Introducing the Rice Cooker of My Dreams

With over a year of testing and refining, the folks at Our Place and I finally built a grain cooker that can rice to the occasion.

Growing up in a Japanese household, rice was a daily staple, just as it is for my own family now. It's a rare morning when my four-year-old Wombat doesn't request tamago kake gohan (Japanese rice and egg bowls) for breakfast, which means that having hot, fresh rice that's ready-to-go can be a godsend.

Over the years I’ve used just about every kind of rice cooker you can imagine. The simple one-button models are easy and intuitive, but the cost of that simplicity is inconsistency: The rice comes out perfect in the middle, but a little mushy up top and slightly scorched on the bottom. The more advanced machines can make excellent rice, but they're often overly complicated or built with materials I'd rather avoid. For a long time, it felt like I had to choose between simplicity and performance. That's why the folks at Our Place and I have been working together on a rice cooker for over a year, designed to bridge that gap, and do so in style.

We wanted a rice cooker that is genuinely easy to use, but produces rice that is light, fluffy, and evenly cooked from top to bottom, with a size that is just right. With a great engineering team, thoughtful design, and over a year of testing and refining, we got there. (And I did the blind taste tests to make sure!)

I am so proud to introduce a brand new collaboration to the Kenji López-Alt Shop: The Our Place x Kenji López-Alt rice cooker. (Super Frienjis and Cookbook Club members even get a little early access discount code.)

If you’re interested, you can order from this link.

Grain Expectations

One of the things I cared about most during development was keeping the interface intuitive. My rice cooker is designed with just a few buttons that you don't really have to think about. It handles white rice, brown rice, and a range of other grains like jasmine, basmati, quinoa, farro, or oats. It also works well for simple one-pot meals—arroz con pollo, caramel apple bread pudding, even a frittata—without turning into a gadget that requires a manual every time you use it.

It also has a delay timer if you want your grains hot and ready at a specific time, as well as an automatic "keep hot" setting that will hold food at a safe serving temperature for up to 24 hours. On busy school days, I love that I can start a pot of rice cooking before bedtime, have it hot and ready for breakfast, and leave it in the pot hot all day to serve again at dinner.

There were also a couple of less obvious priorities that ended up shaping the final product:

• It's made of non-toxic materials. It’s surprisingly difficult to find a rice cooker with a nonstick interior that isn’t built around traditional coatings, this one uses a ceramic nonstick surface made without PFAS, PTFE, or PFOA .

• It looks great on the counter. Most rice cookers are designed to be stored away, but I wanted something that could live on the counter without looking like an afterthought (and something with a color and design scheme that would match my own Wonder Oven Pro).

• It's extremely well-insulated. The walls of this rice cooker are significantly thicker than a standard rice cooker, which means that it heats more evenly and hold its temperature more efficiently, and ensures that any little hands don't accidentally get burned.

• It's got great tactile buttons. This may seem like a small thing, but I love having nice clicky buttons on my appliances that give you feedback when you push them. Touch screen controls work great on ATMs and smartphones, but please, keep them out of my kitchen.

• The capacity is designed for you. We took extensive surveys to arrive at the optimal size for typical home cooks. Six cups of cooked grains is big enough to feed a family, but not so large that it feels like a dedicated single-purpose appliance taking up valuable counter space.

• It's easy to maintain. The bowl, the inner lid, and the sealing gasket are completely removable and dishwasher safe, making cleanup a snap.

Perhaps its most important feature is in what you can't see: It uses fuzzy logic technology to ensure perfect cooking every time.

Smarter Than Your Average Pot

What exactly is fuzzy logic? It's a branch of mathematics and engineering developed in the 1960s, designed to help computers make decisions more like humans.

See, computer chips are digital. That is, they think in terms of true or false, ones or zeros. A basic rice cooker turns on a heating element and runs until its single sensor detects that the water has been absorbed. It then switches off entirely. It's on or off, hot or cold.

Humans, on the other hand, are analog. It's not just hot or cold, we think on a spectrum. Very hot or sort of cold, frigid or lukewarm. So when a very experienced cook is making a pot of rice on the stovetop, they can fine tune the stove settings based on cues they're getting from the pot, gently reducing it once the water boils, for instance, or shutting it off towards the end to allow the rice to steam on its own.

Using fuzzy logic, our new rice cooker thinks and cooks like a human does. In fact, I'd argue that it cooks even better than a human. With its multiple sensors taking continuous readings, the Our Place rice cooker knows exactly what's going on inside the pot at all times, adjusting the heating element in real-time to ensure that the rice cooks perfectly.

It’s like the Terminator of kitchen tools: single-minded, relentless, and impossible to distract. It will not stop until your grains are perfectly cooked.

The Cooker I Rely On

It's been a long process, but after going through dozens of iterations (I have a full-on museum of not-good-enough rice cookers in storage) I finally have the finished cooker in my kitchen, and use it virtually every day. It's the kind of tool that looks great on the countertop, but it mostly fades into the background because I never have to think about it. It just does its job.

If you’re interested, you can order from this link.

And stay tuned for a few recipes designed to be cooked directly in a rice cooker (the recipes are designed specifically in the Our Place cooker, but should work reasonably well in other rice cookers, so long as they are a similar size).