The Power of Expensive Rice Cookers

While other countries might consider rice to be rice, the Japanese are very serious in dividing the rice grown across their country into different classes. Some prefectures, such as Niigata, are singled out as sources of the most delicious rice, and bags of rice from such areas are often priced much higher than Japanese rice from say, Saitama. Having only tasted high class rice a few times, I really can’t claim to be able to taste the difference, but I’m hardly a food expert.

Most Japanese people I’ve met swear by the taste differences of rice from different prefectures, and there probably are subtle differences in taste between them. NTV’s Real Time News recently ran a segment about advances in rice cooking technology, and they had this employee of a rice cooker manufacturing company take a blind taste test to see if he could tell the difference between different brands of rice:

The man, who had spent most of his life taste-testing rice, passed the test with flying colors, reassuring audiences of the differences in rice taste that they themselves might not be able to notice.

The news program also ran another test, one to see if expensive rice cookers made better-tasting rice than cheap rice cookers. Three rice cookers were used: a luxury rice cooker priced at about 1,100 US dollars, one that was about 600 US dollars, and another that was about 90 US dollars. Identical rice was placed in each rice cooker, and a panel of housewives were given samples and asked to pick the best rice:

A majority picked rice cooker B, which was the super expensive cooker. As horribly unscientific as the video showed their polling methods to be, I suppose I might believe that the 1,100 dollar machine could do a better job than the 600 dollar one…