Beth Hensperger - The Best of the Best Rice Cooker Cookbook

No-Fail Recipes for All Kinds of Things That Can Be Made from Start to Finish in Your Rice Cooker

Beth Hensperger and Julie Kaufmann

When The Ultimate Rice Cooker Cookbook was first published in 2002, and then again when it appeared in an expanded and revised edition, with fifty new recipes, in 2012, it taught many thousands of home cooks how to use this inexpensive and unassuming kitchen appliance to make perfect rice of every kind, from jasmine, basmati, and Arborio to brown and black and white. It also offered many exciting recipes for things to make with your rice, such as sushi dishes, pilafs, and risottos. And, in what made the book so revolutionary, it revealed that rice cookers could make more than ricewith recipes for many other grains, such as barley, groats, couscous, hominy, and quinoa, and with inventive ways to cook beans, legumes, vegetables, and even custards and puddings in these machines.

In this volume you will find a curated selection of one hundred of the best recipes from this groundbreaking book, presented now with new photographs and in a new design. We hope these recipes make you love your rice cooker even more than you already do and that they help you get delectable meals on the table quickly and easily.

The Editors of the Harvard Common Press

Once upon a time, rice was just rice. You planned a meal and rice seemed to be the right starch to serve with it. You placed the saucepan on the stove, measured some water into it, pulled down the bag of rice, measured it into the cup, and poured it into the boiling water. As the water came back to a boil, on went the cover and, when the timer beeped, you ate the rice.

That was before we met the rice cooker. Since then, the world of ricethe amazing array of rice available on every supermarket and specialty grocery shelf, where it grows, its lore and history, sharing recipes, the writing of this bookhas become an everyday part of our lives.

To an American cook, the electric rice cooker has been, up to now, a take-it-or-leave-it kitchen appliance. But to cooks throughout Asia and many Asian-American cooks, the rice cooker is an essential appliance for everyday meal preparation. Since in many Asian cultures rice is eaten three times a day, the rice cooker is always on in every home. There are even small ones with a handle to carry while traveling on vacation or a business trip. Why eat less-than-perfect rice when you dont have to? The rice cooker is also the method of choice for cooking rice in Asian restaurants (most of the rice cooker manufacturers have a commercial division).

Rice cookers appeal to a busy cook for a number of reasons. It is an appliance well suited to a small cooking space (it is the cooking tool of choice in college dorms and is great up at the ski cabin) and boasts easy cleanup. It is a closed-environment, slow-cook method, a kind of cross between a countertop slow cooker, an oven clay pot, and a stove-top saucepan. Since it is a one-button technology, there is virtually no maintenance.

When the first edition of this book came out, not much had been written about rice cookers, beyond the slim pamphlets that come with the appliance. This book filled and continues to fill that gap, with information on how to use your rice cooker to make foolproof everyday basic rice, as well as recipes for the new rices on the market and a wealth of rice side dishes. But there is so much more: risottos and hot breakfast cereals, grains, main courses, even desserts made start to finish in your rice cooker. All instructions are presented as simply, but also as comprehensively, as possible, to be of practical use in every type and size of machine.

Your rice cooker is a versatile, convenient kitchen appliance that embraces a style of cooking that emphasizes health and natural ingredients. Rices from around the world, every one available on the market today, are covered in depthwhere they come from, how to cook them, and ways to incorporate them into your meals.

Congratulations on your purchase of a rice cooker. Its versatile and reliable, a very nifty little bit of technology. It can make perfect rice and, as you are about to find out, much more. The electric rice cooker is a kitchen appliance that was born in the climate of postwar Japan. Available since the early 1950s, the rice cooker is a contemporary of the electric blender, part of the surge for faster, more convenient food preparation.

At its simplest, the rice cooker machine is a removable aluminum bowl that sits atop a metal heating element within a round, insulated housing. The heating element looks like a solid metal spring the size of a quarter. It automatically can sense when the water is boiled off by the temperature inside the pot (the amount of water added determines the length of the cooking time, not the amount of rice) and automatically shuts the unit off. It has a round metal or glass lid with a knob handle. The bowl has a rim or handles for lifting it in and out of the appliance housing. There is a switch to push down for turning on the appliance. The switch pops up when the machine turns off. Todays models are remarkably similar in style to those first ones made by the major Japanese companies still in business today: Hitachi, Zojirushi, Sanyo, Toshiba, and Panasonic/National. Newcomers include Aroma, Rival, Cuisinart, DuPont, Krups, and many others.

The shape of the rice cooker bowl was designed to mimic the shape of the okama, the traditional Japanese metal pot used for cooking rice, which has a curved bottom. The slightly curved bottom is an efficient heat conductor and enables food to be cooked using the least amount of fuel. The okama was used for many centuries over an open fire or on top of a wood-burning stove. With the gradual modernization of Japanese homes, housewives adopted the electric rice cooker as a simple alternative to using up the limited space on their new electric or gas stoves. Half a century later, the electric rice cooker is a commonplace appliance in every Japanese home.