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If rice is a regular accompaniment to your dinner, you probably know the name Zojirushi. The Japanese appliance brand is synonymous with intelligent, high-quality rice cookers that offer multiple settings, and a rash of technologies and sensors inside them that work in service of perfecting the batch of rice. Zojirushis are a perennial favorite in our rice cooker product tests, and many of us on staff can attest to their longevity, having lived with the machines for years.
Last year the brand released its latest, most high-tech rice cooker: the Zojirushi NW-JEC10/18 (Zojirushi: Great at making rice cookers, not so good at naming products). This rice cooker utilizes artificial intelligence in a way no other rice cooker has done before; it also happens to be the brand’s most expensive model, with a hefty price tag of $750, though you can find it on sale from time to time.
If there’s anything I’ve learned from testing rice cookers over the years, it’s that there are diminishing returns to advancements in rice cooker technology. By most standards, companies like Zojirushi, Cuckoo, and Tiger have already figured out how to make a consistently good bowl of rice. In our blind tastings, the addition of pressure or induction cooking technology in a rice cooker has been hard to notice for the average person eating a standard bowl of white rice. The advantages of pressure cooking and induction heating are slightly more apparent in brown rice, porridge, and other settings, but not in a way that can’t be improved by user trial and error and adjusting water-to-grain ratios on your own.
So at what point do these features push past the point of reasonably helpful and veer into the realm of superfluous and expensive engineering? Zojirushi’s newest rice cooker certainly raises this question. Here’s how I answer it.
How the Zojirushi rice cooker works
The Zojirushi NW-JEC10/18 has all the defining features of a top-shelf rice cooker. It boasts fuzzy logic (tech that can automatically make adjustments to temperature or cook time to ensure all the water gets absorbed or evaporated), induction-heating, pressure-cooking, and programmed settings for several rice varieties and preparation styles, including white, brown, GABA brown, jasmine, multigrain, porridge, and more. What makes this particular rice cooker unique is a setting called My Rice.
The My Rice setting, which is designed to work with short-grain white rice, adjusts the cook settings to match your desired textural preferences for a bowl of rice. It sounds like magic, but the way it works is actually not that mysterious or complex. When you select the setting, the machine starts by asking you for feedback about the previous bowl of rice. First you’re asked to assess the firmness of the last batch, whether it was “not enough (too soft),” “ok,” or “too much (too firm).” It gives you the same question about the last batch’s stickiness. The rice cooker takes that information on board and makes the necessary adjustments to change the firmness and stickiness in the directions you want, then it gets to cooking.
At first I was curious if you could trick the rice cooker into making batches of rice on the extreme ends of firmness and stickiness, but according to the manual there are actually only 49 different possible variations on cooking method for the My Rice setting.
After using it over the course of a year, I found that the My Rice setting does actually work. I noticed variations in texture between batches of rice I prepared, and the machine really did seem to respond and adjust to the feedback.
However, this rice cooker is already souped-up with all the top-of-the-line rice cooker technology, and it makes spectacular rice without my input. On each setting, the results were—to my standards, at least—exceptional. That’s high praise, but remember, we are talking about a $750 rice cooker here.
My one gripe, if you can call it that, is the amount of time it could take to reach your perfect rice., Instead of requiring the user to make gradual adjustments with each batch of rice, it seems faster and simpler to allow him to more freely select where along this rice preference grid he wants his batch to be. This would allow the user more freedom in making rice of different textures and consistencies as he goes. If there are only 49 possible permutations, why have us play this little guessing game and not just let us pick a firmness and stickiness level between 1–7?
Who is Zojirushi’s $750 rice cooker for?
At the risk of repeating myself too much: You don’t need an expensive rice cooker to cook good rice. Millions of people across the world (and in professional kitchens) make do just fine with a pot on a stove or a simple one button machine. However, multifunctional rice cookers make perfectly-cooked rice more convenient and produce it more consistently.
This really isn’t a rice cooker for someone who has never used a rice cooker or is just looking to begin using one. This rice cooker is really for someone who has been on a dogged life-long journey on the search for a bowl of rice that is exactly to their own personal preferences, or it’s for someone who likes rice so firm or delicate and soft it’s hard to reproduce with lesser programmable rice cookers. While these intelligent machines are designed to produce a certain rice ideal, ultimately rice texture is a subjective preference that can vary from person to person. This has certainly been evident in our own blind taste-testings for our best rice cooker tests, in which we regularly encounter contradictory feedback among our taste testers.
If you aren’t terribly particular about your rice, I’d say opt for any of the other more affordable Zojirushi models out there; here’s our guide to them if you want more specifics. However, if you’ve been continually dissatisfied by the bowls of rice put before you, maybe (just maybe) this machine might be the thing that finally satisfies you.
