Great Rice Cooker! (Soak brown rice first!)
We bought this rice cooker from a store whose name rhymes with "Halmart". Thinking that we knew how to cook rice, we loaded it up and fired away, only to get a tremendous mess of starchy goop that flooded the top of the unit and flowed down the side, collecting underneath. (It stinks and the stink gets worse if you forget that it's there...) [UPDATE: You can place the rice cooker on a large Corelle dish to catch goopy overflow. It's a close size-match.)
After reading reviews for other Aroma rice cookers here on Amazon, I discovered that soaking the rice fixes everything. And very fortunately, this unit comes with a delay timer. Just load the cooker with rice and water (measured, of course), press "Delay Timer" for the number of hours you'd like to delay (the number is the number of hours when the rice will be finished), and choose "white rice" or "brown rice" (brown rice was giving us the most mess). I've set the timer as little as 2 hours, and the mess is eliminated...
Want some chemicals with your rice?
As far as the cheaper rice cookers go, this one is pretty much everywhere. I was happy with it for maybe 6 months, then two things happened. One's a minor nuisance, the other is the major concern that made me ditch it:
1) It started burning the rice. Keep in mind, I had been using it normally for a few months and knew how to operate it....I just had to start measuring the time myself, knowing that if I didn't stop it at a certain interval, the rice would burn. So mine went bad quickly, but that doesn't mean the product itself is lousy - maybe it was a one-off case.
2) The larger concern was that every time I dried it with a towel or cloth, this horrendous black chemical coating would come off. Every time. After 3 months, after six months, after a year, that black stuff was rubbing off A LOT after every single wash. Of course, if it comes off there, it comes off in the food. I asked myself if I really wanted to be slowly poisoning myself with some toxic...
Amazing
I have had the regular inexpensive rice cookers from wal-mart for years. They cooked rice fine, or so I thought. I wanted a rice cooker that looked attractive sitting out in the kitchen. I bought the Aroma ARC-150SB 20-Cup Digital Rice Cooker and Steamer. I expected a prettier appliance that does the same job. I was so surprised when I tasted my first bite of rice! The rice was cooked so well. It was fluffy, tender, not hard or mushy, but perfectly cooked. It cooks brown rice so well. The steamer is amazing. This appliance really steams quickly and well. It works just as well to cook rice and steam vegetables at the same time. This product really has impressed me enough to take the time to write this review. It was well worth the 30-some dollars I paid for it on Amazon.com. I checked e-bay and a bunch of other retailers and Amazon.com was by far the least expensive. And I got free shipping. It arrived with in two days of ordering. Great product, great shopping...
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