The rice cookers I tested fell into three loose categories: small, affordable devices, midrange multicookers and specialized, high-end rice cookers.
Each mini rice cooker I tested, including the Imusa 3-cup, the Dash mini 2-cup rice cooker, and the Black & Decker 3-cup rice cooker offered decent, small servings of white rice, although the Dash took a painfully long 35 minutes just to cook just 1 cup of white. All of them struggled with brown rice and mixed rice.
The slightly larger 6-cup Oster (our budget pick) and the Zojirushi rice makers performed nearly identically, making perfect pots of white rice in 19 and 20 minutes respectively and very good brown rice — albeit perhaps just slightly underdone — in a lightning-fast 22 minutes. I would gleefully recommend either one as a solid space-saving rice cooker option. While the Zojirushi does seem slightly more solidly built, it’s…
