Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog

A silly anecdote:
When I started working in Japan I encountered a Zojirushi rice cooker in my apartment. At the time I could not decipher the control labels but I managed to get good results with various kinds of rice, basically with the "default" settings. I guess that is the "neuro-fuzzy" part.
Later, when I figured out the labels, I started burning everything. Best of luck!

Oh man....that sounds so...Yuppie.

> It must think that this is information you don't need to know, or are better off not knowing...

Who says the rice cooker knows? "Neuro" does not mean omniscient. It only has to "know" how to apply a process that is guaranteed to bring it eventually to the point at which the rice will be within 15 minutes of being done, and it has to be able to detect this point when it occurs. It doesn't have to be able to predict the time length ahead of time, and in fact it probably cannot.

Think what your own neuro circuits do during certain kinds of cooking--e.g. bringing fudge to a soft ball point. You probably don't know how long you are going to have to keep stirring, but you recognize the point at which it starts to turn to fudge.

You cannot make risotto in a rice cooker. It's a contradiction in terms. You have to stand over it, stirring constantly for half an hour, until it's a soggy mess. Then you steam what's left and promise yourself you'll never try to make risotto again.

the voice of experience

take your straw man arguments elsewhere Paul Callahan. Nobody actually makes fudge anymore, they all use the recipe with the marshmallow stuff in it. These days i doubt real fudge actually ever existed.

SOFT BALL STAGE! MY ARSE!

If you are an Iron Chef, then 15 minutes is just enough to complete 3 courses to go with the rice.

If you are an Iron Chef, then 15 minutes is just enough to complete 3 courses to go with the rice.

I am very curious about the result. The automation of risotto cooking seems to me to be only a short step away from being able to program robots to feel emotions... :-)

First you open the Monarch's damper, then the small fire door, scrape out the fluff of gray ash and stoke the firebox with wood shavings,
cedar splints and bundles of applewood prunings.

A kitchen match flares in the kerosene-lamp semi darkness, and soon the fire is roaring. Close the air vent, turn down the damper, and in a few minutes the stove top is warm and fire gone to coals. Pour a cup of whole-grain rice through a tablespoon of oil floating on two cups of water, and cover.

Go feed and water the goats and chickens. Sit on the porch swing and smoke the corncob pipe. Wave at your neighbor in the far field. Read a book.

In about a half-hour, the warm rice is perfectly done and the kitchen bathed in delicious heat. Only the clock ticking in the parlor disturbs the soft clink of silverware, glug-glug of Thai fish sauce and smuk-smuk of hot curry paste.

That, and the soft pinging of apple wood coals, somewhere in the flickering light and darkness.

Professor DeLong, you are about to enter small-appliance Nirvana. The Zojurushi Neuro-Fuzzy Rice Cooker towers over all other rice cookers, and over virtually every other kitchen device with a plug that you can easily pick up and move around. It will fill you with satisfaction and pride of ownership every time you use it.

It will cook virtually any kind of rice you put into it, brown rice, Japanese short-grain rice, American long-grain rice, Minnesota wild rice (ok, not really rice), Thai jasmine rice, the list goes on.

But not risotto. Oh, no, not risotto. The perky elephant cannot help you there.

Every automatic electronic rice cooker I have ever used, neuro or not, has either burned the rice (yes, I used water!), boiled over into a glutinous furor, or both.

But the red plastic bucket with the double-lid that cost $0.75 at the Japanese grocery store manages to make perfect rice in the microwave every single time.

There's an Econ lesson in there somewhere.

[Orson Welles voice] Few would have believed, in the closing weeks of the Bush Adminstration, that the affairs of Professor DeLong were being watched and scrutinised by an intelligence far in advance of his own...

I give the rice cooker six months until it starts its own blog, nine until it gets tenure, and a maximum of two years before its confirmation to a position in the Treasury Department.

Gozer - please, an authentic Japanese rice cooker, bought at a scuzzy asian grocery in your neighborhood. That's not yuppy, it's pure Bobo. I love mine. ;-)

LarryB - agreed, this baby will handle any kind of rice you throw at it. But risotto? no way, baby.

There's only one way to make risotto and it's not in a rice cooker. I mean how much work is it really? 20 minutes of stirring, adding wine, drinking wine, chatting. Repeat until done. Eat. Drink more wine.

Just the other day I ate delicious risotto made in a bread machine on the jam setting. I am going to try it myself very soon.

I'm with Yank. There are few pleasures that surpass cooking and eating Risotto.

I find the key to a good Risotto is sharing a good bottle of white wine with your spouse while cooking. When the bottle is half-finished, the risotto is ready.

I'm not sure whether mine is actually any good, but my wife and I are both happy while we eat it!

Hey, can anyone here tell me what to do with the fascinating-looking bag of Korean rice-n-legumes? Both traditional stovetop and more- fuzzy-than-neuro rice cooker techniques resulted in a mess of ushy rice and crunchy mung beans.

The instructions, of course, are in Korean, as is the nice lady at the store who cannot adequately explain what I should be doing.

A high-tech rice cooker. Perhaps you should spend a little less time reading home catalogues and a little more time reading Walden.

So...
How did it turn out?

ajay,
Thanks for the laugh. Keep up the good work.

The "Neuro-Fuzzy" rice cooker is not "neuro" at all. It's fuzzy. The "Neuro" bit comes in because the membership criteria for the categories in the fuzzy controller (presumably "cooked" and "not cooked", for all you reverse engineers out there) were at some point in the past determined by the output of a neural network. But there is no neural network in the rice-cooker.

This is what "neuro-fuzzy" means in the context of financial forecasting applications, anyway, in those rare cases when "neuro-fuzzy" doesn't just mean "purely and simply does not work".

Should we expect another post-mortem from the 14-year-old? Try to do better this time, professor!

You need to intervene to stop the process about 15 minutes before the Zojirushi thinks the rice is done. But if you do so it makes a fine risotto...

If you don't have the money for a fully-fledged Zaitochi cooker, an ordinary $29 ricecooker makes quite passable risotto - get yourself a copy of Valentina Harris's Risotto! Risotto! Risotto!, by the way, Professor, along with everything else she's ever written - provided that you take the precaution of talking animatedly and drinking continuously at the table.

If you don't have the money for a fully-fledged Zaitochi cooker, an ordinary $29 ricecooker makes quite passable risotto - get yourself a copy of Valentina Harris's Risotto! Risotto! Risotto!, by the way, Professor, along with everything else she's ever written - provided that you take the precaution of talking animatedly and drinking continuously at the table.

"Fuzzy" actually refers to the fact that nobody knows how long the rice will take.

"Neuro" is derived from the neurosis caused by entrusting our rice to 'fuzzy' devices.

I am fascinated by the prospect of Fuzzy Risotto, but just knowing that manual intervention is necessary with such a smart appliance makes me - well, Warm AND fuzzy. Curious about your recipe, tho; how dilute is stock, is rice sauteed first, etc. etc.? I'm pretty traditionalist on this stuff, but the trial-and-error/tweaking process is always cool.