August Rice Cooker Thread - To ask for or share tips and suggestions.

[lindrusso]

Since a few of us have recently made or will be making this purchase, I thought it might be nice to have a thread going where we could share tips and suggestions.

At the moment I am trying out quick oats on the regular cook setting. We are out of regular oats and I'm curious how the quick oats will fare (fair? Tired brain tonight).

I have lots of questions and plan to do some research, but I figured it would be good to have a thread going that we can all refer to - either to ask questions or to offer advice.

I'll go first. :)

For those who cook oatmeal in their cooker:

Any tips on using the timer feature?

I would love to use milk and the timer feature, but will the milk go bad overnight? Anyone use milk in the cooker? Can you even use milk in the cooker???

Any tips on proportions that seem to work? Do you normally go off the box or use the cooker settings?

I'm assuming that raisins would do well in the cooker, either regular cooking or overnight, but what about nuts? Do they get mushy in the rice cooker?

I'll be searching the web for tips and suggestions and I'll post anything I find and, of course, I'll post the results of any of my own experiments.

Thanks! I'm hoping it's not too hard to figure it all out!

Alysha :)

[lindrusso]

I could say that I'm talking to myself, but nowadays I can get away with calling it blogging, right? :D

Anyway....here are my rice cooker results.

Tried overnight oatmeal with success. With oatmeal, I found that you have to prepare it according to the package, NOT the porridge settings. The oats/water proportions on the package are about 1:2. According to the water level on my rice cooker, it would have been WAY more than that. I chose to go with the package and it came out fine.

I did not try milk - having it sit overnight did not seem wise.

I did try putting raisins in, but since they sit all night, they get too plump. I like my raisins a little chewy and these plump raisins (pretty much mushy, really) did not appeal to me at all. So, I'll be adding them at the end from now on.

I found the rice cooker to be very useful for making fried rice (I used brown rice this time). Fried rice is one of those dishes you can't really do last minute since the rice needs to be cooked and then chilled. I cooked the rice overnight and then simply popped it in the fridge the next morning. By dinnertime, it was nice and cold and ready to go. This will definitely encourage me to make fried rice more often, especially using brown rice which takes a long time to cook on the stove.

I am going to a scrapbook workshop this weekend and I'm thinking of taking fried rice. I can use the cooker to keep it warm.

The rice cooker did a really nice job on the brown rice. However, I found that the 1:2 ratio that many suggested was way over the brown rice line on my cooker. I went with the cooker on this one, filling it just below the brown rice line. It came out perfect! The first time I tried brown rice I used too much water and it came out a bit sticky and bubbled through the vent a bit. This time, it was just right - separate grains and everything - a first for brown rice in this house!

I'll be using the cooker again this week to make regular old white rice to go with a fish dish. We are trying to eat mostly brown rices, but I gotta have that yummy white rice once in a while too. :)

Anyone have anything else to add?