The Ultimate Rice Cooker Cookbook : 250 No-Fail Recipes for Pilafs, Risottos, Polenta, Chilis, Soups, Porridges, Puddings and More, from Start to Finish in Your Rice Cooker

I bought this book looking to expand my range of recipes for my rice cooker. What I got was a book that did nothing to excite my palate. The recipes mainly seemed to focus on Asian cuisine. I hate to tell them but rice is consumed in other parts of the world. Beside that the actual typeset of the book makes it very hard to read. The paper is an off white on which they used a grey ink for the main text with the highlighted portions in a pale orange. If I even attempt to make any of these recipes I will be surprised.

Good, interesting recipes to experiment with in my new Sanyo Rice Cooker. But, how am I supposed to keep the page flat while I follow them? My third arm is very slow in evolving. Shouldn't cook books be spiral-bound or in binders? This is a major problem. I don't think a brick (to hold the pages apart) should be a part of the cooking process. Now, I'm going to have to buy one of those plexiglass holders for the book.

The cooker and book are in excellent condition with many delicious sounding recipes. A friend of mine sot the same offer and has taught herself to cook many rice dishes. I am hoping to be as lucky.

This really is a great book for things to make in your rice cooker. A lot of awesome ideas.

I've been using rice cookers for about 20 years with both white rice and mixed grains (brown rice, beans, oat groats, etc). I just received this book hoping to learn some new tricks. Reading the first chapter, describing how the different types of rice cookers work, I'm amazed at inaccuracies/vagueness.

On page 1, they write that the sensor detects when the water is boiled off and the amount of rice doesn't affect the cooking time. This is clearly wrong--these types of rice cookers prevent all but a small amount of steam from escaping so almost all the water is absorbed. Both the quantity and type of rice affect the rate of water absorption.

On page 5, they describe the induction heating type cooker (the most recent technology, which I own and was hoping for a little insight into) as being fitted with "state-of-the-art microm technology designed for sensitive sensor timing and temperature detection...it delivers a finished product that is the most evenly cooked of any method available because of the accuracy of the microm technology controlled by a microcomputer (think microchip)." So they've said the induction machines differ from the fuzzy logic ones by the inclusion of a microm microcomputer which is like a microchip. However, the other type--fuzzy logic--so they haven't explained how they're different. It's as if a non-technical person speculated on how, say, a helicopter works. You'll get an answer but it won't be very useful--it almost sounds like they're saying something but the gleaning of actual information are few and far between.

On page 9, they acknowledge that "some machines have separate settings for both brown and (white) rice". (Note, all the machines I've used for the last eight years have had brown rice settings.) However, most of the recipies ignore this distinction. For example, the four-grain pilaf on page 154 says either regular or brown rice cycle. They're implying that there's no difference between the white rice and brown rice setting? Their lack of rigor in areas I know a little about, makes me suspicious of everything else. For example, I suspect they don't at all understand the difference between these cycles and didn't experiment with it much in their test kitchen.