"RiceCookers" news and stories

The above is one of the most insane things I've ever seen, and not because of the hugely enthusiastic Japanese voiceover. This is a clip showing you how to make bread with a rice cooker. Why would you want to use a rice cooker? Ease? Speed? If you guessed either, you'd be wrong.

I guess that these guys never heard of no-knead bread, and find bread machines to be too easy. To make this bread, you have to do all the required kneading yourself, along with the waiting and punching. But unlike regular loaves, which get thrown in the oven and simply baked after all those steps, you have to turn this bread a number of times while it cooks in the rice cooker. So basically, it's bread with extra hassle.

I guess, at the very least, it'd come in handy for someone who has a rice cooker, but not a oven, toaster oven, or bread machine.

Still, I think I'll stick with the tasty, and easier, no-knead varieties.

[via Serious Eats]

There's going to be a lot of rice cooking going on in the kitchen this weekend for Chinese New Year, and unless you've got the technique down to steam rice in a regular pot, you're better off using an electric rice cooker.

Rice cookers range from low to high-end, with prices going anywhere from $20 to over $100 for cookers that can be described with terms like "fuzzy logic," a technology by which the rice cooker can gauge temperature and type of rice to cook rice perfectly. However, the most sophisticated, luxurious rice cooker I have come across yet -- the Ferrari of rice cookers, if you will -- is the NJ-WS10 by Mitsubishi.

The machine is sleek and black, but it's not the design that makes it the ultimate rice cooking machine. The inner pot is 100% rock solid carbon, and though I have no idea what that means, I do know that it makes this rice cooker almost $1,000.

Quite a lump of change for the perfect bowl of rice!