Beans in a rice cooker?

January 22, 2024 8:46 PM

I heard you can cook beans in a rice cooker - tell me how!

I have a Neuro Fuzzy Rice Cooker which we use every day. I'd love to use it for more things - and I see that some people use rice cookers for beans and lentils, sometimes mixed with rice and sometimes on its own. I'd love to do this, but want to know about portions and cook times (this rice cooker has settings based on food type, not time). Have you done this? What worked and what didn't?

posted by Toddles to Food & Drink (7 answers total)

Best answer: I do not have that specific cooker, but whenever I've adapted cooking methods that I know work for one kind of seed food to work with another, I've started with simple substitution and gone on to adjust from there.

Use similarities between the processing that you can see has been applied to the raw ingredients. For example, red lentils have been hulled, so start by treating those as you would white rice; brown and green lentils haven't, so set your expectations based on experience with brown rice. Measure your inputs by cups or by weight rather than just eyeballing them, and keep notes. If your end result is too dry or chewy, use more water next time. If it's too mushy or squishy, use less.

All of these foods are very cheap, so they're a perfect fit for this kind of experimentation. You're not going to end up seriously out of pocket even if it takes you several goes around before you nail the delicious. Plus, all the experience you gain from getting it wrong a few times will tell you exactly how to get that texture again, should you ever end up needing to incorporate it into something else.
posted by flabdablet at 12:11 AM on January 23

I don't know if it would boil enough to deactivate the toxin in kidney beans, so I probably wouldn't try to cook them in a rice cooker.

I've seen lots of recipes for lentils in a rice cooker. Most seem to do 1 cup lentils to 2 cups liquid.
posted by belladonna at 3:53 AM on January 23 [3 favorites]

Again, I don't have the specific rice cooker referred to but I do have one of the old non-electronic ones and when I use it for brown rice it will easily maintain a rolling boil for over half an hour. I would not hesitate to eat kidney beans cooked in it.
posted by flabdablet at 4:10 AM on January 23

Best answer: I have two cookbook suggestions that use rice cookers to cook more than just rice:
The Ultimate Rice Cooker Cookbook by Beth Hensperger
The Everyday Rice Cooker by Diane Phillips
I got both of these (and a few more) out of the library so I could play around with cooking more stuff in my Zojirushi rice cooker. Mostly I just do rice and steel cut oats now, but both of the cookbooks cover cooking beans and bean recipes. Hensperger has a separate bean section; I think Phillips includes it in the section on vegetarian entrees. And recipes in both are designed to work with fuzzy logic rice cookers.

If you want to play around yourself, the Zojirushi manual for your rice cooker will list the time estimates for how long it takes for it to cook on different cycles. You can then use that to extrapolate what settings would work for different kinds of beans and legumes.
posted by carrioncomfort at 9:08 AM on January 23

Best answer: I have that exact rice cooker, and I've made this recipe for mujadara in it several times:

• 1/2 onion
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 teaspoon garlic
• 1 teaspoon cumin
• Salt (I didn't have an exact amount written down -- probably 1 tsp - 1 1/2 tsp?)
• Pepper
• 2 cups brown lentils
• 1 cup brown rice
• 6 cups veggie broth

Pop everything in the rice cooker, stir, and cook on the 'brown rice' setting. Caramelize some onions (at least 3, but then I like caramelized onions), and stir them in after it's cooked. It's great served with yogurt.
posted by shirobara at 4:17 PM on January 23 [1 favorite]

As noted above, some beans have a toxin that needs to be deactivated by boiling for ten minutes. It's not uncommon for guidance to say to go longer, particularly with larger batches, just to ensure that *all* the beans are thoroughly heated.

The rice cooker is designed to switch to warming mode once the internal temperature gets to boiling, so I wouldn't count on it to stay at that temperature for 10+ minutes. As with most food poisoning, it's the sort of thing you can get away with until that one fateful day that you can't.

I will throw in canned cooked beans into the rice cooker with rice but I don't see an upside to cooking them in a specialized appliance. Unlike a pressure cooker, I don't see upsides to using a rice cooker rather than a pot and several downsides.
posted by Candleman at 9:43 PM on January 23

I’ve tried lentils and barley in my induction/pressure Zojirushi (the internals look similar) which I would think are way less challenging than beans. If I try to cook more than a dry cup and a half, it splatters all over the lid and mucks up the inside more than rice. It's not a huge deal but when I need beans, I usually need a lot, so opt for my old fashioned stove top pressure cooker.
posted by brachiopod at 6:07 PM on January 24 [1 favorite]