ELI5- how do rice cookers know how long to cook the rice for no matter the different quantities
In: Other
The premise is a bit wrong, the short eli5 is it depends and some really do have just a stupid timer.
Most basic ones that use more than a timer will just stop heating (or turn into keep warm mode) when no more water is present. It is either detected by a sharp rise in temperature, finally being able to go above the boiling point of water, or using something a bit more fancy like steam detection.
The really advanced ones however have more complex logic. One reason is that they need it because they use a much heavier cooking vessel like a fat cast iron pan, and if you did that you’d end up burning the rice on the bottom (just try it, even if you remove it from the heat it stays hot for a while), but it is used to give even heating to the whole bowl of rice (instead of only a heating element on the bottom that barely gets the tiny sides hot). They can measure how much rice you put in and let you select between different modes, some keep pressure high for faster cooking. The fancy ones can get quite expensive and obviously most people are not going to feel like spending as much as an iPhone on a rice cooker, and nobody is going to do teardowns to show how they work cause it’s a lot harder to reverse engineer.
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