I didn’t think I needed the KitchenAid Rice and Grain Cooker. It seemed superfluous to my kitchen, given that I already own a fleet of Zojirushi rice cookers in the five- and ten-cup sizes, plus a commercial 20-cup one for really big parties. But in integrating more quinoa and beans into my diet over the past two years, I have come to accept that I suck at making those. I forget to soak my beans; I overcook or undercook quinoa. I have to baby these grains and pulses. I’d eat more of them if they were less challenging for me to make. And thanks to the KitchenAid Cooker, now they are.
The Rice and Grain Cooker is a sizable appliance, taking up about the same amount of space as my ten-cup Zojirushi rice cooker or a KitchenAid stand mixer. It’s sleeker looking than any rice cooker I’ve had, primarily matte black with a stainless-steel lid and a clear water tank. There’s a small touchscreen that swooshes with images of water when you’re not clicking through its 21 preset options (for various grains and beans) and its prompts.
The water tank reminds me of a Nespresso machine’s, but the KitchenAid cooker is overall more high tech than any Nespresso machine I’ve owned. With both machines, you never have to think about the water level when you’re using them because they both dispense exactly the correct amount needed.
More importantly, the KitchenAid cooker does the additional work of measuring your grains or legumes for cooking. Once you add the estimated amount you want to cook, the cooker displays the weight. You then use the touchscreen to identify what they are and whether they’re rinsed or not, then the machine dispenses the correct amount of water to cook them with. If you’ve overfilled it (beyond the eight cups of cooked grain capacity), it beeps disapprovingly and tells you how much to remove. It will also beep happily when it has finished cooking (you can opt to turn off the beeping in settings) and automatically sets itself on a keep-warm function.
The cooker comes with a steamer basket that sits inside the pot, above the grains that are cooking, so you can also steam vegetables, eggs, tofu, or whatever you desire. (I also steam food in my rice cookers while my rice is cooking, but I usually do so with a ceramic bowl that sits on top of the rice, and I usually burn myself when extricating it.) All of its components are dishwasher safe.
If you’re using dry beans, you can set its timer on the soak function. If you’re cooking anything in a broth other than water, you can tell the machine that you’re adding your own liquid and not to dispense water from the tank. You can also set it on a delay, so you can wake up to — or come home to — fresh cooked rice or beans.
My first test in using the cooker was making long-grain jasmine brown rice on its regular setting, which came out perfectly cooked. Risotto was less successful — instead of distinct, al dente grains, I ended up with uniformly cooked-through arborio rice. It was absolute magic with quinoa, however. I’ve now made five pots of quinoa in the cooker, and each has turned out fluffy. I also haven’t soaked a bean independently of the cooker since it has entered my life, and every batch of beans has come out at the ideal level of doneness, nary an overcooked, broken bean in sight. With some experimentation, I expect to find many more uses for the cooker: In fact, I just cooked some diced potatoes using the kidney-bean setting.
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