The 3 Best Rice Cookers of 2025
Top pick
The Neuro Fuzzy makes sublime sushi rice and is great at other varieties, even basmati, which is one of the hardest to get right in a machine. Although this model is a little slow, it’s the most all-around excellent and foolproof cooker we tested.
Though not the fastest machine we tested, the Zojirushi Neuro Fuzzy NS-ZCC10 is by far the most versatile, making the best white rice across the different grains plus respectable brown rice (though if you love brown rice, you might prefer our upgrade pick).
Handles on the inner pot make it easier to pick up than many others we tested, and the Neuro Fuzzy’s computer chip is particularly good at adjusting cooking parameters to adapt to human error.
Rice made in the Neuro Fuzzy can seem like a work of art: firm, slender, intact, and milky white. Each grain plumps nicely without bursting and doesn’t seem to break when scooped out of the pot. In our tests, the Neuro Fuzzy was one of the few machines that made sushi rice, brown rice, and long-grain rice all taste great.
Of all the machines we tested, this model produced the best basmati, cooking it up light and fluffy. By comparison, our upgrade pick, the Cuckoo CRP-P1009 made overly moist long-grain white rice.
In previous tests, the Neuro Fuzzy was the only cooker that still made decent rice with separate, firm grains when we added almost twice the needed amount of water, likely due to its advanced fuzzy-logic chip. It can adjust to the extremes of human error, a skill we find helpful for people who don’t want to measure a precise ratio every time.
We like that the Neuro Fuzzy comes in two sizes, a 5½-cup model that’s perfect for smaller households and a 10-cup model that can provide for larger families or dinner parties.
In contrast, our upgrade pick from Cuckoo only comes in a 10-cup version, which takes up too much counter space for people making rice for just one or two people. The Neuro Fuzzy also has a smaller footprint than most other 6-cup cookers we tested.
Of all the cookers we tested, the Neuro Fuzzy is also one of the easiest to clean. It has a removable inner lid, which allows you to wash from every crevice the starchy film that accumulates during cooking. (The Hamilton Beach and the Cuckoo also have removable inner lids, so they are similarly easy to clean.)
Plastic handles attached to the Neuro Fuzzy’s inner pot—a feature that many rice cookers lack—make it easy to transport a still-hot pot of rice to the dining table or to dump the contents into a pan for stir-frying.
The Neuro Fuzzy also has every perk we looked for in a cooker. It can keep rice warm for up to 12 hours, which feels more than adequate. When it’s finished cooking, the Neuro Fuzzy plays a chipper, electronic rendition of the French gavotte “Amaryllis” (video), which we found charming.
The Neuro Fuzzy comes with a one-year warranty, the same amount of coverage as our other picks.
How the Zojirushi Neuro Fuzzy has held up
“Our Neuro Fuzzy makes wonderful rice, better than a restaurant,” says senior staff writer Joel Santo Domingo, who has been using the Neuro Fuzzy since 2022, “we have/had a cheaper Zojiroushi 5-cup model, which is much faster, but makes harder texture rice.”
Like Ellen (see caption above), Joel notes the slowness of the machine: “The main drawback of the Neuro Fuzzy (NF) is the lengthy cook time. About half the time, we use the quick cook function on it.
Quick cook is faster than regular, but not quite as fast as the cheaper Zojirushi. The texture is also in between the two. We’ve had to start the rice earlier in our cooking routine to give the NF time to finish. We mostly cook jasmine rice.”
Flaws but not dealbreakers
The downfall of all the Zojirushi cookers we tested is their slowness, and the Neuro Fuzzy is no exception. It took a long time to make a batch of white rice, 44 to 46 minutes for a 3-cup batch, compared with 38 minutes in the Hamilton Beach and 29 minutes in the Cuckoo.
And the Neuro Fuzzy was the slowest for brown rice by a landslide, taking 1 hour 38 minutes, almost twice as long as the Hamilton Beach and the Cuckoo. Overall, we believe that great rice is worth waiting for.
The difference of 10 or 20 minutes between an okay batch of rice and an amazing one isn’t too significant for people who care about great rice, especially if you start your rice at the beginning of cooking dinner or use the timer function. But if you regularly cook brown rice, you might prefer our upgrade pick, the Cuckoo CRP-P1009. Or just be prepared to plan ahead.
In our tests, the Neuro Fuzzy made brown rice better than most rice cookers we tried, but the process took a bit of experimentation.
The results were a little too firm when we used the machine’s measurements of water and rice, but when we used the 1:1.5 proportion of rice to water that Lundberg recommended they came out a little mushy, with quite a few burst and exploded hulls.
The Zojirushi’s quick-cook setting made firm white rice that felt a little too al dente (it wasn’t nearly as good as the results from the Hamilton Beach or the Cuckoo). But we figure that if you really care about your rice, you’ll wait the extra 10 or 15 minutes it takes to churn out a delectable batch of grains. After all, some things you can’t rush.
