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Alternative implementation idea: pi with a mike feeding audio signals to a detector. If waveform matches Twinkle Little Star (aka sound of rice cooker), send notif("rice is done").

Extensible to other important sounds like smoke alarm, oven timer beeping, and a catch-all that sends notif("weird sound in kitchen, best investigate").

Plugin architecture to allow other contributions for waveforms to recognise different brand gear, eg the beeps from GE being different from Zojirushi.

This wheel has already been invented. Amazon Echo devices can detect (and respond to) beeping appliances.

I have one in the kitchen (which is near the laundry), and another one in my office (where I cannot hear the things in the kitchen).

When things beep, the one in the office says "beep beep".

And if things beep for a long time -- I think it's 2 minutes or something -- it also notifies my phone.

Large appliances can also be monitored via energy use back at the panel with a device like Sense: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/sense/

This can detect an inductive load like an AC/fridge/freezer compressor or washing machine motor. Something small and purely resistive like a rice cooker might be more challenging, but certainly a Sense does get you a long way.

That's a cromulent method. It does involve buying single-task hardware, but it's tidy.

I'd expect that it would work the same for either resistive or inductive loads -- after all, AC current on a wire is AC current on a wire, however it came to be present.

Sort of. Inductive loads tend to have a much more distinct "signature" in terms of how they draw current— both the obvious business of causing idealized current lag [1] but also the choppiness of how the magnets energize and de-energize as it spins.

My understanding of Sense is that it measures the top-level current consumption somewhat blindly and then uses the inductive monitoring and other inference to attribute that consumption to different known devices— like oh here's 4kW of resistive heating going on, I can tell whether that's your dryer or your hot tub based on whether I see the drum or circulation pump running. Whereas if it can't find an inductor then it will basically just assume it's your kettle, toaster, or a fanless space heater, with more emphasis on the device doing unique things as it starts up, see [2].

[1]: https://eng.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Electrical_Engineerin...

[2]: https://blog.sense.com/articles/how-does-sense-detect-my-dev...

Thanks. I did read through your provided links, and I don't disagree with them.

The current transformers used by Sense are inductive by their very nature, but that property does not suggest preferential detection of specifically inductive loads.

It can detect inductive loads as being unique, but it can also detect largely-resistive loads as being unique -- as well as many other things that present a particular signature.

The toaster presented in the blog is an excellent example of a largely-resistive thing that still behaves in unique ways.

The Sense is way too expensive for the very limited capabilities it has. You get to pay extra for the machine-learning to mis-interpret your appliances!

The Emporia Vue is half the price and has a clamp for each circuit.

In this case though, the wall plug monitoring is definitely the right solution.

Can the Vue ever automatically differentiate between a rice cooker and a toaster that are plugged into the same branch circuit?

Sense, theoretically, can.

sure, just write a homeassistant integration. you have only 4 cases to handle:

- toaster oven on

- rice cooker on

- both on

- both off

I would be extremely surprised if the sense was able to detect a rice cooker accurately.

The point is not using a third party spying device in the first place.

It is?

I thought that the point was a notification when the rice was done cooking, and I provided a mechanism by which this may be accomplished by some here that might not involve any monetary expense at all because the hardware might already be sitting there [spying from there] already.

(But if you want to implement it in some other way, then: By all means, please provide your own suggestion.)

In the original blog post:

"I don't want my rice-cooker sending all my rice-cooking habits back to the manufacturer - so even more yes."

It is safe to assume that people who don't want their rice cooker to send their cooking habits to the manufacturers would not be willing to send it to Amazon.

I hope you ask people you invite home for permission to record and send your conversation with them to a third party before letting them in. Most people don't.

As a pragmatic person, I recognise that I gave up on any aspect of personal privacy when I started carrying a pocket supercomputer built from proprietary parts and binary blobs and a dizzying array of sensors that also perpetually has Internet connectivity.

I hope you ask the people you interact with for permission to record and send your conversations with them to a third party before engaging with them with your own pocket supercomputer in your pocket. Most people don't.

[dead]

My pi won't phone home, Echo constantly does.

That's absolutely correct.

My Echo devices go further, and can even provide a slice of Internet for the Alexa-enabled TVs that my neighbors may think have no network connection.

...and I'm OK with all of this. :)

Energy use for constant audio monitoring would make that implementation impractical compared to simply monitoring the energy draw from the device.

A Pi draws somewhere under 10W at peak, probably significantly under that most of the time. That’s about 87kWh per year, worst case.

Something like $8-16 dollars depending on how incompetent your power company is - well under the threshold for anyone who knows how to do this kind of work to worry about. Again, worst case; I’d bet you can do constant listening half that.

You could probably run this on a 32bit micro controller doing less than a watt

Yeah I want that for detecting when my furnace cycles. One mic could probably cover everything in the utility room.

With multiple outdoor microphones I'd love to build a ShotSpotter, but I'm not good enough at audio to know how practical that is.

For a forced-air furnace, I put a hinged piece of cardboard over a room vent with a paperclip switch. When the furnace blew, the cardboard would rise and the switch would open. Simple and effective. It doesn't measure the burn cycle of the furnace exactly, but it was close enough for me.

Sounds like a story I've heard about a conveyer belt and a large fan.

I like simple solutions to simple problems

I remember when Fuzzy Logic was an everyday tech term that seemed to be the big new hotness. I think people were excited about how they used it in the mass combat simulator software for LoTR.

Now it seems to be mostly associated with rice cookers. They must do an amazing job, since it still seems to be people's favorite rice cooking tech!

My understanding is that there was a period of time where computer science was very excited about fuzzy logic, because it was thought it would prove to be more powerful than conventional logic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_logic

However, it was demonstrated that it had no additional power over conventional logic, so interest faded as quickly as it rose. Which is not to say it is useless, but that rather than a revolution it became just another tool in the belt. It can be more convenient to formulate certain systems in fuzzy logic rather than binary logic, but it doesn't really create new possibilities. And programmers in the trenches were doing this sort of thing already anyhow, less formally, but generally effectively.

It was weird how loud it was for sure. New forms of logic don't generally get the red carpet treatment like that.

I don't know why a rice cooker would particularly care about "fuzzy logic" other than a bizarre marketing spandrel [1].

[1]: Since this seems an obscure usage of an already-obscure term: https://www.scienceabc.com/pure-sciences/what-are-spandrels....

Fuzzy logic sounds like it has been superseded by neural networks. It has much the same principle, i.e. gates/neurons that are tuned to provide a non-digital output. But with fuzzy logic, presumably the parameters and network are hand tuned.

I don't think "superseded" is the right word, in the same way that ordinary relativity [1] hasn't been superseded by special or general relativity. Fuzzy logic is a more straightforward model that works well enough here, so why throw in the additional complexity and illegibility of neural nets?

[1] Also known as "classical mechanics". Despite widespread belief that relativity is a 20th century idea, the first person to describe relativity wasn't Einstein -- it was Galileo. Einstein himself saw his work on relativity as extending what Galileo had done.

Control theory is very interesting and in my opinion more relevant than before

I thought that was all marketing nonsense and they actually work by detecting when the temperature spikes because the water has been consumed.

If I head to head my zojirushi vs a bargain rice cooker with temperature detector, would I be able to tell the difference?

The cheap cookers use a mechanical setup as there are no electronics. I have the cheapest Zojirushi 3-cup cooker where you just push down a lever. That lever mechanically latches a spring loaded mechanism that closes the heating element switch. The temperature will stay relatively stable as the water absorbs the heat keeping it at around 100 C. Once the water is evaporated from the bottom the temperature rises which trips a bimetallic mechanism releasing the spring loaded lever opening the heater switch. Stupid simple.

Tangential, but one reason zojirushi is a buy it for life product is because you can get spare parts for a very long time. I have a 20 year old zj with no fundamental failures beyond the cookpot getting old and dented, and zj part replacements are easy and cheap.

Try replacing the clock battery on a unit that has one :/

Disappointing aspect indeed, but the battery is only relevant to people that use the clock to set cooking times a lot AND ALSO keep their rice cooker unplugged. The intersection of those 2 groups is likely minimal, and the slight inconvenience of setting the time for the aforementioned group is not that bad.

Or is it [reaching the curie point of a magnet to switch the heat off](https://youtu.be/RSTNhvDGbYI)?

Good point. I haven't looked at mine but perhaps it is.

I replaced a crummy spring/latch one with a Zoji induction 3 cup and I would never go back to the old one. Rice is always evenly cooked and never stuck/toasted at the bottom, keep warm with tracking of elapsed time, countdown to being done, plus flexibility for lots of different type of rice and grains.

Could you do the job with a cheap one? Sure, but you can always make rice on the stovetop as well if savings/space are a big priority. This is a convenience appliance, and the convenience of the fancy ones is a significant improvement over the basic ones.

When I cook rice I purposefully take the lid off and add 10 extra minutes to get that delicious crispy bottom.

Tahdig! You can better control it if you wrap the lid in a towel and boil the rice on a low fire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorched_rice#Iran

The Zojirushi 3 cup induction is the highest scoring rice cooker tested by Consumers Union. It was expensive but it makes excellent rice and you don’t have to be precise with the water. I hope to have it for the rest of my life.

Mine consistently produces better rice than my old mechanical one. It's also slower. I think it does a more gentle temperature ramp than the mechanical one did.

I've always assumed it was a name for a clever way to improve on limitations of simple bang-bang control with on-off sensors and actuators plus some 7400 series-type logic. Nowadays you can have an STM8 with two dozen 10 or 12-bit ADCs and enough grunt to do hundreds of PID loops at once for 10 cents.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSTNhvDGbYI Great Technology Connections video about how it works.

Your video explains how traditional rice cookers work. However it doesn’t explain how fuzzy logic in a rice cooker works.

A good thing about living in a small house. I can hear when my rice cooker is done (plays a tune), when my washing machine is done (plays a tune), when my dryer is done (plays a tune). :) (note that that hasn't prevented me from hooking them up to smart plugs the way terrence did)

My rice cooker switches to "keep warm" mode once it's done cooking. I think most do this. Is the drop in power consumption significant enough to reliably know when its done?

Yes. It has been reliable so far. Keeping warm uses less electricity than cooking.

I think the author says it’s about rice beeing overcooked. Even if it turns to keep warm its better to directly open the lid and go eating.

In my Cuckoo rice cooker it's better to let the rice sit in "keep warm" for a few minutes anyway. When the cooker detects "done" there is no water left on the bottom but the rice grains still aren't finished absorbing all the water on their surface. I haven't noticed any big quality dropoff, even 1hr is fine.

The alternative to this is to buy an expensive rice cooker like a mug (me) and after a few months realise that the last 20-odd minutes on the display go down much faster than 20 minutes. Fuzzy logic indeed.

I have a clothes dryer which works like that, the other way around: equipped with an intelligent controller and an array of moisture sensors, it will spend 40 minutes chugging through the last 10 minutes of its cycle before presenting a load of washing which is just barely damp enough that you're not sure whether it's actually done.

> Step 2 - Install Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi

In hindsight, I wouldn't want to install HA for the sole purpose of running one smart plug. HA is one of the best pieces of software I've worked with but it has a learning curve and it does require some tinkering every now and then.

I should have mentioned, I have HA for all sorts of different things - not just this plug.

On the other hand, HA tends to act as an attractor for this kind of stuff. I installed mine first to play with Hue lights, then to try and add my A/C units to it. With the latter turning into a spectacular success (infinitely better than vendor's garbage app, plus actually liked and used by my wife), HA now also runs hacked IKEA air quality monitors, floor heating, and most recently, reports when the washing machine is done. It's now pretty much critical infrastructure for us.

Can someone explain? Why is a rice cooker needed? Like, why a special pot to cook rice, specifially? I eat plenty of rice -basmati, brown basmati, brown long-grain, carolina, bomba paella, arborio, etc etc. I boil it in a simple pot where I also boil everything else. It cooks just fine. I make pilafs (in my French oven!), Greek stuffed veg, egg fried rice (with last day's rice obviously), risotto, Persian tahdig with saffron, you name it. I really don't think there's ever any problem with my rice.

So why is everyone using special cookers? What's the secret?

> I boil it in a simple pot

Maybe the difference is this.

Boiled rice gives you one type of rice. It is relatively easy, but I know a lot of people tend to want the softer fluffier rice cooked using the absorption-method.

Rice cookers are doing absorption-method cooking. This is slightly more technically complex - the exact ratio of water to rice is important, as is controlling temperature.

I consider myself a reasonably competent home cook. I cook rice fairly regularly on a stove top, but getting the exact ratio of water to rice correct is something I find is very easy to mess up.

Additionally, my current stove is fiddly, and hard to control the exact temperature. Sometimes I will end up with a situation where the rice has fully used all of the water, but is not cooked through, other times I will end up with rice that is fully cooked, but is still quite wet.

When trying to time this with other dishes, it's painful.

I don't have anywhere convenient to store a rice cooker, so I don't have one - but when I renovate my kitchen in the future it will be one appliance I end up getting.

It should be noted that it is recommended to boil rice in plenty of water and to pour away the excess to remove a lot of the arsenic in rice.

https://health.osu.edu/wellness/exercise-and-nutrition/how-t...

https://www.livsmedelsverket.se/globalassets/publikationsdat...

It's not obvious to me how much concern one should generally have about this.

The first article mostly marketing material for a paper and seems to actively avoid actually mentioning real numbers or details.

I think there's a reason for this -- the paper does not do any original research, and only relies on evaluating other papers. They also seem to be talking about the effect on some kind of brown rice for their % reduction numbers.

The second seems better, IMO, but also for some reason adds salt into the mixture. They don't test the salt for the amount of arsenic in it, only noting it's a common household product in Sweden. This alone could be the cause for a significant difference in the boiled-dry vs poured-off results (i.e salt in solution will be partly removed).

I'd want to see better research on this before coming to any significant changes in how a major food staple is consumed.

Not just arsenic but also to remove the starch. Most folks don’t cool down the rice before eating so it’s preferable to remove the starch before eating.

Also helps to avoid rice grown in the southern US in favor of rice from California.

Thanks for the insight. I didn't know what "absorption-method cooking" is so I looked it up online and it's how I cook rice, or at least how I cook rice when it's not part of a dish that has to be cooked as one. A couple of guides I found online even use a normal pot, with a more or less precise measurement of water. In my experience, exact measurements are not something a human palate can do, and I think there is a lot of posturing in recipe writers who insist on such, most of the time - with the exception of baking and emulsions, although even there the variability in the ingredients themselves introduces a lot of uncertainty.

Maybe a rice cooker can make exact measurements, but again I would have to wonder: who was the superhuman tester who detected the perfectly cooked rice, that everyone on earth will indisputably recognise as perfect? For me, cooking is not science and I think I'd feel a bit silly having a scientific instrument for rice cooking. So, I guess, it's not for me.

> exact measurements are not something a human palate can do, and I think there is a lot of posturing in recipe writers who insist on such

To be clear, when I'm saying more precise, I mean in the sense of "a cup of something is whatever fits into the cup in my cupboard", not using ISO standards with accuracy +/- 1 millilitre.

> who was the superhuman tester

Again, I'm talking about the difference between "This is clearly uncooked" dry rice, and "this is no longer rice, it's just vaguely rice-coloured mush".

Both states are relatively easy to achieve with absorption method cooking, because you have a lot more variables to consider. It depends not only on the rice, but the cooking vessel, the stove and it's performance, and a bunch of other things.

Perhaps you don't have this issue and are naturally skilled at this. If this is true then I'm happy for you.

Please, however, do understand that there are many many people however who do have this, and find using a rice cooker a much more convenient tool. Some of them would find cooking rice on a stove with a pot would either be difficult or stressful.

This is the answer to your question: "Can someone explain? Why is a rice cooker needed?"

Just try it. It just a lot more convenient and results are great.

1. Put rice in 2. Put water in. 3. Press a button. 4. Come back whenever you want (exact duration doesn‘t matter since a good rice cooker will keep the rice warm and moist).

Don't I have to "0. Buy rice cooker" first? :P

You have family or are lazy.

Life with $400+ high end rice cooker:

Load up big batch of rice when convenient, rice cooks at set schedule. No minding the stove.

Keep warm option can keep rice 95% tasty for 3-4 days vs storing/reheating rice that gets dry. Rice quality also consistently good.

Depending on how much rice you eat, this will save you multiple hours a week. Hundreds of hours over a few years. It's really no brainer investment.

It's like asking why do people have toasters when they can fry up or bake bread every time. Except high end toasters have nothing on high end rice cookers. Imagine a toaster that can be loaded with bread and you can open it whenever and have perfectly toasted bread for days. I imagine frequent bread eaters would pay stupid money for that.

E: if your clumbsy, never accidentally burn a pot again, which adds up.

I see, thanks for the insight. Well, you're replying to someone who makes her own bread, and her own everything else [1] so I at least understand why I don't have a rice cooker now!

I enjoy cooking and I don't think of it as a waste of time, like "hundreds of hours over a few years". Those are hundreds of hours where I get to do something I love and that I find rewarding, physically so. My average time spent on cooking is about an hour, or an hour and a half, depending on the dish, I reckon. But then I'll eat that for a couple of days, so it's an hour for four meals; for two people. My partner also cooks so it's not always me spending that time.

Of course for some lunches I'll just make myself a toastie or puff up some noodles and eat them with tuna. Maybe give them a quick fry if I really feel like it.

Anyway I guess this thread has helped convince me I don't need a rice cooker in my life. I do have a toaster though :)

______________

[1] Except for beans and chickpeas. Not if I can buy a can of perfectly boiled chickpeas at 0.45 p. The power to cook that on a stove will cost me more and it's probably better for the environment given the people who put the chickpeas in the can boil them in batches of several hundreds of kgs, not 1kg as I'd do.

I like myself a fresh loaf as well. I think there's more joy/ritual in bread making/baking. There's more types of bread to experiment with. It's a hobby. Some bakers I know spend more money on mixers and cast iron baking pans and other contraptions than a fancy rice cooker. No one makes rice for a hobby or bring plain rice to potluck. Your chickpea comparison is apt. Imagine if your normal staple is just chickpeas. It's a chore made for automation. East Asian rice consumption is pretty boring, people stick with their brand rarely even switch up grain types. Other cultures put stuff in their rice, spice it up, cook it with stuff and have more one pot raw rice recipes. But if your rice diet is 95% white rice consumed the same way, splurging on a "unitool" like a rice cooker to save time brings joy.

Lentils, chickpeas or beans can be boiled in a perfectly reproducible way and with minimum energy consumption in a microwave oven.

The boiling time depends on the quantity and on the oven, but it is unlikely to exceed 15 minutes (preferably after soaking them for a half day in acidified water, then rinsing them) (by acidified I mean adding a little lemon or lime juice, or vinegar or citric acid; such acid soaking removes much of the phytic acid from seeds or nuts).

I even bake my bread or my cakes in a microwave oven, because it is much faster and more reproducible than in a traditional oven. Thus I have stopped cooking for multiple days, because cooking any dish takes much less than a half hour (the wall clock time may be greater, but it includes times when the food is either in the oven or it must rest, but it is unattended and I can do other activities).

That's interesting to know. Unfortunately I don't have a microwave oven. Just a traditional one. I do make lots of dishes that need sauteeing and slow cooking in a French oven. How does that work with a microwave?

Slow cooking is very easy in a microwave oven, but only if it is a good oven that has a power control with many steps, which allows the selection of a power much smaller than the maximum.

For instance my oven has 6 power steps, the maximum is 1000 W and the minimum is 100 W. This is enough to be able to choose for any food how fast or how slow to be cooked, within a large range. However, even the equivalent of slow cooking is much faster when done in a microwave oven, because the heat is introduced directly inside the food, so it is heated uniformly in all its volume.

On the other hand if you like food done by sauteing, a microwave oven is not helpful for that. A microwave oven is optimal for replacing boiling, steaming, roasting or baking for any kind of vegetables or meat (also for dough, cakes, creams, eggs). The vegetables that contain much water, e.g. potatoes, sweet potatoes or quinces, are more tasty if they are not boiled but just baked in a closed glass vessel, without adding anything to them. Meat is also done best by roasting in a closed glass vessel without anything added.

A microwave oven is not useful for replacing frying or sauteing.

Nevertheless, in my opinion, these are bad habits. As a general rule, it is useful to heat only the parts of food that consist of proteins and carbohydrates.

Heating any kind of fat cannot provide any useful effect from a nutritional point of view, it only degrades the fat and it makes it harmful, even if many people are addicted to the taste of burned fat.

I have transitioned from cooking with a traditional oven and kitchen stove to using only a microwave oven a few years ago, but I had stopped heating any kind of oil or fat many years earlier.

I add to the food the various kinds of oil that I use or any other kind of fat only after the food has been cooked and it has cooled down.

Except if the taste of burned oil is desired, there is no need for using oil or fat when cooking in a microwave oven, because when using closed glass vessels it is possible to heat anything of interest without the risk of the food sticking to the vessel or becoming burnt.

"Addicted to the taste of burned fat"? Can you please tell me more about that?

I like the toaster comparison!

You can definitely toast bread using a pan but you'll find it difficult to get the same consistency and it's also more hassle and cleaning.

That being said, is there really much difference between a 100$ vs 400$+ rice cooker? I've been trying to find a reason to upgrade my cheap(ish) Panasonic to something like a Zojirushi but every time I look into it I just can't justify the expense.

Apart from extended keepwarm because better sensors (?), my experience with higher end rice cookers is they're designed to vent moisture better, less cleanup for frequent activity always good. I think there's also satisfaction knowing you're having the best reasonable quality of (for me white) rice, since a bunch of japanese engineers spent decades making it in a sense, a solved problem. That's just like... nice to think about, or not worry about (even if placebo effect) whenever eating rice, which is always. I'm the least buyitforlife kind of guy, not interested in $200 pants or $400 boots or $800 jackets that last a decade, because I don't like dealing with wear and tear after a few years, but as long as the rice cooker is working, which they seem to for like 10 years, you're getting best rice. It's a nice reoccuring feeling for $40 a year.

Zojirushi has very high build quality. I wouldn’t be surprised if mine lasted more than a decade. And also they are pretty good on parts availability; I had to toss a different $100 rice cooker I used to own because I needed a new pot and they didn’t make them anymore.

You can also use special programs that will make healthier rice - search for low sugar rice cookers.

Yes. Price is quickly forgotten but quality endures.

As tempting as it is, according to food safety guidelines you shouldn’t leave rice in the rice cooker for more than 12 hours, even on “keep warm”.

But it's just spent 30-45 minutes at boiling point. If you keep the cooker closed and only use clean utensils to remove rice I'd say the risk is pretty low.

My understanding is the Bacillus cereus spores aren't guaranteed to be entirely killed off in typical rice cooking times (also, 30-45 minutes boiling seems long for cooking even 4 cups of rice in my rice cooker). If not killed, the remaining spores become a problem.

The contamination (spores) come in the rice you buy.

My model recommends the warming function for up to 40 hours, but I'm sure Japanese people who eat rice every day get poisoned all the time, and we should all follow FDA guidelines that say to throw out all of our food if it is in the fridge for longer than 2 days or out at room temp for 4 hours. No wonder people think that cooking or grocery shopping are intimidating with that mentality...

No need to be sarcastic :) I just thought 3-4 days was really stretching it

I wouldn't leave it for that long, but mostly because of degradation in texture.

The sarcasm is how I stop myself from getting too angry over the ridiculous US food safety guidelines that discourage people from cooking and encourage waste. Sadly those are treated as gospel all over the Western Internet. I can imagine the comments on TKG...

Yeah 4 days is stretching it, was more commentary on rice taste/quality vs rice stored in fridge and reheated. As for 12 hours, I know it's the guidelines, but plenty of people I know grew up eating multiday room temperature stored rice. IIRC China released data on bacillus cereus outbreaks a year ago, and they had <10 deaths and a few 1000 hospitalizations over 10 years from a billion rice eaters - cause was primarily poor food handling in cafeterias. Risk:reward wise, 2-3 days works for me, but I also have pretty strong stomach when travelling.

I would wonder if room temperature is better or worse conditions than the keep warm temp

Convenience.

In our house plain rice is a staple eaten with almost every meal and often associated with non-time-intensive meal prep (like reheating leftovers or eaten with eggs and some other toppings). So we like being able to start the rice and walk away.

Using our rice cooker makes "making rice" a 1 minute labor effort with absolutely no monitoring needed. You can't burn it. You're welcome to forget about it. You can barely mess it up.

In our case the rice maker is a 25 year old simple magnet kind. Not one of the expensive pressure cookers. This style of rice maker can be bought for as little as ~$30 and is super-convenient if you eat a lot of rice. Just don't get the non-stick pots if you buy one - they aren't needed and they don't last for more than a couple of years.

Thanks! I think one reason why I don't feel the convenience is because I usually don't cook rice on its own. Most of the time it goes in casseroles, pilafs, risottos, stuffed veg and things like that where it doesn't make sense to boil the rice separately (although sometimes it makes sense to parboil it). I did use to eat plenty of plain rice in the past, but I got into cooking more and more over the years and I don't eat plain rice that much anymore.

Grew up with a rice cooker in the house and it was used frequently. I actually didn’t buy a rice cooker as an adult until two months ago - and always made it stovetop. Was resistant and proud to just make it on the stove.

Cannot believe it took me so long to buy a rice cooker and wish I’d done it sooner. It just makes it way easier and more reproducible to make perfect rice. Plus some have a steamer tray and other features.

Knowing how to make it stove top is a good skill but prefer a rice cooker now.

It’s funny though - my family is mixed race with some being Asian and others being from Spain/Western Europe. Rice Can be prepared in so many different ways - paella has its own pan and cooking method that’s just as valid as a rice cooker.

They’re just different but rice cooker for daily use for me.

The secret is it's cultural. Asian people eat a lot of rice. when you do, it makes sense to optimize the boring part, which is watching rice cook. this frees you to cook delicious entrees to go with the rice. Or cook means in the rice cooker. For whiter audiences that don't eat as much rice, but do eat bread, a toaster is the equivalent device. you could toast bread in a pan, why don't you? you could load it up with all sorts of stuff that way. But most people have a toaster.

the secret is labor saving devices. if you don't do a ton of that sort of labor, it doesn't make sense. My rice cooker spends more time with rice in it that I eat, than not.

I think a pan is for frying bread, not toasting it. Or to make flat breads. Anyway I see the point, thanks. I do eat lots of rice, btw, except not plain and this thread has given me to understand that this is an important detail I've been missing.

A while ago I met a guy from Argentina (on the night train from Paris to Venice, where you meet all sorts of interesting folk) and he was complaining about the plain white rice he eats in China, where he goes often for work. He told me he absolutely loves rice and when he went to China for the first time, he was thinking to himself "oh boy, here I'll eat the best rice!". And was very disappointed to find out that the Chinese eat their rice plain white. I thought he should have gone to Iran, where they really go the distance when it comes to cooking rice, and making it a very special thing.

So I guess if you are coming from the more far-east side of Asia then a rice cooker makes sense, but if you're used to pilafs, tahdigs and biryanis and things like that, then it's probably not very useful.

You're totally right about Iran cuisine focusing more on rice dishes. Chinese fried rice is what you do with leftovers, not an entree, way back when, anyway. Still, don't let the focus on white rice stop you from trying a rice cooker out as a modern fusion food thing. They're plenty capable of cooking delicious dishes full of spices. I throw chicken and vegetables on top of rice, and throw in a bevy of spices to get something more than plain white rice.

Don't need a fancy rice cooker to try either, they've had decades to perfect them so a cheap one that's big enough is totally fine.

Convenience. Rice cookers are very much fire-and-forget systems.

I can't be arsed watching the pot.

And how do you make dolmades avgolemono re man?

In a rice cooker, of course!

Concise, accurate, and to the point.

For the same reason why someone might have a toaster just for bread.

In Asian households it's common for us to be eating rice everyday, with side dishes. So it's also really common for us to have rice cookers for convenience.

Rice cooker is a "fire and forget" thing. It's much harder to mess up rice using a dedicated cooker.

And you can also do dishes in it. E.g. put some pork ribs on top of the rice. You get a complete meal in one step.

Thanks, I didn't know that. How do you clean the cooker afterwards though? Doesn't it make more of a mess if you add more ingredients?

The main part is usually a teflon-coated metal bowl. Quite easy to wash by hand or in a dishwasher. Depending on the design, cleaning the top/cover might be a challenge.

I imagine another reason why rice specifically is the physics behind it. Water has a property where it won't get hotter than it's boiling point while it's boiling.

The way they cook rice is: put rice and water in a pot, boil water until there's no water left, take it off the heat. Because of that property, making a rice maker is extremely cheap. It's just a heating element and a thermostat that switches the element off when the temperature is 101 degrees C (because while there's water, it will only ever be 100 degrees C).

A rice cooker also frees one burner in your stove, it is a huge difference when you have only one or two burners total.

Yeah, I've definitely live in some places :cough Paris cough: where two stove heads are the norm. I can see the point in having an extra place to cook in that case.

Why do you need a kettle when you can boil water in a pot?

Speaking of the cheap $25 ones: It's easy. You add water and rice, and it automatically turns off when all the water is gone.

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This is the "put in weeks of work to save minutes of your time" kind of automation that I absolutely love and wish I did more of

Neat!

I was always under the impression that rice cookers worked on a timer basis, but from the article it sounds like it's more of a thing where the appliance will tell you when the rice is cooked - is that right?

I'm intrigued to get one now, although it's unclear to me what the difference is between a £40 one and the one mentioned in the post (which looks to be about £100 now on Amazon)

I love rice cookers!

Rice cookers (usually) make clever use of 1) alloys whose magnetism depends on temperature and 2) the fact that boiling water occurs at a fixed temperature. With a "trigger" temperature just above the boiling point of water, the rice cooker automatically turns off the heating element when all the water is gone (and thus the temperature starts to rise above boiling point).

More detail here: https://youtu.be/RSTNhvDGbYI

Those are the older ones. The new ones like the "Fuzzy Logic" line are more akin to a PID controller trying to make the temperature/time graph match a specific curve, where the temperature changes at different points in the cooking, if I understand correctly.

I'd like to see a patent that actually confirms this. The Curie temperature of the common ferromagnetic metals is well above the boiling point of water, which raises some questions as to what one would make the alloy out of.

Canadian nickels were made of nickel until 1981. Assuming you have a magnet that's heat resistant, you can do a cool demo with a torch or gas stove: pick up the coin with the magnet and dangle it in the flames. You'll know when it hits the Curie temperature. It'll fall off the magnet.

bimetallic strip doesnt necessarily mean magnetism, i believe in this case it simply deforms to flip a switch

The more expensive fuzzy logic-based rice cookers are more “accurate” in the sense that they have a better idea of when your rice is actually done cooking. This makes your rice cooking more deterministic.

As to whether this is worth the extra cost, it depends on your budget and how frequently you cook rice.

I got an expensive cooker and can tell the difference. Cheap 3 cup cooker to 10 cup bottom burner to Zojiriushi induction. The same amount of rice cooked would not fit in my rice saver container for stir frying without being smushed down because it was more fluffy.

It takes 3 times longer to cook however yet has not burned my rice when sitting on warm yet. I get happy when I smell the fresh cooked rice several times per week so I'm definitely in the worth it category.

Right. Before all water at the bottom has evaporated, the temperature is 100C. After all water has evaporated, the temperature rises uncontrolled due to lack of latent heat. So basically it just shuts off when the temperature exceeds 100C, and the classic mechanism is to formulate a magnet that loses its magnetism at that temperature (all permanent magnets have an operating temperature, and it can be tweaked during manufacturing) and at that point it's just a leaf spring switch that the magnet conditionally attracts.

The fancier rice cookers monitor what's going on inside and turn off when the last of the liquid is gone. At the lower end I do not like them because that ends up somewhat overcooking the rice next to the heating surface--I prefer putting it in the microwave using settings I have determined by experiment to work. Perfect every time.

I presume the more expensive ones are better at avoiding overcooking but it seems to me hard to conceive of a conduction-heat system that doesn't suffer this problem to some degree.

> putting it in the microwave using settings I have determined by experiment to work. Perfect every time

Does that involve a humidity sensor in your microwave? Because if you're just talking about power level and time, then how do you account for variation of water temperature? I guess you could use room temperature water (or a fridge pitcher) which would be plenty stable, but tap temperature varies wildly based on the season, at least where I live.

I was taught by a chinese restaurant chef his technique for how to cook chinese rice in a normal pot on the stove at home. The technique consists of (after washing away most of the starch) starting out by submerging the rice under an extra couple of centimeters of water (you use your hand/knuckles to measure, it's not super precise) and high-heat boil uncovered till the water level drops to even with the surface of the rice. Now cover and put heat down very low and let the rest of the water absorb while you make your stir fry. Before serving, turn all the rice over a time or two with a paddle and let it resettle uncovered, this helps the rice dry a little and be less sticky, but keeps it cluster-chop-stick-able.

I explained all that to say, I adapted that technique for a microwave and it worked great right away. Microwaves vary a lot in power and timing, so I can't really give a how-many-minutes recipe, but the technique just works.

From my experience microwave heats up water so fast it doesn't matter. I've used coldest and hottest tap settings and as long as water level is right it works fine, provided you wait long enough after cooking for the rice to absorb the water. Usually I just wait 10 minutes. If it's still a little wet from cold water, I'll fluff the rice, stick the lid back on and wait a few more minutes (assuming this is using a microwave rice cooker).

The water is coming from the reverse osmosis tank, not the faucet. Thus it will be at room temperature.

There are different ways of doing it, but when I microwave rice I boil the water in a kettle first

I do the same with my washer. I monitor the power usage, save it in a variable and run a trigger when it drops from a certain amount below another.

Super simple, works good.

Same. I have my washer / dryer set up to notify us when they're done.

I also have my automated cat pan hooked up, which incrents a counter and once that counter hits a threshold we get a notification that it's time to change the box.

I've been experimenting with some home automation using Home Assistant recently. Its scope is absolutely incredible. Some open source friendly brands are Sonoff, Shelly, and Athom. Would be really sweet if there was an Awesome Open Source Home Assistant git some day. =)

Home assistant uses some weird “code in YAML” syntax. Chances are, the author could have written a virtual binary sensor by making one that turns on off according to the meter. I found that chatGPT makes writing these yaml files significantly better and faster.

No need for YAML, you can add binary sensors from the “Helper” tab of any device’s entities list.

How about a special kind of ammeter that makes a noise when the current drawn goes below a particular threshold? (Possibly for a minimum time length) You can make any appliance beep that way.

Here's Matthias Wandel doing something like that with his microwave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkqpNI7q1Dc

The talkie toaster from Red Dwarf comes to mind… “Does anyone want toast?”

Hey, big companies--there's a market for this! Why is there no commercial product that does something of the sort? Power drops below X watts for Y minutes, send notification.

Don't tip them off, they'll make something that requires a cloud service and records every time you cook rice.

And fills all of your social media, Amazon, eBay, etc. with ads for rice, products made with rice, rice adjacent 'influencers' and travel to places where rice is grown via "we value your privacy (for the money we make from it)" affiliate data sharing.

It's all spelled out in the click-thru ToC...you have noone to blame but yourself for not reading all 132 pages.

/s

That doesn't scale. What, you sell someone a product, they're happy with it, it fulfills the problem they had, they don't send you another penny until you spend the money to actually make a new product? That sounds too expensive, nobody would fund that

This idea doesn't sound like that though. Current rice cookers are already what you describe. A rice cooker with an app would be more likely to have a subscription model.

The person who invents a fully automated home rice cooker (rinses the rice, puts it in a pot, adds water and cooks) will be a billionaire. I want to start my rice cooker while I'm driving home from a big hike and have that steaming pot ready when I get home.

They already made it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmiJ0OzFKd0

Mother of god.

> Is this worth it? I like playing with gadgets - so yes.

It is only worth it because it lets you play with gadgets.

Otherwise, one can only have so much attention span. I would go nuts if my home appliances started sending me push notifications. This is just a dumb trend in my opinion. Just because you can does not mean you should.

If you don't like to play with gadgets, you don't even have appliances. I am still cooking my rice in a saucepan.

beep beep beep. They have alarms for that ! :) But nice fun project !

And keep-warm. Most of the reason I use a rice cooker is so I don’t need to monitor it or try very hard to time the finish right.

How about we don’t?

Haha, I read the headline and my brain went "I bet it's a Energy Monitoring Smart Plug on Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi". Honestly a simple automation with device trigger: smartplug "power changes" with below: X watts might have worked too if it only crosses in that direction once per cook. But it's nice that a fancy appliance monitoring add-on exists - some appliances probably have a few weird power cycles per cook.