Evolution of Rice Cooker (1955 to 2021):
- Sony Build first Rice Cooker, But it was never Put on Market
- Toshiba Launch First Rice Cooker
- Zojirushi Launch Fuzzy Logic First Time
Rice is the 3rd most popular grain around the globe, and they have a special status in Asian cuisines. In the past century, many migrations either for work or studies created a diaspora of nations across the globe and made the cultural communities in the world, especially in the USA and Europe, for obvious (life standard) reasons.
If we talk about the cooking methods used in primitive times for rice, well, that’s a whole lot of difficult process. Usually, the rice was cooked in the pots on the stoves, and they should be treated very delicately and precisely, depending upon the person who is cooking rice.
The temperature should be taken care of to prevent overcooking or undercooking. Unfortunately, this manual monitoring makes it very tough to cook the perfect fluffy rice. Luckily, Japanese experts decided to bring innovation in this process by making a rice cooker in the initial times.
Kamado is a large Japanese stove on which rice was cooked, but in the era between 1920-1926, the first attempts were made to develop rice cookers in Japan. But, unfortunately, nothing big happened in that domain until the late 40s, when World War 2 ends and a weaken Japan was there, they focused on technology.
Sony has reportedly developed the first rice cooker, but it was never put on the market for sale due to some technical limitations.
Until the mid-50s, the first rice cooker was put to the sale by Toshiba after working half a decade to develop a quality product with user-friendly modes. In 1955 with the new rice cooker by Toshiba, which uses Electrodes to warm the water and thus cooking the rice it brings the revolution in the traditional Japanese kitchen as the people started using this cooker.
In the 1960s, more developments were made in this field, and the warming feature was added in it, that keeps the rice warm after they cooked this fascinates the consumers when they always found the fluffy and fresh rice.
Until this era, the modern cookers were popular in the whole world and accepted by the masses, but in the 1980s, the breakthrough was made with the invention of fuzzy logic technology, and Zojirushi is the pioneer of it.
Fuzzy logic tech transformed the rice cooker and laid the foundation stone of foolproof cooking of different types of rice. You just need to take care of the water/rice ratio as per the rice type, and “Boom” it will take care of your rice cooking.
Equipped with sensors and logical input settings, these are mini-computers installed in the cooking device that act as its brain.
In the 1990s, multicookers were introduced in the market that could cook many types of foods besides rice, and it was a massive advancement in the evolution of rice cookers. These were hugely accepted and appreciated by people.
For the past 2 decades, the improved versions of multi rice cookers are coming every year, which encapsulates slow cooking, sauté, steaming, warming, and other modes and timer can be set for them.
Now they also can prepare the pasta, noodles, cakes, stews, oats, mixed grains, steamed veggies, and sliced meat, and much more besides the rice, and that’s marvelous for the foodies.
More and more compact and small rice cookers with the small body are coming these days to fit in easily on any small surface available or to carry along with for travelling.
The future seems to be bright in this regard. Change is inevitable, and the same goes for it. We hope that future technology will add more value to it and be more comfortable due to innovation.
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