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Cosori 5L Rice Cooker: one-minute review
Nowadays, rice cookers aren’t simply rice cookers. Many double as multicookers, offering a multitude of cooking functions that make them multifaceted kitchen appliances. The Cosori 5L Rice Cooker is one such rice cooker, offering more than 10 cooking modes that cover sautéeing, steaming, and even jams and cakes. However, this appliance falls short in what it should do best.
During our testing, we found the rice results to be overly dry, with clumps of overcooked grain. Far from inedible, but not the quality you’d expect from a rice cooker of this price range. The Cosori Rice Cooker’s other cooking functions present mixed results, too. In some cases, the results were excellent.
The design of this rice cooker is top-notch, however. It’s exceptionally easy to clean, compact for its 5L capacity, and the digital touchscreen display is a joy to use. It’s not overly pricey either, at £119.99 / $99.99 (about AU$150).
If you don’t mind experimenting a bit to get optimal results, the Cosori 5L Rice Cooker is well worth considering. But we can’t help but compare it to similarly priced competitors offering higher-quality results.
Cosori 5L Rice Cooker: price and availability
- $99.99 / £119.99 at Cosori
- Sold at Ubuy and Amazon in Australia for between AU$197.57 and AU$249
- Available at third-party retailers like Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy
At $99.99 / £119.99 (about AU$150), the Cosori 5L Rice Cooker is a budget-to-mid-range appliance. You get extra value for your money here, as it also doubles as a multi-cooker. While it’s not the best Instant Pot alternative we’ve tested, it’s more affordable than the likes of the Instant Pot Pro ($129.99 / £149.99) and the Instant Pot Duo Crisp ($229.99 / £229.99)
However, when stacked against the likes of the Ninja Foodi PossibleCooker, which is another rice cooker that doubles as a multicooker and falls in a similar price range at $129.99 / £119.99 (about AU$200), there’s no contest. While the Cosori Rice Cooker has its benefits, performance isn’t as consistent, nor its results as high quality, as the Ninja.
Cosori 5L Rice Cooker: specifications
|
Review model |
CRC-R501-KUK |
|
Number of baskets |
1 cooking pot |
|
Number of cooking functions |
10+ |
|
Cooking functions and modes |
White Rice (Long Grain, Short Grain, Quick), Brown Rice (Short Grain, Long Grain, Quick), Grains (Quinoa, Porridge, Mixed), Steam, Slow Cook, Soup, Sauté, Jam/Sauce, Cake, Keep Warm, Delay Timer |
|
Accessories |
Soup ladle, measuring cup, 3L steam basket, and standing rice paddle |
|
Smart control |
No |
|
Rated power |
970W |
|
Capacity |
5L |
|
Time range |
Up to 24 hours on Slow Cooker/Keep Warm modes |
|
Dimensions |
12.3in (D) x 10.6in (W) x 9.2in (H) / 312mm (D) x 269mm (W) x 234mm (H) |
|
Weight |
9.81lbs / 4.45kg |
|
Dishwasher-safe |
Yes (but we don’t advise it) |
|
Guarantee |
2 years |
Cosori 5L Rice Cooker: design
- 5L capacity cooking pot
- Large, touchscreen buttons
- Easily clean pot and accessories
- Lines in pot indicating required water levels
Out of the box, this Cosori rice cooker comes with a black, silver-topped main base, a 5L non-stick cooking pot, a soup ladle, a measuring cup, a standing rice paddle, and a 3L steam basket. Assembling the appliance is straightforward thanks to its thorough user manual, though you may find its inner lid and steam cap a tad confusing to insert the first time.
This rice cooker isn’t overly chunky, taking up less than one kitchen counter space, and its modern matte black base, silver-topped design means it shouldn’t look out of place, no matter your kitchen’s style.
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When on, the touch-screen digital display on the front of the rice cooker lights up, displaying the rice preset options, a Keep Warm button, and a Mode button, allowing you to access other cooking functions such as Sauté and Steam. The touchscreen is easy to use, with the large buttons and digital timer display (which is even bigger) clear to see, even from a few feet away.
To open this rice cooker, you simply click the silver button on its top, and the lid springs open, revealing the heating plate and temperature sensor inside. The 5L non-stick-lined cooking pot effortlessly inserts into the space and provides a decent capacity for small to medium households. Inside the pot are lines on either side indicating where to fill the pot with water when steaming or cooking white rice, brown rice, etc., corresponding to the number of cups of grain you’ve added. These lines, when combined with your measuring cup and the user manual’s quick reference chart, make it easier to balance your water-to-grain ratio when cooking.
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This non-stick pot was probably the easiest cooking pot we’ve cleaned in our time testing appliances. By filling the pot with warm soapy water and wiping it with the soft side of a sponge, we found rice, porridge, and even compote residue could be removed with minimal effort. While Cosori says the pot and accessories are dishwasher safe, we don’t advise cleaning anything with a non-stick coating in a dishwasher, as it could damage the non-stick lining.
Just ensure you also clean the inner pot lid and its steam cap after each use. This has a few more crevices, and the lid needs to be disassembled for proper cleaning, but the process is, again, pretty easy. The same can be said of the inside of the base, which can be easily wiped with a cloth.
The accompanying 3L steam basket neatly fits into the inner pot, but we wish it had some non-metallic handles to make removal after cooking easier (and safer).
In addition to its user manual, the Cosori 5L Rice Cooker comes with a quick reference guide that includes tips for cooking, the grain chart, and a quick rundown of how to set up the appliance and cook white/brown rice. This is handy if you don’t want to flick through the user manual. The rice cooker also comes with a recipe book featuring global recipes that utilise its various functions. We always love the flavour of Cosori recipes, so we highly recommend trying these out.
Cosori 5L Rice Cooker: performance
- Variety of cooking modes and rice presets
- Rice was overcooked
- No control over temperature
- Cake function is excellent
The Cosori 5L rice cooker is positioned first and foremost as just that: a rice cooker. Unfortunately, we found its rice cooking capabilities to be lower quality than its other cooking functions.
This appliance has several presets for rice and grains. For white and brown rice, you can specify short grain, long grain, or quick cook (which takes less time but results in harder rice, according to the user manual). We added two cups of washed, long-grain white rice to the pot, filled it to the respective line in the pot, and selected the White Rice/Long Grain option, which takes 50 minutes. This is in line with some rice cookers, but slightly longer than cooking on the hob.
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When running, the rice cooker is surprisingly quiet, registering around 32 decibels (about the volume of a whisper), but when cooking is complete, it lets out several loud beeps that you can easily hear from another room. After using the rice paddle to fluff the rice, we found clumps of overcooked rice in the batch, and the results were, overall, quite dry. In case it was an error on our part, we tried again with the Quick Cook option, which takes 39 minutes. While the dry clumps were less prevalent, there were still enough to make the results less than ideal.
We had the same issue with long-grain brown rice. On the relevant preset, it took 75 minutes, much longer than on a hob, even though brown rice takes longer to cook. Again, we found the results to be overcooked and quite dry, with several clumps of chewy grain. Edible, but not the high quality we’d expect.
It’s disappointing, as the Cosori 5L Rice Cooker’s other functions work pretty well. We tested several recipes from the Recipe Booklet, which utilises the different cooking functions, and were generally impressed by the results (though it was a mixed bag).
Following the Spiced Carrot & Lentil Soup recipe, we used the sautée function (accessed through Modes) to sauté onions and cumin seeds to perfection. Our only gripe here was that the pot gets very hot, and there seems to be no control over its temperature settings, so you need to be careful not to overcook in this mode. After sautéeing, we were able to seamlessly move to the Soup function, and after 45 minutes, we had a lovely chunky soup with soft carrots ready for blending.
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The Jam/Sauce mode is impressive, too. We followed the Strawberry-Thyme Compote recipe, which requires the lid to be open, and had a delicious compote after 15 minutes: soft chunks of strawberry, plenty of tang, and just the right consistency.
This (perhaps minus the thyme) pairs well with porridge. We were surprised that, despite the rice cooking issues, the Porridge preset (under Grains) provided excellent results. We added two cups of rolled oats to the pot and filled the pot to the corresponding water/liquid line for porridge. While it took 30 minutes to get there, the porridge consistency was spot on.
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The Steam function, too, provided great results. For steaming, you add water to the steam line in the pot, then place the steam basket into the pot. We followed the recipe for a soft-boiled egg, adding two eggs to the basket. For steaming, there’s some preheating required. While it doesn’t tell you how long preheating takes, the digital display shows when the rice cooker is preheating and beeps when finished. We were concerned this preheat time would impact cooking, as the eggs were in the basket during that time, and it wasn’t accounted for in its six minutes of cooking time, but the results were excellent. The egg yolk was runny and yellow, the white cooked but not overdone.
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Again, following a recipe from the provided book, we made the Slow Cooked Sunday Sauce, which utilises the Sauté and Slow Cooker modes. We found the pot’s width to be somewhat of a restriction here. The recipe advises cooking your meat in batches, and we did, but there wasn’t a huge amount of room to ensure our chuck beef could layer along the bottom without several batch cooks.
The pot prioritizes depth capacity, so don’t expect it to act as a de facto hob in Sauté mode. After sautéeing our meat and veg in several batches and adding the necessary ingredients, we set the appliance to Slow Cook for four hours. After four hours, the sauce itself was delicious. However, the fat on the beef chuck hadn’t rendered, despite braising, and we were left with inedible, chewy fat on our meat. It’s a shame, because the meat was otherwise cooked well, though not necessarily melt-in-your-mouth.
The best results we got by a mile, however, were for cake. Of all things. We were understandably very sceptical of a rice cooker’s ability to bake a cake. We followed the Chocolate Cake with Chocolate Buttercream Frosting recipe in the book, which requires making the batter separately before pouring it into the greased inner pot and selecting the Cake mode. After 70 minutes, we had a (slightly oddly shaped) chocolate cake that was delicious. The cake was moist but not wet and somehow light. In my husband’s words: “It’s the best chocolate sponge I’ve ever had.”
The Cosori 5L Rice Cooker is a mixed bag when it comes to performance, but we’re particularly disappointed in its rice-cooking abilities. You potentially could, with some experimentation (like adding more water than suggested), get better results, but if you want a rice cooker that makes perfect, fluffy rice each time, this may not be the appliance for you.
Should you buy the Cosori 5L Rice Cooker?
|
Attribute |
Notes |
Score |
|---|---|---|
|
Value |
This rice cooker is good value for what it offers, but competitor products offer better performance for the same price range. |
4/5 |
|
Design |
A dream to clean and use, this appliance is quiet and easy to use. |
5/5 |
|
Performance |
We had subpar results with rice cooking and a mixed bag when it came to other cooking modes. |
3.5/5 |
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