2) This rice cooker produces moist, fluffy, chewy, textured rice that exceeds a vast majority of the restaurants out there, including those that cook individual portions of rice in stone pots. It will spoil you and make you a snob when it comes to rice. The menu has different settings for pretty much any kind of rice you want to cook like white (soft, regular, hard), brown, mixed, rinse-free, sushi, porridge, GABA, etc. You can keep the rice warm and tasting fresh for upto 24hr.
3) Good things take time, but this cooker pushes the limit of patience, taking ~50mins for white rice, ~75min for mixed rice, and upto 3.5hr for GABA rice. Fortunately, there's a timer so you can tell it to have rice done by say 6pm, as well as an express mode (25mins) when you are starving. Though still quite good, rice cooked in express mode tends to be slightly firmer and not as impressive as the regular mode. (Minus half star for long cooking time)
4) Compared to the $10 variety I used for a number of years, this one has more parts to clean. The non-stick bowl, the inner lid, and the steam vent needs cleaning after each use as you'd expect. In addition, you need to check if any debris is obstructing any of the sensors, holes, or vents. The air intake and exhaust located on the bottom of the cooker for dissipating heat needs an occasional vacuuming. (Minus half star for extra cleaning required)
5) This unit is rated at ~1230 watts, but that doesn't mean it's using that much electricity continuously like a hair dryer. The cooker turns the heat on and off as needed like an oven to maintain internal temperature and pressure. (Since posting this review, I measured the total electricity consumed by using a Kill A Watt 4460 meter and it came out to 3 cents per use.)
6) Back to the original question, is it worth it? This is really a personal decision based on your budget, utilization, and love for rice. My thought process was I could buy 16 x 20lb bags of rice, or get this rice cooker and enjoy that 1 bag of rice like I never have before. Finding it for $200+ cheaper sweetened the deal too.
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I have never had a better more intuitive rice cooker than this Zojirushi! I am just sorry I had not purchased it sooner. It makes delicious brown rice (I have not tried the GABA yet, but I expect it to be par excelllence). The brown rice is the best that can be made as long as it is washed, as you should with all rice. I love trying new things to add to my brown rice and I am itchin' to try the GABA. I could not recommend this rice cooker with greater enthusiasm, delight and satisfaction.I cooked Steel Cut Oats on the Porridge setting, and I could not have made it better; as a matter of fact, I was extremely pleased and mine, heretofore, never tasted as good.
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I have been cooking rice with Japanese rice cookers for decades. When my last one failed after more than 20-years of service, I decided to buy the best replacement I could find, regardless of cost. (It's easy for me to justify paying a premium for a product I plan to use on a daily basis for decades.) After much research, I chose this one because it seemed to me that the Zojirushi induction pressure rice cookers were regarded as among the best rice cookers sold in US.I am very happy with the build quality, look and convenience features of the product. However, after buying the rice cooker, I realized that pressure cookers produce rice that is too soft for my taste. I now know that many people prefer pressure rice cookers specifically because they produce super soft rice that doesn't adhere together too much. I prefer rice with a little more body. After corresponding directly with Zojirushi, I learned that the "soft", "medium", and "hard" settings can only be used when cooking white rice on the default setting, but not in any of the other settings (e.g., quick rice) or with any other grains (e.g., brown rice) and that white rice cooked on the "hard" setting in this cooker is roughly as hard as white rice cooked in a non-pressure cooker on the default setting.
I had eight people from three families individually compare high quality white and brown rice freshly cooked in this cooker and a budget one-button rice cooker in side-by-side blind taste tests. Everyone had surprisingly strong preferences, but their preferences were roughly equally split between rice cooked in the pressure cooker and budget cooker based on texture. Those who liked super soft rice thought the rice cooked in the Zojirushi was great. Those who didn't prefered the rice cooked in the budget cooker.
I rate this cooker with 1-star, while my wife would give it 5-stars, based solely on whether we happen to like super soft rice. I like everything about the cooker, except for the texture of the rice it produces. If I had my druthers, I would swap this pressure induction cooker for a non-pressure version from the same maker. Unfortunately for me, her vote is more equal than mine, especially in the kitchen....
Honest reviews on Zojirushi NP-HTC10 Induction Heating 5-1/2-Cup (Uncooked) Pressure
Got this Pressure Rice Cooker and used it the next day. White rice came out better than any other rice cookers I have owned. It was a lot of money, but in my opinion, was so worth the cost. You get what you pay for, and in the case of this rice cooker, I got exactly that -one excellent cooker! Had no problems with it, just followed the directions and used their provided cup to measure level cups of raw rice. It is a 5 Star all the way!Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for Zojirushi NP-HTC10 Induction Heating 5-1/2-Cup (Uncooked) Pressure
The negative first: it's expensive and not for everyone (i.e. you do not eat rice a lot, and yet I am Asian).The rest is nothing but positive. It looks good and makes fantastic rice. I don't quite understand how it does it, but this rice cooker manages to make brown rice the same consistency of white rice. If you and your family only casually eat rice, this is not the rice cooker for you, buy something a lot less expensive. If you eat rice more than once a week it is definitely worth it from my perspective. It is well designed and very easy to clean.
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