Do rice cookers work on brown rice?
With the prevalence of white rice in American and Asian diets, most rice cookers around the world consider white rice the default setting. Even the least expensive rice cookers have a little notch inside the pot that tells you where to fill up the rice and where to fill up the water, and in 99.9% of these instances, the rice cooker is referring solely to white rice with these measurements. It is what the vast majority of these rice cookers will be cooking, and the primary reason that people buy a rice cooker in the first place. If you buy a rice cooker, it can handle white rice. That statement is pretty much always going to be true.
For those that enjoy or prefer brown rice, however, whether the rice cooker can handle it is more in question. In reviews of rice cookers all across the Internet, you will see thousands upon thousands of reviews that discuss how a particular rice cooker messed up their brown rice, and that for those that prefer to cook that style, they should look elsewhere.
Yet in very few places do these rice cookers mention whether they can or cannot handle brown rice. Some of the more advanced rice cookers will have a “brown rice button,” so the answer to the question is clearly more obvious. But for those less advanced appliances that do not have that feature, one must wonder whether or not their rice cooker is able to support cooking brown rice.
Does it Handle Brown Rice?
Luckily, nearly every single rice cooker in the world can handle brown rice. Despite what the reviews of specific rice cookers may say, the device itself is designed to handle brown rice, as well as other styles of rice.
So Why Do Some Rice Cookers Get Such Bad Brown Rice Reviews?
For starters, brown rice tends to become much stickier after it is completed. It also burns more easily. For those that are using the standard on/off rice cooker, that means that a fairly significant amount of the rice is going to be stuck and burned to a rice cooker that does not have a non-stick pan – even more so than would occur if you were to make white rice.
In addition, brown rice requires a completely different water to rice ratio. The USA Rice Federation recommends as much as ¼ to ½ fewer cups of water than is usually advised for cooking brown rice over the stove. You also may need to be handled differently upon completion. For example, many cooks recommend that you remove brown rice before the “keep warm” feature of a rice cooker turns on, in order to avoid drying and burning.
Finally, it is advised that with brown rice especially you should expect to be testing until its completion, so that you will known when it is done by its flavor, rather than simply waiting for the rice cooker to say it has finished.
All of these are due to the way brown rice is cooked in general, combined with the method that rice cookers use to cook it. The rice cooker itself is usually more than adequate for brown rice. But if you:
· Do not have a non stick pan.
· Use incorrect measurements.
· Do not check to see if it is dine.
· Keep the rice in the cooker for too long.
Then rice cookers that do not have brown rice settings will not know to adjust, and chances are the brown rice will not turn out very tasty.
Useful Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_rice
http://nutrition.about.com/od/healthyshopping/f/brown_white_ric.htm
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