

It was an uphill struggle because with Japanese rice some starch has to be converted to sugar so that it has a sweet taste with a sticky texture, separate grains and the correct moisture. About 10 years later the Japanese even deployed a multi cooker in the war but rice cookers for the household were still decades away. A company called Mitsubishi Electric released a very basic industrial model. The birth of the rice cooker happened around the year 1923. This often involved waking at dawn and bellowing the flames for 15 minutes before they could even think about getting the rice cooking.

Every day, Japanese women would spend hours sweating over the Kamado to make rice. A careful combination of heat and less heat was used to cook the rice but doing this with a wood fire was an almost impossible task. This traditional method of rice cooking was incredibly tricky. This is a box shaped cooker range topped with a heavy cast iron pot. The ancient way of cooking rice in Japan was to use a Kamado. It took determination and some significant inventive leaps by even the biggest of names in Japanese technology. However, the creation of these wonderous kitchen appliances was not easy. They can be super smart too and are almost impossible to mess things up. The ‘automatic rice cooker’ is a mid 20th century invention that made the culinary labour intensive task of hovering over a stove as easy as measuring rice and water in a rice cooker and pressing a button. “World War Two is over, use technology!” he admonished viewers in a follow-up on his Instagram. A recent viral video by Malaysian comedian Nigel Ng shows him reacting dramatically to a BBC personality cooking rice with a saucepan rather than using a rice cooker. If you don’t time or measure things correctly you can end up with mush or a complete mess of an oven top. Let’s face it, cooking on a stove can be very troublesome. Have you ever wondered how the idea of the electric rice cooker began? In this article we dig deep into this exact topic – it’s absolutely fascinating if you like rice and enjoy the benefits of using electric rice cookers.
