Why We Finally Bought a Rice Cooker

Sometimes the best helpful finds aren’t complicated.

They’re just things that make everyday life a little easier.

We eat quite a bit of rice in our house. Since I’ve been following a low-sodium diet, rice has become an easy base for a lot of the meals we make at home.

Plain rice is naturally very low in sodium as long as you’re not adding salt, salty broth, or other high-sodium ingredients while cooking it.

There’s just one problem.

You still have to cook it.

Making rice on the stove certainly isn’t difficult, but you have to watch it, get the water-to-rice ratio right, make sure it doesn’t overcook, and hopefully end up with rice that’s neither crunchy nor mushy.

Eventually we decided there had to be an easier way.

So we bought a rice cooker.

And I’m glad we did.

Set It and Forget It

The biggest reason we bought a rice cooker was convenience.

Put in the rice and water, turn it on, and let the machine take care of the rest.

There’s no standing over the stove or wondering whether I should turn the heat down.

Set it and forget it.

Once the rice is finished, our cooker automatically switches to a keep-warm mode. That means we don’t have to perfectly coordinate the rice with everything else we’re cooking for dinner.

That may seem like a small thing, but when you’re preparing several things at once, having one less pot to worry about is pretty nice.

The Rice Comes Out Right

This might be my favorite part.

The rice comes out consistently good.

I’ve made plenty of rice on the stove that was still a little hard when dinner was ready. I’ve also gone the other direction and cooked it too long.

With the rice cooker, there’s much less guesswork.

Put everything in, start it, and when it’s finished, we have rice ready for dinner.

Brown Rice, White Rice and Carbohydrates

We make both white and brown rice.

I’ve been using brown rice quite a bit because it provides more fiber than white rice. But that doesn’t mean we’ve eliminated white rice. We still enjoy both depending on what we’re making.

For me, the bigger consideration is portion size.

Rice may fit nicely into my low-sodium diet, but it still contains a significant amount of carbohydrates. Because I also have diabetes, I have to pay attention to how much rice I put on my plate.

That’s an important distinction I’ve learned along the way:

Low sodium doesn’t automatically mean something is unlimited.

A food can work very well for one part of my diet while still requiring some thought because of another health condition.

So I enjoy my rice.

I just don’t fill half my plate with it.

Great for the Meals We Make at Home

Rice has become the base for quite a few meals around here.

The steak and shrimp rice bowls I recently mentioned in my Daily Journal are a perfect example. We can control the seasoning on the steak, choose our vegetables, pay attention to the sodium in the shrimp, and serve everything over a measured portion of rice.

I’ll be sharing my version of that recipe on the site soon.

That’s the kind of cooking I’ve been trying to embrace.

Instead of focusing entirely on foods I can’t have anymore, I’m finding meals we enjoy and figuring out how to make them work for me.

The rice cooker simply makes that easier.

It Doesn’t Take Over the Kitchen

Another thing I like about rice cookers is that you don’t need a giant appliance.

They come in several different capacities, so you can choose one based on how much rice you normally make.

We went with a medium-sized model, which gives us enough capacity without taking up a ridiculous amount of counter or cabinet space.

If kitchen storage is limited, that’s worth considering.

Cleanup Takes Almost No Time

Convenience doesn’t mean much to me if an appliance takes forever to clean.

Fortunately, ours doesn’t.

The cooking pot has a nonstick interior, so cleanup is extremely easy. Once we’re finished, it takes very little time to clean the pot and have it ready for the next meal.

Simple to use.

Simple to clean.

And consistently good rice.

That’s pretty much what I wanted.

❤️ Greg’s Take

Do you absolutely need a rice cooker?

Of course not.

You can make perfectly good rice on the stove.

But that’s not really why I bought one.

I bought it because it makes life easier.

Living with chronic illness has made me appreciate things that save a little time and effort. If an appliance can take one job off my plate while we’re making dinner, that’s valuable to me.

I can put the rice on, walk away, and concentrate on preparing everything else—or just sit down until I need to do something again.

When dinner is ready, the rice is ready.

And it’s cooked right.

Sometimes a Helpful Find doesn’t have to change your life.

Sometimes it just has to make one little part of it easier.

The Rice Cooker I Use

If you’d like to see the rice cooker we purchased, you can find it here:

See the rice cooker I use on Amazon

There are different sizes available, so I’d choose the capacity that makes sense for the amount of rice you normally prepare rather than automatically buying the largest one.

Affiliate Disclosure: This post contains an affiliate link. If you purchase something through my link, I may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. I only share products that I personally use or believe may be helpful.

Health Disclaimer: I’m sharing my personal experience and how rice fits into my own eating plan. This is not medical or nutritional advice. Rice is a carbohydrate-containing food and can affect blood glucose. If you have diabetes or another condition requiring dietary management, work with your healthcare provider or dietitian to determine the types and portions of foods that are appropriate for you. Always check nutrition labels and ingredients, particularly on seasoned or prepared rice products.