[maxglute]

Rice is really easy to master, especially small portions like 1-2 cups of rice.

Convenience of rice cooker life is if you have to feed family of 4+ and don't want to fuss or worry about water boiling over because you forget to check stove. Throwing in 4-5 cups of rice, and have keep warm feature preserve rice for 3-4 days. Extra perk with fancy induction rice cookers which gives bump in rice taste but takes 3x more time to cook - 50-60 minutes, which isn't worth the effort for small portions, but worth a little planning if you're doing multipe days worth. Slightly high end models are solid $300-400 appliance (msrp in JP) investment, steep if you're paying 500+ elsewhere. Super high end 800+ hard to justify. Especially when there's instant pot. But instant pot fussy with measuring. Beauty of dedicated rice cookers is you just dump in bunch of rice and eyeball water and it'll generally manage very consistent results. Easily worth the convenience if you're eating rice every day.

Edit: ultimate lazy / easy rice for small portions is a $20 microwave rice cooker with dialed in settings. Joseph Joseph has one that's very easy to clean - there's drain basket for cleaning rice, it's plastic so don't have to worry about accidental sticky bottom, and post cooking clean up takes a minute. Paired with my (lol) $700 inverter microwave, makes very solid cup rice in 13 minutes.

[harshreality]

Then again, a rice cooker with metal or ceramic-coated surface doesn't infuse your grains with microplastics.

[maxglute]

Purely convenience at expense of personal health. I don't feed others plastic cooked rice because it freaks people out.

Hario (HARIO XRCN-2-B) has a $7 glass microwave rice pot in JP . Still has some plastic components that do not make contact with the food. But it's like $60 to import to NA. There's also ceramic versions which I've never tested.

[ricardobeat]

Keep warm for 3-4 days? That’s insane. Rice stored in the fridge starts to go bad after three days. Not to mention you’d end up with a dry block of rice. Have you actually done this?

They recommend the “keep warm” feature is used for no longer than 4-12 hours. You’re exposing yourself to serious food poisoning going longer than that, especially if your cooker isnt very good at keeping the entire bowl at >60C.

[phil21]

The rice cookers are very good at keeping things at a safe temp. The good ones will have power failure detection.

I regularly make a (work) weeks worth of rice on Sunday night and eat through it until Thursday or Friday or so. Been doing this for well over a decade so far.

The first two days you probably can't tell the difference unless you are a rice snob. After that the taste tends to suffer a bit, but infinitely better than reheating rice from the fridge.

[peteforde]

Keep in mind that the only good way to make good fried rice is to start with yesterday's rice from the fridge.