When I was moving into an apartment for the first time as a college student, there was one kitchen appliance that was non-negotiable for both my roommate and me: a rice cooker. It’s the most convenient kitchen appliance that any college student can buy, and you can make close to anything in it without much effort.
If you don’t have a rice cooker yet, have no fear, because Amazon’s Prime Day has you covered with one of the most trusted rice cooker brands on the market: a compact Zojirushi Micom Rice Cooker.
The Zojirushi Rice Cooker is on sale for Amazon Prime Day.
The Zojirushi Micom Rice Cooker’s price on Amazon has dropped from its usual $189 to a lower cost of $121 — and while this purchase is definitely an investment, its usefulness in the kitchen will quickly prove its worth.
Zojirushi is a Japanese brand known globally as the top rice cooker brand for its microcomputer (Micom) technology, which ensures that the cooking of your rice is perfect by offering precise temperature control and automatic shut-off when the rice is finished cooking to prevent overcooking.
Another feature of the rice cooker is that it has multiple settings specific to the needs of the user. For example, regular white rice — meaning short and medium-grain white rice — and long grain white rice cook at different rates, so the rice cooker provides two different settings depending on which grain of rice you’re cooking.
Personally, my most-used rice cooker function is the “Quick” setting, which does exactly as you would assume: it quick-cooks the rice. For dinners where I’m basically throwing stuff together at the last minute, the rice cooker ensures that I only have to wait for about half an hour before I get to eat perfectly-cooked rice with my meal.
The rice cooker also has cooking settings for brown rice, sushi rice, and steel cut oatmeal.
This particular rice cooker is a 3-cup compact size, meaning that you can cook up to 3 cups of rice in it at a time. While bigger rice cookers can typically cook up to 6 cups of rice at a time, as a college student, 3 cups of rice at a time is more than enough. Plus, the smaller the rice cooker, the less space it takes up on your counter, leaving more room for your coffee maker and air fryer that you also bought on Prime Day.
For $121, the Zojirushi Rice Cooker is sitting at an unbeatable price for the amount of settings it has. However, if you’re just looking for a rice cooker with no bells and whistles, the 2-cup mini rice cooker from Dash will be your best option, priced at a Prime Day deal of $20.99.
You can make more than just rice in your rice cooker.
Once you buy the rice cooker, anything is possible. Aside from having multiple settings for different kinds of rice, the rice cooker can cook whole one-pot meals inside of it, saving you from washing multiple dishes when you’re cooking dinner.
One creator, Kylie Sakaida (@nutritionbykylie on TikTok) has a whole series dedicated to healthy one-pot rice cooker meals. One of my favorite meals of hers is the one-pot salmon rice bowl, which cooks short-grain rice, chopped bok choy, edamame, beans, a salmon filet, and a simple sauce all at the same time.
By putting everything in the rice cooker, you allow for the rice to basically steam all of the ingredients on top of it.
Sakaida also makes a Japanese beef rice bowl known as gyudon in the rice cooker, where she combines white rice, marinated thinly-sliced beef, and sliced onion to cook together.
For all of her recipes, rice always goes on the bottom of anything you cook in the rice cooker, to ensure a proper cook.
The rose tteokbokki recipe from Julia Vuong (@thespicyjuju on TikTok) requires a little more prep, but it’s equally as fast in cooking time — maybe because this recipe doesn’t call for rice at all.
Vuong tosses soaked potato noodles, pork and veggie mandu, fish cake, sausages, and ingredients like gochujang and milk for the sauce. For an added texture, consider air-frying dumplings on the side like Vuong does.
Another creator, Sarah (@groovyfoodiess on TikTok), loads up her finals week rice cooker meal with plenty of chopped veggies, sliced shitake mushrooms, sliced lap cheong — a sweet and savory Cantonese pork sausage that I also like to cook in the rice cooker — and an egg.
The result is a one-pot meal rich in vitamins, protein, and most importantly, flavor.