Best Rice Cookers of 2024
The rice cookers I tested fell into three categories: small, affordable appliances, mid-range multicookers, and specialized, high-end rice cookers.
Every mini rice cooker I tested, including the Imusa 3-cupthe Dash mini 2 cup rice cookerand the Black & Decker 3-cup The rice cooker produced decent, small portions of white rice, although the Dash took a painfully long 35 minutes to cook just 1 cup of white rice. They all struggled with brown rice and mixed rice.
The slightly larger 6-cup Oster (our budget choice) and the Zojirushi Our two rice cookers performed nearly identically, turning out perfect pots of white rice in 19 and 20 minutes, respectively, and very good brown rice — though perhaps slightly overcooked — in a lightning-fast 22 minutes. I’d happily recommend either as solid space-saving rice-cooker options. While the Zojirushi seems a bit more solidly built, it’s more than twice the price of the Oster, which ultimately gives us the preference for the Oster.
The simpler rice cookers from Oster and Zojirushi performed nearly identically in our tests.
The $50 Hamilton Beach 8-Cup Rice Cooker (currently out of stock) seems like a good deal for the size, but the rice was inconsistent, with chunks that were severely undercooked and dry. Zojirushi’s 3-cup option also disappointed with the rice which was too wet and slightly broken, losing the quality of well cooked white rice.
4-cup from Cuisinart and the Black and Decker 7-cup rice cookers were among our least favorites because they were both so messy. The Cuisinart rice cooker boiled every time I used the conventional rice cooker, and the larger Black and Decker model leaked all over the counter, requiring a major cleanup.
As for the mid-range multicookers, I found the cooking time to be too long and the results were always slightly different. An 8-cup Aroma rice cooker and food steamer, Instant Pot’s Zest Cooker and a 5-cup Panasonic made us excited about the various features available on their interfaces, but all three produced overcooked, slightly mushy rice, possibly due to the slow cooking. I also tested the larger Rice Plus Multi-Cooker from Cusinart and while it holds a lot of rice and produced decent amounts of both white and brown rice, it took longer to cook the rice than any of the other appliances did, at over an hour and a half for brown rice.
If you cook a lot of different grains, one of these might be a viable option since they have so many niche settings. For rice, there are better options out there. You might also find that you get more value with a true multicooker that has a pressure cooker function. I’d point you to CNET’s list of the best Instant Pots for 2024 for more on that.
Somehow no fuses were blown.
Finally, there are the more expensive, specialized rice cookers from Tiger (currently out of stock) and Zojirushi were both impressive, as mentioned above. It’s clear that these devices have been carefully calibrated; Zojirushi even offers a bit of customization on how you want your white rice cooked, which is ideal if you have people with different rice texture preferences living under the same roof.
The Tiger is less than half the price of its counterpart and cooks rice extremely well; faster than anything else. It may not have all the bells and whistles of the Zojirushi, which is our top pick for custom rice, but it’s our best overall pick for 2024.
