DASH Mini Rice Cooker Steamer with Removable Nonstick Pot, Keep Warm Function & Recipe Guide, .5 Quart, for Soups, Stews, Grains & Oatmeal - Aqua

Dorm essential; a small rice cooker. This is VERY small however. If you have only one person, it's suitable but if you are dealing with two or more, a 5 cup minimum would be better. The size of this unit is compact enough to toss into a suitcase or store in small quarters.This is a simple rice cooker with a press-down button for turning it on, a keep-warm function and an automatic shutoff. It works by thermostat; as the temperature rises when the water has boiled off and been absorbed by the food, the temperature spike makes the spring contact drop back, and the heat shuts off. No "fuzzy logic" here. Simple operation.Because the unit is small, cooking things like porridge will mean it possibly boils over. I had to put a kitchen towel under it to cook one serving of steel cut oats (they foam up) and it was a bit messy on the lid. The instructions do warm about boiling over. If you're using this, I'd put a towel under it as a matter of course.Cooking:I did regular Japanese short grain rice, steel cut oats, mixed grain porridge and a "Dutch Baby" pancake. The recipe for the pancake is included in the booklet, which has a number of recipes. All of them came out ok; the rice was slightly more wet and less cooked thoroughly than in my regular, large fancy rice cooker but it was fine to eat. The porridge boiled over (as I mentioned) and the Dutch Baby was really good. It's a large recipe requiring several batches to be poured in and cooked for two cycles. I'd halve the recipe next time, but it was a nice little breakfast made with milk, egg, flour and sugar, with a dab of jam or some fresh fruit,powdered sugar or syrup for extrasThe unit comes with a booklet including recipes (useful), a paddle for scooping the rice, and a measuring cup. My cup was cracked (thin plastic) but I already had a standard measuring cup for rice. This cup was a bit on the thin side and didn't survive the packaging.Dash doesn't make a mid sized (6 cup) rice cooker, only a family sized large one, so if you have need of more food than single servings, I'd get a different brand model that can do 5-6 cups of rice, which will feed two or three easily. But for dorm cooking, single person, tiny kitchen or traveling and cooking say, because you need to be gluten-free while traveling, this is perfect and very compact.

I love rice, but have never mastered how to cook it in a pot the "normal" way. I've had multiple people show me how and tell me it's so easy to cook rice in a regular pot, but we clearly have different definitionns of "easy," or I just have some secret skill that makes me fail at cooking rice in a pot. I resorted to the boil-in-a-bag kind of rice because that was the only way I could get it cooked properly, without it burnt to the bottom and crunchy and the mushy in other spots.Then, enter this rice maker. I followed their instructions and filled their measuring cup with rice up to the line, added it to the pot with some salt, and then filled their measuring cup all the way with water, dumped it in, and pressed the "cook" button. (I did not rinse the rice; no one in my family does and I had no idea it was even a thing. Its never affected how my rice cooks, so I don't intend to start doing so either.I did expect it to take less time initially...not sure why), but when it did flip from "cook" to "warm" and I checked the rice, it was done perfectly. Nothing burned to the pan, no mushy spots, just fully cooked, delicious rice. I've followed the same procedure every time and gotten basically perfect rice every time. If you don't get to the pot right away, the rice will start to get a bit brown on the bottom and cook together a bit, but when you add butter and other food to the rice I've never noticed a burnt or bad taste; just that it's a bit more stuck together than usual.I have had a few occasions where it did start to boil over, and that's generally when I accidentally spilled water when adding it to the pot and guestimated how much I split and probably added more than it needed. Otherwise I've never had it boil over or make much of a mess at all, maybe beyond a few splatters... which is much less mess than I ever got making rice in the stove, where it would constant boil over, so I have no issues with the occasional splatter. It's cooking...there's sometimes a mess...that's just how it goes. Regardless of whether it boils over or not, it's super easy to clean; I just use a dishcloth and soapy water and any starch or other residue comes off quickly and easily. Again, far less time spent cleaning the cooker pot than I would spend cleaning an actual pot of rice, were I to attempt to do so, so I have no quarrels with that either. I just make sure to plug it in some place that isn't right next to something I don't want accidental rice water on (textbook, Alexa, phone, etc).I've should note I've only ever cooked rice in it despite owning it for years. Gluten free noodles take forever to cook on the stove in general and since I tend to make a big batch at once, using the Dash for noodles just hasn't made sense. And I don't eat oatmeal all that often, nor quinoa or other such things. Despite being basically a one function appliance for me, I'm perfectly happy with it because I can finally have good rice whenever I want, and not the stuff boiled in a bag. Also, I've used this in multiple places throughout the country, and have never had to change my regular procedure much, if at all. (Granted, I've never cooked rice at a super high altitude, so maybe that would require alterations to my process.)Aside from cooking rice perfectly, the Dash rice cooker just looks cute. Mine is red (to match my other kitchen appliances and decor/accent colors), and even when I had a microscopic kitchen the thing as hardly a concern because it's so small that it doesn't take much counterr space when using it, nor much space to store it. Though...once you buy the cute little Dash rice maker, you might end up with their little waffle maker and a few other Dash appliances, so storage space may eventually become a concern!If you're second guessing buying the Dash rice maker, I'd just go for it. It might take some experimentation to get enough water to cook rice but not boil over everywhere...but having tried to scrub boiled on stains and gunk from the stove from a "regular" pot of rice that boiled over, cleaning up after the Dash is still far easier and quicker.Plus it's basically set and forget; once you figure out the timing for the pot of rice to cook, it's easy enough to ask Alexa to tell you to check the rice in X minutes, and then you won't have to hover around waiting for the switch to flip over to "warm" (or nervously stare at the pot and hope it turns out okay!). You get 1-2 servings of delicious and perfectly cooked rice (depending on if your serving size is eating all the rice you cooked, or saving half of it) for very little effort and monitoring, and can focus on the rest of your meal...or Netflix (no judgement here!).