The Rice Cooker – Essential for Cooking Asian Food

A rice cooker is the first thing you should buy when you want to seriously cook Asian food, especially Southeast Asian food. Not a wok, not a cleaver; they can wait. It’s a rice cooker or rice steamer that you want to make a priority to buy when you’re setting up your kitchen to cook Southeast Asian cuisines.

Why? I know how to steam rice on a stovetop just fine and you probably do, too. But it doesn’t go right every time. When the rest of your meal is ready and you find you’ve overcooked the rice or worse, do you really want to keep other people waiting while you try it again? No.

An Asian kitchen essential, a decent home rice cooker, also called a rice steamer, these days costs around $US50. If you cook Asian food often, it’s the best fifty bucks you’ll spend for the kitchen. We live in Siem Reap, Cambodia, where everyone owns a rice cooker.

Ask a Cambodian cook if they make rice on a stove and they’ll laugh. Locals use rice cookers to steam rice. Unless they live in a remote village without electricity, when they’ll cook their rice in a pot over fire. Otherwise, a rice cooker is used, and locals always make more rice than they need, using leftover rice to make fried rice, rice soup and rice porridge. More rice recipes here.

We use our rice cooker almost every single day of the year. Here are our tips to why you should buy and use a rice steamer regularly.

The Rice Cooker – For Cooking Asian Food This Is the First Thing You Should Buy

We’ve had a few rice cookers over the years and, yes, they can have their little idiosyncrasies. For instance, our current rice cooker doesn’t do a great job unless there are two cups of rice or more. It’s just a matter of figuring out those idiosyncrasies and consistently adapting to them.

Thankfully with the exact measurement that you use to make rice, it’s easy to adapt and adjust, say, if you rice ends up a little dry and you need to add a little extra water than the instructions say.

I know some people who claim that rice is better cooked on a stovetop, but I’ll just refer them to David Thompson’s Nahm, the best Thai restaurant in the world, where every night four industrial-sized rice steamers sit on a table just inside the kitchen doors.

If a rice cooker is good enough for David Thompson, then it’s good enough for me. But of course, being David Thompson, he soaks his jasmine rice in water and jasmine flowers to give it a more, well, jasmine flavour.

Our rice steamer has other uses too. A medium-sized 10 cup steamer, it’s large enough to perform other tasks.

What Else Can You Do With a Rice Cooker?

If the rice cooker has a steaming tray, you can steam eggs and get them perfectly soft- or hard-boiled – perfect every time.

You can steam dumplings and bao on the steaming tray.

And – a little trick I learnt at a cooking course recently – you can also make sticky rice on the steaming tray!

The best bit about using a rice cooker is that cooking rice is one less thing to think about when making Asian food.

Just put the rice on 20 minutes before completing your cooking and let it do its magic. It will stay warm while you finish cooking.

And that extra rice we cook every time? See this post for recipes for leftover rice that will have you deliberately cooking too much rice.

*Of course you can spend more on a top quality rice cooker such as this 15-cup Cuisinart rice cooker ($127), which is ideal for big families or big parties, but we find the $50 cooker meets our needs.

If you’re new to cooking, see our post on 12 dishes beginner cooks should learn and if you’re not, but looking to improve your kitchen skills, see my post on 10 dishes to master to become a better home cook.

You might also like my posts 10 things I’ve learnt working in restaurant kitchens that are useful in home kitchens, some pro chef lessons for home cooks, from precision in the kitchen and why size matters, if you want to be a better home cook, work in a restaurant kitchen, and a night in the kitchen with Michelin-starred French chef Pierre Gagnaire.