cooked white rice.

Cuisinart's 4-cup and Black and Decker's 7-cup rice cookers were some of our least favorites because they were both so messy. Cuisinart's boiled each time we used this conventional rice cooker and Black and Decker's larger model leaked onto the counter, necessitating significant cleanup.

When it came to the midrange multicookers, we found the cooking time to be slow and the results consistently a little off. An 8-cup Aroma rice cooker and food steamer, Instant Pot's Zest cooker and a five-cup Panasonic got us excited with the various functions available on their interfaces, but all three produced overcooked, slightly mushy rice, possibly due to the slow cooking. We also tested the $140 Cuisinart's larger Rice Plus Multicooker and while it can hold a lot of rice and produced decent batches of white and brown, cooking rice took longer than any other machine to do so at well over an hour and a half for brown rice.

If you find yourself cooking loads of different types of grains, one of these may be a viable option since they have so many niche settings. But for rice, there are better options available. You might also find you get more bang for your buck with a true multicooker that includes a pressure cooker function. I'd direct you to CNET's list of best Instant Pots for 2023 for a bit more on that.

Finally, the higher-end, specialized rice cookers from Tiger and Zojirushi were both impressive, as noted above. It's clear these devices are carefully calibrated; Zojirushi even offers a little bit of personalization as to how you want your white rice cooked, which is ideal if you've got folks with different rice texture preferences living under the same roof.

The Tiger, however, is less than half the price of its counterpart and cooked rice extremely well faster than any others. It may not have all the bells and whistles of the Zojirushi, which nabs our top pick for custom rice, but it's our top overall choice for the best rice cooker in 2023.

If you like rice, but it's not a staple of your diet, I wouldn't recommend buying a rice cooker. Cooking rice isn't difficult and you can get great results with good technique in a pot of boiling water. That said, if you eat a lot of rice, a cooker can really streamline that cooking process and prep, allowing you to focus on the other elements of the meal. Choose a standard rice cooker with 5 cups which is not too small and too large to make your cooking easy.

There was a surprising amount of variance in performance across the rice cooking devices that we tested and frankly, some disappointment in some of them. But if you pick any of our top three, whether for the price, the cooking pot size (big families can eat a lot of rice) or simply because you want the best rice you can get every time, you should be fully satisfied.

If you love rice but have trouble cooking it, then a rice cooker is definitely worth the investment. Rice can be made in a standard pot but it takes precise measuring of water and rice and meticulous attention to cooking time and how much the water is simmering to get it just right. Plus, some excellent rice cookers cost as little as $30 and take up no more space in the cupboard than a small saucepan.

Cleaning a rice cooker is simple. The main cooking container and lid are typically the only components that get dirty and can almost always be hand washed in the sink or run through the dishwasher. The main body of the rice cooker may experience some dripping and smudging but can easily be wiped down with a sponge and warm water.

Using a rice cooker is safer than cooking it on an open stovetop. Because they are self-contained and use electric heating elements, there's less risk of fire than with a gas-powered or even an electric stovetop. A quality rice cooker knows when the rice is done (water is gone) and shuts itself off automatically. Conversely, making rice on a stove requires consistent attention. Leaving rice in a pot for too long after it's finished cooking will cause it to burn and can even lead to kitchen fires.

A rice cooker is an invaluable small appliance, especially when that rice cooker is multi-purpose. I tested three rice cookers, two Tiger rice cookers and one Zojirushi rice cooker, and I was impressed with how perfectly they cooked rice. I was even more impressed with how easily they can go beyond rice and cook other foods.

Because the Tiger JBV-S10U and the Tiger JAX-R10U have a synchro-cooking function, I wanted to test out how they can make two dishes at once. They can do this as they both have a Tacook plate that sits on top of the cooking rice. That plate utilizes the steam from the rice to cook the food on the plate.

Both of the Tiger rice cookers will make 5.5 cups of rice at one time, and they both have 10 different functions you can use. I tested out the synchro-cooking function by making sweet and sour meatballs to serve over rice.

I was using the Tiger JAX-R10U to cook the food, so after I added the rice, meatballs, and sauce to the Tacook plate, I closed the lid and popped the vent on the top of the cooker. After pressing the start button I waited for a timer to appear on the device to tell me how long the food would cook, but nothing changed on the display.

When I popped the lid on the cooker the meatballs and sauce were steaming. Upon removing the plate, I could see the rice was done as well. I may have added too much sauce to the meatballs as some of it dripped onto the rice below, but I was serving it all together so I was OK with that. 041b061a72