![]() ![]() In fact, one iconic Japanese company had an early stumble due to bad rice. And people are very, very picky about how their rice should be.” Other ideal elements include a sticky texture, separate grains, and a lot of moisture: all hard to obtain, says Itoh, “without any automated way to do it. “With Japanese rice, what you’re looking for is for some of the starch to almost convert to sugar so that it tastes rather sweet,” explains Itoh. ![]() ![]() But rice cookers for the home were still years away, and there was a high bar to clear. In the 1930s, the Japanese military deployed a multi-cooker for the field. The dawn of the rice cooker, Itoh notes, started in 1923 when Mitsubishi Electric released a simple industrial model. (A contemporary restaurant in Nara, Japan, offers a kamado-cooking experience that starts with 15 minutes of pumping a bellows to fan the flames.) For centuries, Japanese cooks prepared rice upon kamado stoves. “And that, with a wood-burning stove, is very difficult.” Each day, Japanese women rose at dawn and labored for several sweaty hours to make rice. Cooking rice this way, says columnist and food writer Makiko Itoh, takes heat modulation: high heat until the water and rice boils, then low heat, then high heat again. In fact, it took decades of inventive leaps, undertaken by some of the biggest names in Japanese technology.įor centuries, most Japanese cooks made rice with a kamado, a box-shaped range topped with a heavy iron pot. But creating an automatic rice cooker was not so easy. So long as you add water and rice in the right proportions, it’s nearly impossible to mess up, as the machines stop cooking at exactly the right point for toothsome rice. The automatic rice cooker is a mid-century Japanese invention that made a Sisyphean culinary labor as easy as measuring out grain and water and pressing a button. “World War Two is over, use technology!” he admonished viewers in a follow-up on his Instagram. In a recent viral video, Malaysian comedian Nigel Ng reacted dramatically to a BBC personality cooking rice with a saucepan rather than using a rice cooker. But for others, making rice is as easy as pressing a button. Without a keen sense of timing, you end up with undercooked grains. Add too much water and you end up with porridge. Cooking rice on a stovetop can be fraught. ![]()
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