Best Rice Cooker in 2023: If you have a rice cooker, you can make a bowl of sushi rice even on a busy night. You can also cook a big batch of rice on Sunday to have for grain bowls and fried rice all week. Even purists who believe they prefer the stovetop method and people who dislike single-use appliances can be persuaded by the best rice cookers.
Because, despite its simplicity, cooking rice can be finicky, and no home cook wants to serve overcooked or undercooked rice. But with the aid of a rice cooker, you can make perfectly tender grains with the push of a button, allowing you to focus on other aspects of the meal. If there is a single-use kitchen appliance worthy of cabinet space, this is it.
With a rice cooker, you can make sushi rice on even the busiest of nights or cook a large batch of rice on the weekend to prepare for the entire week’s worth of grain bowls and fried rice. Rice cookers are simple to use, simple to clean, and take the guesswork out of cooking grains. After testing over a dozen top-rated rice cookers and countless cups of steamed rice, we settled on a model that consistently produced the best rice batch after batch. Learn more about our top picks and how we evaluated each machine by scrolling down.
Rice is one of the most versatile foods in the world; you could eat a different rice dish every day for weeks without growing tired of it. If this appeals to you, you may appreciate a rice cooker that can produce perfect, plump grains with minimal effort.
Table of Contents
Here is a list of Best Rice Cookers in 2023
Toshiba TRCS01 Rice Cooker
This rice cooker performed just as well as premium Zojirushi models. Each batch of rice turns out exceptionally well. And if you are overwhelmed by the Zojirushi rice cookers’ precision and slight nuances in cooking function, the Toshiba will be easy to use but superior to the basic one-button rice cooker.
The controls are extremely user-friendly and intuitive, with presets for white, brown, mixed grain, porridge, and oats, among others. In addition, it includes a delay timer and a basket for steaming proteins and vegetables.
As with many high-end rice cookers, the Toshiba utilizes fuzzy logic AI, which enables the rice cooker to make precise temperature adjustments to optimize the rice’s quality. Toshiba receives bonus points for providing a complete countdown from the beginning instead of appearing 10 minutes before the end. It also features a delay timer, allowing you to do things like soak grains overnight and cook them automatically.
Zojirushi 3‑Cup Rice Cooker
For the purposes of testing, we categorized as a mini rice cooker any appliance that could cook no more than four cups of uncooked rice, an amount suitable for households of two to four people. Both the top-rated induction Zojirushi and the budget-friendly Toshiba can cook a lot of rice at once, making them ideal for large groups or families who want to prepare rice for the week in advance. But for the average user, a rice cooker with a capacity of one to four cups is more than adequate.
The Zojirushi 3‑cup cooker is a favorite of Team Epi; it’s simple, straightforward, easy to clean, and doesn’t produce a starchy mess during operation like some other mini models. It has a glass lid, which is ideal for monitoring the rice’s cooking progress. Because it has only one button, anyone can use it, and it’s small enough to store in a drawer or cabinet when not in use. Due to its sub-$50 price point, it is the ideal rice cooker to own if you frequently prepare one cup of uncooked (or three cups cooked) rice at a time, which is sufficient for two people with some leftovers.
Zojirushi 5.5‑Cup Induction Rice Cooker
This Zojirushi rice cooker has a capacity of 5.5 cups (uncooked). It is simple to use and simple to clean. The nonstick inner pot was the heaviest of those we examined, and the markings indicating how much water to add for different types of rice were the easiest to read (the markers are white, which contrasts nicely with the dark pot). But what truly distinguished this appliance was its use of induction heating, which provides a precise, uniform heat source that warms the entire pot, not just the bottom.
(The majority of rice cookers only have a heating element that warms the bottom of the pot, resulting in uneven cooking and browned bits at the bottom of the batch.) The rice produced by the Zojirushi was never unevenly cooked; it was always fluffy, perfectly tender, and overall superior to the rice produced by any other machine. Additionally, it never adhered to the bottom of the pot.
As is the case with all rice cookers, one of the greatest pleasures of using the Zojirushi Induction Rice Cooker was that it could be set and forgotten. This Zojirushi is a particular delight due to the automatic Keep Warm setting that keeps the rice at the ideal serving temperature for hours. This Micom rice cooker (also known as a micro computerized rice cooker) has the intelligence to adjust temperatures and cooking times based on sensor feedback.
This is useful when your measurements of water or grain are imprecise. If you added too much water by accident, for instance, the machine will adjust cooking times and temperatures so that you won’t end up with mushy rice despite your mistake. In addition, it is the only one of our top picks that counts down your cooking time from start to finish, so you always know how close you are to a bowl of perfectly cooked rice.
This rice cooker is unquestionably more expensive than most, but this is because it offers more than most: induction heating, a large capacity, and programmable functions. It automatically manages the numerous variables that can result in undercooked rice on the stove. This Zojirushi model is unrivaled in producing great-tasting rice with virtually no effort.
Other Pressure Cookers That We Tested
Cuckoo CRP-P1009SW 10-Cup Electric Pressure Rice Cooker
The Cuckoo CRP-P1009 produces the best sushi rice of all the rice cookers we tested, with perfectly cohesive, distinct grains. Because it is a pressure cooker, it also produces these results faster than the other rice cookers we evaluated. In some tests, the Cuckoo was able to cook brown rice nearly half as quickly as the Zojirushi.
If you prefer softer brown rice, you may need to adjust the amount of water in your recipe; our batches were quite dense, albeit not unpleasant. We believe that the pressurized cooking rendered our delicate long-grain rice somewhat mushy. Because the Cuckoo is expensive and only comes with a 10-cup capacity, we recommend it to those who frequently prepare large quantities of short- or medium-grain white and brown rice.
Dash Mini Rice Cooker
The Dash Mini Rice Cooker is adorable and simple to operate, with a single-button lever system similar to the Zojirushi 3‑cup model. However, the lid was too flimsy to stay in place; as the rice cooked, the resulting steam kept pushing the lid out of place. This allowed excessive heat to escape, necessitating constant monitoring throughout the process. In addition, it took 34 minutes to cook one cup of uncooked rice, the longest of any of the mini models we evaluated.
Hamilton Beach Rice and Hot Cereal Cooker
Given its low price, the Hamilton Beach Rice and Hot Cereal Cooker is a marvel for producing excellent white rice in record time. Although the results were not as tender or well-separated as those produced by the Zojirushi or the Cuckoo, the rice produced by this model was superior to many other high-end models, we evaluated. The Hamilton Beach rice cooker can cook a good batch of white rice in roughly 35 minutes, making it faster than our top pick. In addition, it has delayed cooking and brown rice settings.
Instant Pot Duo
The Instant Pot Duo is a multicooker, and among its many versatile functions is a setting for cooking rice. Unfortunately, it produced the worst results of all the rice cookers we evaluated and failed to advance past the round of medium-grain rice. The rice was gummy, difficult to fluff with the rice paddle, and stuck to the stainless-steel pot (the only pot insert that retained rice, likely because it was the only model without a nonstick pot). As a pressure cooker, it is excellent, but cooking rice successfully is not one of the Instant Pot’s many features.
Cuckoo 6‑Cup Rice Cooker and Warmer
The Cuckoo 6‑Cup Rice Cooker and Warmer offer exceptional value for the quality it provides. It produced rice of comparable quality to the Zojirushi Induction Rice Cooker but at an accelerated rate. It outpaced the Zojirushi by fifteen minutes. Additionally, it has a slightly larger capacity than the Zojirushi, holding 6 cups of uncooked rice as opposed to 5.5 cups for the Zojirushi. It’s a great deal for $90 (at the time of writing), and you’ll get delicious rice from it repeatedly. However, the lid opens so violently that it can knock itself or other objects off the counter, and the countdown is not displayed from beginning to end.
