wildunicornherd:

Aliette de Bodard, who’s been linked here before, has a guest post on Futurismic about the Rice Cooker of the Future:

This particular one comes with all the bells and whistles: the pot is non-stick (which comes in handy to wash off the rice), it has several modes including porridge (congee/zhou), soup, and several different types of rice (white, sushi, glutinous, and brown). And it has a timer.

And (this is the part that appeals to my inner geek), it has artificial intelligence.

Specifically, what the makers call Fuzzy Logics, which allow it to handle more complicated scenarios than the one where the user has put in the correct amount of rice and the correct amount of water. As this article has it, the cooker is starting to think like a real cook, adapting its behaviour to what’s happening inside the machine. Typically, if the rice gets dry too fast, it’ll adjust the temperature downwards; if there’s too much water, it’ll boil it away, etc.

When the robots rise up and enslave us all, the rice will be perfect.

P. S. Actually I am linking this more for her description of European rice-making: “flinging a few handfuls of it into a large pot of boiling water”. D: Until now I assumed there were two ways of making rice: 1) rice cooker, 2) basically the same way, but in a pot, adjusting the temperature yourself. Never in my life had I imagined such a culinary perversion as cooking rice like frozen peas.

P. P. S. My friend X. confirms that there exists mushy “white people’s rice”. I thought I was brought up as “assimilated” as you could get, but clearly there exist realms of whiteness I am not privy to, and frankly I don’t think I’m missing much.

zuky:

I’ve eaten White People’s Rice. I won’t subject you to the horrible, horrible details, but here’s the brief: long-grained, all the starches washed out, bland but slathered with butter and salt. I’ve also eaten rice cooked up by white people which was delicious, even transcendent, so that’s out there too. Like paella and risotto. Still, I’m obviously pretty partial to the steamed rice and thin rice porridge I grew up eating, for me they’re the most comforting.

I got a fuzzy logic rice cooker as the first item in my bachelor pad kitchen when I moved to New York in 1992. The start button with the red light was actually labeled “Fuzzy Start”, which always cracked me up because the machine is kinda telling you, “Okay you ‘started’ me but this is no primitive binary on/off start trapped in the illusory confusion of duality, this is a motherfucking fuzzy start, so I’m kinda starting at my own pace, maybe I’ve started, maybe I haven’t, dig?”

It was an extravagant purchase, but you gotta understand the importance of proper rice to a Chinese guy like me. Nothing else in your life can possibly go well if you don’t have good fuel, which starts with rice. Once you’ve got a rice cooker you can trust, you can forget about it and focus on other parts of dinner and life. It was a good purchase: that rice cooker steamed away on the kitchen counter for 17 years. I finally retired it from a long, productive tour of duty last year, when I moved. I found a replacement a couple weeks ago at the Asian market, which is steaming away as I type this out.

i don’t really know anything about rice.  i should investigate further.