****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
When selecting a Christmas gift for my Chinese wife, I chose carefully. A rice cooker was high on the list, since she had an old Black & Decker that had treated her well for a number of years, but it was old and tired. The nonstick coating had worn off, and it was a cheapy with no additional features. The nonstick coating bothered me. For our next cooker, I didn't want to get one with a nonstick coating that could wear off. We now had a four year old, and I didn't want to see this kind of coating land in any of our stomachs, especially his.My Asian friends highly recommended very expensive Japanese rice cookers. I seriously considered these, but these were only rice cookers. They did their job cooking rice well, I'm sure, but didn't offer any additional cooking options. They also had nonstick coatings. In addition, some reviews indicated these units had an internal battery that, over time, would need replacement. Batteries don’t last forever. Replacement involved sending the unit back to the manufacturer, which is costly and time consuming.After careful consideration, I chose the Tatung cooker for a number of reasons. First, it has no nonstick coating—the cooking vessel is manufactured using stainless steel. At this price point, I don't see many stainless steel cookers on the market. It also offers nondirect cooking, which is a very nice feature. The cooking surface doesn't sit on a burner. Rather, it sits on a secondary level of water that transfers heat more uniformly to the main cooking pot. Controls are fairly basic and include an on/off function with warmer. All work well. As far as I can discern, there is no internal battery that will eventually and inevitably wear out and require replacement.The strongest selling point for me though was the ability at add to this cooker. I know my wife's cooking style. Being ethnic Chinese, she loves hot pot and steaming fish and vegetables and cooking baozi (Chinese bun filled with food), steaming Chinese bread, and creating other tasty meals. While the cooker you’re looking at is billed as a rice cooker, it can be expanded to include a steamer/cooker set. If you're like my wife, I'd highly suggest also purchasing the Tatung TAC-S02 10-cup stainless steel steamer set. This set provides two generous stainless steel steaming levels that sit on top of the rice cooker. An example of how this works would be cooking the rice in the rice cooker while placing, say, vegetables in the first steamer level and fish in the second. This way, you can cook multiple items at the same time.Tatung provides a helpful CD with this rice cooker that shows a number of cooking possibilities, as well as instructions on how to use this rice cooker. It provides a number of cooking possibilities.My wife loves the cooker, although we discovered a few things worth mentioning. When cooking rice, it takes a little trial-and-error to figure out the exact water amount necessary for perfect, fluffy rice. Our first batches were a bit soggy. Also, we like to cook either brown rice or white rice. The water quantity is different between the two, so expect to spend a little time getting adjusted to the exact cooking process.When cooking bone soup, or other soups that require extended cooking times, we found the water evaporates out of the cooker. For this reason, my wife doesn't cook this type of food in this cooker. The top doesn't clap down enough to prohibit water from escaping. This is only a factor during long cooking times and might be compensated by adding water during the cooking process. We haven’t explored this too thoroughly. For bone soup or other kinds of long-term cooking, my wife uses our heavier iron cookware. The top sits heavily on top of the iron stock pot allowing the water to roll back into the soup.When considering which rice cooker to purchase, consider what you intend to do with the rice cooker. If you will only be cooking rice and you want perfection, then a higher-end cooker may be best for you, assuming you have the budget to afford one of these more expensive cookers. If you'd like to cross over to cooking more than just rice, then the Tatung is worth considering. Adding the steamer set is a great way to go, in this regard. If you add the price of the rice cooker with the steamer set, it's far cheaper than the cost of a high-end rice cooker. As an added benefit, there's no replacing an internal battery years down the road, and you won’t have a nonstick coating to contend with.
