Back in March at my favorite trade show, 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 go back one?”

Reluctantly, he did, and it was like catnip for me: a rice cooker that makes use of induction warmth with an choice to prepare dinner it with strain.

In my ebook, rice cookers are among the many most handy of kitchen home equipment, making good rice and retaining it heat and prepared for an prolonged time period. Pressure-cooker rice grew to become an Instant-Pot crowd craze a number of years again as a result of it might 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.

Against the Grain

Chez Joe, we are the sort of family that is had the identical good, middle-of-the-road rice cooker for occurring 12 years. It’s protected to say that our machine has been cooking rice or retaining 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’s a 3-cup mannequin that is a part of Cuckoo’s “Fuzzy Series” of cookers, and I needed to see the way it carried out in opposition to a similarly appointed Zojirushi that I reviewed in 2020.

Instead of dragging you on a boring experience by my in depth testing, I’ll 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 appeared on the outcomes. Yes, my style exams have been subjective, and the truth that the Cuckoo prices loads—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 greater than a 5. Normally, at this a part of the story I’d 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 “Super Turbo” setting the primary time I made it, however subsequent exams on the identical setting with totally different portions of rice left it very al dente as soon as and in some way sticky and al dente the subsequent time.

The first 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 people.” Every white rice check, strain or not, scored a 4 or under. Even short-grain white on the non-pressure setting, which must be the North Star for all rice cookers, was everywhere in the map; it was nice, however definitely not $400-list-price rice-cooker nice. 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 appropriate 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 good algorithms ought to yield good rice.