Rice Cooker

Need to find a new rice cooker. I have a small 3 cups one which works but always has a crust on the bottom of the pot, which I attribute to it being too hot. No matter what I've done, more water, less rice, it always has that crusty layer which the old one didn't have.

Course the trick is the 'new' one is like 15 bucks. Any of the fancier ones that I've seen is like much more expensive. The cheapest I've seen is the Panasonic SRYB05P which goes for 90 here. The next is the Sanyo 5 cup ECJF50S which goes for around 95 in various places. There is the ECJS35K which is a 3 cup model but appears to be recent, and goes for more than the 5 cup model. It's most interesting factor is that it makes bread as well. Maybe I should wait for prices to drop a little.

One aspect that I like about the Sanyo models is that they have a very thick rice pot, which should cook the rice more evenly.

There are sites that have rice cooker specific recipes, practically allowing you to have one pot meals. With the fancier rice cookers, you can cook brown rice, porridge etc.

One negative aspect is that you cannot usually clean all of the machine easily such as the outer lid. Can't have everything!