Beth Hensperger and Julie Kaufmann's The Ultimate Rice Cooker Cookbook offers 250 timesaving, convenient, and healthy recipes for making everything from simple white rice to full-course meals. This cookbook proves the rice cooker--which tends to have a bad rap as a never-opened or oft-neglected wedding gift--can be surprisingly versatile: not only does it prepare your rice, it can be used for every dinner course--salad, soup, vegetable, entree, and even dessert.

There is a complete buying and cooking guide for the many rice varieties, as well as other whole grains such as barley, millet, wheat berry, and quinoa. Many of the recipes provide convenient alternative cooking methods for traditional dishes like Italian risottos (the Italian Sausage Risotto is wonderful). Hensperger and Kaufmann show the rice cooker can also work miracles for hot breakfast cereals and porridges with such recipes as Hot Fruited Oatmeal. Delightful main courses include Steamed Ginger Salmon and Asparagus in Black Bean Sauce, and the meal is done almost exclusively within the rice cooker for simple preparation and cleanup. The dessert section has many ideas beyond the expected Old-Fashioned Rice Pudding--the Poached Pears with Grand Marnier Custard Sauce is one elegant and sophisticated example. Both authors of this cookbook are seasoned food writers and this combined effort gives tasty, easy, and healthy recipes that will motivate you to use what has been, until now, an underutilized appliance. --Teresa Simanton


From Library Journal
Hensperger is well known as the author of a dozen or so books on bread. Here, she and Kaufmann, food editor of the San Jose Mercury News, show just how versatile a simple rice cooker can be. They start with rice, of course, providing an excellent guide to the numerous varieties now available and cooking directions. Included are recipes for dozens of rice dishes from risotto to sushi and a chapter on other grains. There are also recipes that use the cooker to steam vegetables, main dishes, dim sum, and tamales, and readers will find a good assortment of desserts, from silky custards to creamy puddings. Other books, such as Stephanie Lyness's Cooking with Steam (o.p.), have focused on various aspects of "steam cuisine," but Hensperger and Kaufmann's is far more ambitious and wide-ranging. For most collections. Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Ever-advancing technology continues to transform kitchen techniques and processes. The rice cooker has been on the market for many years, but its appeal outside those communities traditionally dependent on rice was limited. New models of the rice cooker employ "fuzzy logic" in order to duplicate the intuitive techniques of the best rice cooks. As Beth Hensperger and Julie Kaufmann point out in The Ultimate Rice Cooker Cookbook, these machines' usefulness extends beyond merely making perfect white rice. These high-tech gizmos also produce risotto, polenta, chili, soup, and puddings, often better than traditional methods. The authors have developed recipes for foods as diverse as Indian lamb biryani, Spanish paella, Japanese sushi, Mexican frijoles, French lentils, English steamed pudding, and American split pea soup. Anyone whose use of this appliance has been limited solely to rice will find much to take advantage of here. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Rice cookers are ideal for the way we cook today. Versatile and convenient, they feature simple, one-button technology, they don't take up much room on a countertop, and they are a breeze to clean. But best of all, their closed-environment, slow-cook method locks in delicious, juicy flavors. Now, The Ultimate Rice Cooker Cookbook unlocks the true potential of the rice cooker, an appliance invented in postwar Japan and used daily by millions throughout the world to prepare a staple food. Rice is the most popular grain on the planet, and there is an amazing array available on today's supermarket shelves, from basic long-grain American white rice and brown rice to short-grain Asian and European rices to truly exotic varieties such as Bhutanese red, Indian Kalijira, and Chinese black Forbidden Rice. The Ultimate Rice Cooker Cookbook includes foolproof cooking instructions for preparing every type of rice you will encounter, plus all manner of grains and beans. But rice cookers can do so much more than produce perfectly cooked rice.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal