Our Favorite Rice Cooker

Rice is a survival food in a house this big — cheap, filling, and it stretches almost any dinner to cover eight. But making it on the stovetop was a gamble we kept losing. Mom would get pulled away to referee something, and we’d end up with a scorched pot on the bottom and a crunchy layer nobody wanted, or a gluey mess that made the whole meal sad.

The Zojirushi Neuro Fuzzy, the 5.5-cup, ended the rice roulette. The fuzzy-logic settings do the thinking for us — it turns out properly cooked rice batch after batch without anyone standing over it, which Mom swears it’s never once gotten wrong. It keeps a finished pot warm and fluffy for hours, so rice made at four is still good at seven, and the nonstick bowl rinses clean instead of soaking overnight with a burnt ring on it.

We considered a plain budget rice cooker and thought about just buying a heavier stovetop pot. The cheap cooker had the same on-off crudeness that got us the scorched batches in the first place, and a better pot still needed a human paying attention we didn’t have to spare. The Zojirushi is $189.99, which is a lot to spend on rice, but the sheer never-fails consistency is what a family running on it several nights a week actually needs. It’s the one appliance the kids have simply stopped worrying about, because it always works.