Cuisinart 4-cup Rice Cooker

Cuisinart 4-cup Rice Cooker

My wife and I received this rice cooker for a wedding present more than 13 years ago. To give you some idea about its utility and reliability, I just used it to make some rice for my stir fry lunch just as I’ve done about once per week since we’ve had it. We purchased an InstantPot last year and use it regularly, however I still chose to keep our Cuisinart rice cooker because I feel it does a better job with rice. I rarely buy single-function kitchen gadgets and earning cabinet/counter space in the minimalist Fencil kitchen is a feat in and of itself, so this is saying a lot.

The two most important factors for making perfect rice are a proper water-to-rice ratio and cooking time. If you add too much or too little water, your rice is going to be gummy or gritty respectively. The Cuisinart rice cooker has dialed in how long it takes to make the rice and will do the rest thanks to a spring-operated pressure switch that the insert rests on. If you want consistently good rice, this is your ticket.

A medium batch of rice takes about 10 minutes to finish, at which point the rice cooker switches into “warm” mode. It does a good job of keeping the rice warm without further cooking so that you have time to finish cooking the main entree without having to microwave the rice.

This is unrelated to the product itself, but I’m surprised by how many people don’t know about the importance of thoroughly rinsing the dry rice in a colander beforehand, regardless of what they’re using to cook it. Rinsing the rice gets rid of the fine white dust that results from the grains rubbing against one another during transit that can make your finished rice taste starchy and have a sticky mouthfeel.

Some of the user reviews on Amazon state that this rice cooker boils over, sending scalding hot, starchy water onto their countertops and causing a mess. The people who are saying this are overfilling the unit. It’s meant to make four cups, and yes, it will send excess liquid out the vent in the lid and onto the countertop as it heats up if you try to make more than that. Cuisinart makes an 8 and a 10-cup rice maker if you need additional capacity.

I don’t have to worry about quality when considering a purchase for our kitchen when it has the Cuisinart label on it. If you take care of it, this rice cooker will serve you faithfully for many years. I only use a rubber spatula to scrape the rice out of the non-stick insert and hand wash it. I haven’t had any problems with the coating coming off.

Like our Cuisinart coffee maker, coffee grinder (which I reviewed here), and food processor, this rice cooker has an attractive brushed stainless steel finish that has held up remarkably over the years. We don’t keep it on the counter, but it wouldn’t look unsightly if we did. I appreciate how Cuisinart has stuck to a timeless, unifying design across their product lines and hasn’t tried to revamp everything every few years. I wish more companies would do the same.

In summary, a good rice cooker is an indispensable small appliance for someone who cooks a lot and needs an easy way to make batches of rice as much as it is for someone who wants to prepare their own meals but hasn’t mastered the art of making perfect rice on the stovetop (which is not an easy feat). This unit has saved me so much time on Sunday afternoons when making my lunches for the coming work week. Rice is the backbone of many of my weekly meal preps because it’s simple, inexpensive, versatile, and easy to scale up if I want to make extra portions.