This Ingenious Rice Cooker Makes It Almost Impossible to Screw Up Rice

For years as a home cook, I contended with rice rather than cooked with it. I’d follow all the instructions, and my rice would still turn out a bit mushier, clumpier, or stickier than I wanted. It wasn’t really a problem I thought I’d be writing about on the internet until I bought and started using the Neuro Fuzzy. I don’t know why I bought it, and at this point it doesn’t matter, because the personal joy I have experienced by having superior, restaurant-quality rice available at any time is just too great not to share.

The Neuro Fuzzy’s strength is its simplicity. You can rinse anywhere from 1 to 5.5 cups of rice in the rice cooker’s bowl, add fresh water up to the appropriate line, drop the bowl into the cooker, close the lid, and press Cook. It will sing you a little song, which many have come to love and adore, and it’s finished in about 40 minutes.

The Neuro Fuzzy’s name is related to how it’s able to make such incredible rice. It uses a mathematical term called “fuzzy logic” to change its temperature and cooking time as the rice is being made rather than relying on the rice’s temperature being above boiling to turn the machine off, like traditional rice cookers. Fuzzy logic is especially good at accounting for human error, like adding too much water. Our kitchen team’s tests actually showed that the Neuro Fuzzy is capable of turning out decent rice even if you add nearly double the amount of water. The Neuro Fuzzy doesn’t give you an estimated cook time when you start the machine, but about 10 to 12 minutes before it’s finished, it will show a countdown clock.

And when the Neuro Fuzzy is done, the rice that it makes is sublime, with well-defined grains that are never mushy or soggy. I typically make long-grain white rice like jasmine and basmati, and I prefer the Softer setting, which takes a few minutes longer but produces a more tender rice, as the name implies. But the Neuro Fuzzy can handle all kinds of grains. When our kitchen team tested rice cookers, the Neuro Fuzzy was the most versatile, making great-tasting sushi rice, brown rice, and long-grain rice.

Outside the kitchen team, the Neuro Fuzzy is also loved by other Wirecutter staffers. “Our Neuro Fuzzy makes wonderful rice, better than a restaurant,” says Joel Santo Domingo, a senior staff writer on the PC and networking team. He had previously used a cheaper Zojirushi rice cooker but prefers the softer grains from the Neuro Fuzzy.