This Ingenious Rice Cooker Makes It Almost Impossible to Screw Up Rice
Dave Gershgorn is a writer covering monitors, laptops, and tablets. He is a certified display calibrator through the Imaging Science Foundation.
On any given weeknight, the Zojirushi Neuro Fuzzy Rice Cooker & Warmer NS-ZCC10 is all I need for a dinner plan. I wash some rice, fill water to the appropriate line, and then I have a 40-minute timer to dig in the fridge and figure out what goes on top.
But the luxury of a $200 rice cooker isn’t just that it makes rice for you—it reliably makes restaurant-quality rice, the kind I was never able to achieve in a pot. So even if my tofu stir-fry is just okay, at least everyone I’m feeding knows we’ll have great rice.
Our pick
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. Although this model is a little slow, it’s the most all-around excellent and foolproof cooker we tested.
It makes really great rice with no effort
For years as a home cook, I contended with rice rather than cooked with it. I’d follow all the instructions, and my rice would still turn out a bit mushier, clumpier, or stickier than I wanted. It wasn’t really a problem I thought I’d be writing about on the internet until I bought and started using the Neuro Fuzzy. I don’t know why I bought it, and at this point it doesn’t matter, because the personal joy I have experienced by having superior, restaurant-quality rice available at any time is just too great not to share.
The Neuro Fuzzy’s strength is its simplicity. You can rinse anywhere from 1 to 5.5 cups of rice in the rice cooker’s bowl, add fresh water up to the appropriate line, drop the bowl into the cooker, close the lid, and press Cook. It will sing you a little song, which many have come to love and adore, and it’s finished in about 40 minutes.
The Neuro Fuzzy’s name is related to how it’s able to make such incredible rice. It uses a mathematical term called “fuzzy logic" to change its temperature and cooking time as the rice is being made rather than relying on the rice’s temperature being above boiling to turn the machine off, like traditional rice cookers. Fuzzy logic is especially good at accounting for human error, like adding too much water. Our kitchen team’s tests actually showed that the Neuro Fuzzy is capable of turning out decent rice even if you add nearly double the amount of water. The Neuro Fuzzy doesn’t give you an estimated cook time when you start the machine, but about 10 to 12 minutes before it’s finished, it will show a countdown clock.
And when the Neuro Fuzzy is done, the rice that it makes is sublime, with well-defined grains that are never mushy or soggy. I typically make long-grain white rice like jasmine and basmati, and I prefer the Softer setting, which takes a few minutes longer but produces a more tender rice, as the name implies. But the Neuro Fuzzy can handle all kinds of grains. When our kitchen team tested rice cookers, the Neuro Fuzzy was the most versatile, making great-tasting sushi rice, brown rice, and long-grain rice.
Outside the kitchen team, the Neuro Fuzzy is also loved by other Wirecutter staffers. “Our Neuro Fuzzy makes wonderful rice, better than a restaurant,” says Joel Santo Domingo, a senior staff writer on the PC and networking team. He had previously used a cheaper Zojirushi rice cooker but prefers the softer grains from the Neuro Fuzzy.
It’s a flexible kitchen appliance
A steaming bowl of rice is a cornerstone of cooking in cultures across the world, and having it at the push of a button has allowed me to focus on expanding the kinds of food I make. Rice can be the base of a quick and simple stir-fry, but I’ve also been consistently making dishes where good rice is a centerpiece, like Thai curries, mapo tofu, and katsu curries. I also just eat rice on its own sometimes, seasoned with a bit of tamari and furikake. The rice is that good.
The Neuro Fuzzy can also cook grain-based porridges or soups, another advantage over simpler rice cookers. The steps are the same as for rice; just add more water or stock and other ingredients as desired. Recently I added rice, chicken stock, chopped carrots, dill, and green onions to the Neuro Fuzzy and set it to the Porridge setting. I ended up with a delicious result that I could eat as a thicker congee or water down into a chicken rice soup.
It’s an easy wash
The rice cooker’s bowl has a nonstick coating, and I’ve never met any residue that the soft side of a sponge couldn’t wipe off. If you’re cooking with meat, vegetables, or stock in the rice cooker, you should also clean the inside of the lid and the air vent.
It’s a little slow, but it’s worth the wait
The Neuro Fuzzy takes a little longer to cook rice than the other picks in our rice cooker guide. It takes about 45 minutes to make white rice, while our upgrade pick, the Cuckoo CRP-P1009S, takes about 30 minutes. But when you pop open the lid and the steam clears, you’ll find perfect rice every time.
The Neuro Fuzzy also has a quick-cook setting, which takes less than 30 minutes and produces very similar results, if not a little on the side of al dente. This is still longer than making rice on the stove, but the ease and consistency are such a boon.
This article was edited by Marilyn Ong, Rachelle Bergstein, and Catherine Kast.
