The Best Rice Cooker

Rice is one of the world’s most versatile foods: You could eat a different rice dish every day for weeks without getting bored. If that sounds appealing, you might appreciate a great rice cooker, which can turn out perfect, plump grains with almost no effort.

Upgrade pick Cuckoo CRP-P1009SW Electric Pressure Rice Cooker

The Cuckoo CRP-P1009 makes the best sushi rice of all the cookers we tested—chewy, distinctive grains that hold together perfectly. Because it’s a pressure cooker, it also delivers these results more quickly than the other rice cookers we tested. The Cuckoo is especially handy at cooking brown rice quickly, in some tests taking almost half the time it took the Zojirushi. However, you might need to tweak the amount of water in your recipe if you prefer softer brown rice—our batches came out quite al dente, though not unpleasantly so. And we think the pressurized cooking caused our delicate long-grain rice to come out a bit mushy. Because the Cuckoo is pricey and comes in only a 10-cup capacity, we recommend this cooker to people who want to cook short- or medium-grain white and brown rice often and in large batches.