Did you know you can use your rice cooker to make an entire meal in just one pot? Yes, it’s true. Here are all my favorite Asian-inspired rice cooker recipes. Enjoy flavorful dishes cooked up in a single pot with very little hands-on cooking time needed. Simply prep up your ingredients, put them in your rice cooker, and let it cook!
Whether your cooking for one or a family the rice cooker makes a great kitchen tool to have on hand. It’s great to use for my favorite One-Pot Chinese Chicken and Rice and this Beef and Rice Recipe too!
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Benefits of Using a Rice Cooker to Cook Meals
- One Pot Cooking: Using one pot to cook an entire meal means less dishes to cleanup!
- More Than Just For Rice: If you’re on the fence about spending the money on another kitchen appliance, you can do much more with your rice cooker than just cook rice.
- No Need to Turn on the Stove: A great option in the summer when you simply don’t want to heat up the kitchen.
- Even Cooking: Rice on the stove is difficult because you can’t always control the level and evenness of the heat on the bottom of the pot. A rice cooker solves this dilemma 100% making perfectly cooked rice each and every time.
What is a Rice Cooker?
A rice cooker is an electric kitchen appliance that was created to help you cook rice perfectly each and every time. It ensures that the correct rice to water ratio is used as well as cooking it more evenly thanks to the heating mechanism it contains.
What I love about the rice cooker other than the fact that I can cook rice completely hands-off is that it also works great to cook an entire meal.
I use the Zojirushi rice cooker (pictures above) and it works great! I bought it at Costco 8 years ago and it’s still reliable to this day. The rice always comes out delicious! You can also buy this brand of rice cooker on Amazon.
Best One-Pot Rice Cooker Recipes
Here are all of my favorite one-pot dishes to cook using a rice cooker. Each of these dishes is Asian-inspired and adapted from my own Chinese heritage as well as using fusions of Korean, Thai and Japanese cuisine. The dishes are meant to be a full meal cooked up all in one pot!
Tips for Cooking in a Rice Cooker
- Prepping the Meat. It’s always helpful to cut the chicken into smaller pieces and mix it into the rice prior to cooking in order to facilitate even cooking.
- Choosing the Right Rice. You can cook any variety of rice in a rice cooker but I prefer Jasmine or sushi rice for these recipes. Jasmine rice results in a fluffier texture while sushi rice is a bit more sticky.
- Rinsing Your Rice. Be sure when you’ve rinsed rice before adding it to the rice cooker that you drain it well. This will ensure you have the right ratio of water to rice.
- Measure Correctly. Adding the right proportions of rice, meat, and sauce ratio to your rice cooker is key to ensuring the rice is not soggy and turns out cooked well.
- Using Brown Rice. It is possible to use brown rice in a rice cooker but these recipes haven’t been tested with it. In most instances brown rice requires additional liquid to cook properly. You will need to do a bit of testing to determine how much more liquid is needed.
Rice Cooker FAQs
Yes, most definitely! Like a slow cooker or pressure cooker a rice cooker can also be used to cook chicken and other meats. It’s all about the timing. For me, I’ve found that the chicken actually cooks faster and ends up juicier! In all these recipes the dish is cooked for the amount of time it takes for the meat to cook completely. It’s always a good idea to check the temperature of your chicken with a thermometer and make sure it’s at 165 degrees Fahrenheit (74 degrees Celcius) before serving.
This is always a bit tricky and will really depend on the size of your rice cooker. In most cases I’ve noticed that adding a lot of ingredients causes uneven cooking of the rice. This means it’s important that you avoid overfilling your rice cooker especially when wanting to make more than one recipe at a time.
My recipes are all created using standard measuring cups rather than what comes with a rice cooker. This alleviates any issues caused if the rice cooker’s measures vary from brand to brand.
Your rice cooker can do so much more than simply cook rice for meals. As you can see it works great to cook up a wide variety of dishes with less work and very little cleanup!
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