Appliance brands are often in an arms race to see which bring the most convenience to our cooking routines. Sometimes this leads to surprising new innovations (excellent multifunctional countertop smart ovens), but it can just as easily lead to a flop (the infamous Juicero).
And that brings us to the KitchenAid Grain and Rice Cooker. This KitchenAid rice cooker came to make an already easy-to-use appliance, the rice cooker, even easier. Specifically: It removes the step of measuring your ingredients. If you’re someone with a low frustration tolerance who is constantly thwarted by the presence of numbers in their life, this may sound like a godsend. However, the previous “just add water and press a button” functionality of a rice cooker is not that complicated, so the question I wanted to answer was: When it comes to rice cookers, how much more is there to optimize?
As soon as you take it out of the box, you’ll be able to tell that the KitchenAid Rice and Grain cooker is different. In addition to the primary cooking vessel, it has a water reservoir connected by a flat base with a small touchscreen control in the corner. To use it, you choose a setting from the menu of options, which includes 21 preset cooking modes for beans, legumes, whole grains, and rice. Within each setting, the machine provides options for doneness level, as well as specification for whether or not you’ve rinsed the ingredients or if they are dry. Once you select your cooking mode, the screen prompts you to fill the cooking bowl with your ingredient of choice. After that, you close the lid and press start. The machine will then add a preprogrammed amount of water from the reservoir based on the weight in the pot and provide you with an approximate cooking time, depending on the setting.
We tested several different cooking modes to get a sense of how it cooked different types of grains. We cooked white rice, short- and long-grain brown rice, oatmeal, quinoa, and different varieties of beans.
The machine did a solid job cooking rice and other grains. I made several different batches of grains on the “regular” setting (as opposed to, “soft” and “firm”) and each batch came out with well-cooked, firm, and intact grains. In general, I’d say this machine cooks on the drier side, which is great for people particularly averse to even the slightest presence of mush in their rice. I’ve used dozens of rice cookers, and I think most Zojirushi models, which set the standard in our testing, balance moisture and firmness more successfully and deliver a more desirable result. But this is subjective, and I, alongside several of my coworkers, thought there would be a group of firm rice eaters who would appreciate what the KitchenAid can do.
The machine performed the strongest when cooking brown rice. Most rice cookers tend to overcook brown rice, and the KitchenAid was a pleasant departure from the trend. Quinoa also came out great—if not ever so slightly scorched on the bottom.
I cooked oatmeal on the regular and soft settings and found that, while well-cooked, the oats came out quite firm and a bit stodgy and definitely needed an added splash of milk. I still considered this a success, though, because if I’m being honest, oatmeal is just kind of like that when you cook it in a rice cooker, regardless of the machine.
I’ve looked at other reviews of this machine, which have included glowing words over the “bean” setting, and no matter how long I presoaked them, the beans came out underdone, even on the “soft” setting. Frankly, I wasn’t surprised because, in my experience, beans can really vary in cooking time, so a machine that works with preset cooking times doesn’t really account for that. I'd recommend cooking your beans on the stove or in a pressure cooker like an Instant Pot.
Also, those low moisture levels I noted with the rice carried across everything I cooked, and, once removed from the pot, everything began to dry out as soon as it cooled down. Since you have no control over the amount of liquid added, there’s nothing you can really do about it either.
Finally, while the electronic interface was helpful and straightforward, there were some times that it seemed to glitch out or freeze up. On more than one occasion, while trying to tare the scale, I had to close out and start from the beginning.
The KitchenAid rice cooker can get the job done for most grains you will find yourself cooking. I could not get the beans to work, but I’m content cooking beans on the stove, since it takes just as long as it would in this machine, and I have way more control over what’s going on as cooking happens.
There was a level of effortlessness to using this rice cooker, but after years using different rice cookers, I still don’t think measuring liquid is so inconvenient it needed to be eliminated. While Zojirushi rice cookers don’t, in general, offer as many cooking presets, it’s possible to make most anything in them with some practice. The bottom line with the KitchenAid: If you like your grains on the firmer side and really hate measuring things, this is the appliance for you—just keep the beans on the stovetop.
