Keep-warm and quick-cook settings: The option to keep your rice warm for hours is useful if the machine finishes cooking before you’re done with the rest of your meal, or if you want to keep rice warm for someone coming home later. But we figure that if you really care about your rice, you’ll wait the extra 10 or 15 minutes it takes to churn out a delectable batch of grains. With many functions in one machine, it may at first seem complicated, but this tends to get easier with use. The 8-cup (cooked-rice) model was the smallest in our lineup, but we were attracted to its undeniably cute compact size, while the 20-cup (also cooked) version was similar in size to a standard Instant Pot. In addition, it sports modes for delayed cooking and brown rice—though our brown rice came out a little underdone.

There’s something satisfying about honing that skill, but, even with age and wisdom, the grains don’t turn out right every time.We tested one Panasonic model with fuzzy logic in 2018, and although it had 13 settings and cost about half as much as our top pick, it took an excruciatingly long time to cook white rice.

A good rice cooker should cook delicious, fluffy, and flavorful short- and medium-grain white rice every time. All the models we tested delivered on that intuitive simplicity with manuals that clearly outlined how to get started, including details on how to measure and wash rice, how much water to add to the cooking pot, which menu setting to use, and what buttons to push to start cooking. Note that most manufacturers use uncooked-rice cup measurements to identify the maximum capacity of their machines, but some, such as Instant Pot and Hamilton Beach, use cooked-rice measurements to indicate their models’ capacity.

The Neuro Fuzzy makes sublime sushi rice and is great at other varieties, even basmati, which is one of the hardest to get right in a machine. The NS-TSC10’s quick-cook setting is around 10 minutes faster than the Neuro Fuzzy’s, but regardless we prefer the normal cook settings, which make considerably better-quality rice.

Apple sauce: Just cut up the fruit, add a bit of juice and sugar (if needed), and close the lid to make small-batch apple or other fruit sauces.The intense pressure that builds from trapped steam inside a pressure-cooker pot causes the water’s boiling point to rise, and at the higher temperature, the rice cooks faster.