Is a rice cooker rice-only?
July 19, 2004 9:27 AM   Subscribe

Should I try cooking pintos or lentils in my rice cooker? Are there hazards or pitfalls associated with doing so?
posted by namespan to Food & Drink (7 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
By all means. We always mix in some red or green lentils with brown rice. It cooks up fine and is delicious.
posted by pissfactory at 10:15 AM on July 19, 2004


some beans are poisonous if they aren't soaked properly and boiled for a while - red kidney beans are the ones that are always mentioned. i'm not sure a rice cooker really gets hot enough to be considered boiling, so you should probably avoid at least kidney beans.

see here
posted by andrew cooke at 10:24 AM on July 19, 2004


Yes, you should soak beans for eight or more hours, save for a few that don't need it (black-eyed peas, lentils, green peas). Yes, they can all (all) be cooked in a pressure cooker. In fact, it's the only plausible way. Lorna J. Sass's Recipes from an Ecological Kitchen is the canonical text.
posted by joeclark at 6:31 PM on July 19, 2004


Rice cookers and pressure cookers are two very different appliances.

Yes, you can absolutely cook lentils in a rice cooker, but I highly recommend against it because it's much messier and you don't have same ability to slow cook the lentils with onions, oils, and spices.

Messier because lentils tend to boil over a lot if covered, which causes leakage on the sides of the pot, which dribbles into the cooker's heat source.
posted by BlueTrain at 6:55 PM on July 19, 2004


Response by poster: andrew, do you realize you just linked to a paper on quantum mechanics?
posted by namespan at 8:40 PM on July 19, 2004 [1 favorite]


It is common here in Korea, where every household has an industrial-strength pressure rice cooker, to mix rice and beans during the cooking. I'm not sure if that's what you're talking about, but it works fine, and yum.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 2:52 AM on July 20, 2004


oh, bugger. well, it was a very good paper. sorry about that.
posted by andrew cooke at 10:57 AM on July 20, 2004 [1 favorite]


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