Zojirushi NS-YSQ10: Expensive, but a brilliant rice cooker
Not everyone will want to spend this kind of money, but for perfect rice every time there's nothing better
Zojirushi makes superb, market-leading rice cookers, such as the Best Buy award-winning NS-TSQ10 which is excellent in almost every way. It’s not cheap though at just under £200, yet the NS-YSQ10 is even costlier at £269. Even we had our doubts about whether this rice cooker could justify such a high price, but the results speak for themselves.
Cooking performance
Short grain rice was cooked in just over 48 minutes, which is a considerable amount of time, but the restaurant-quality results were truly exemplary. Perfectly soft and fluffy throughout, there wasn’t a rough patch to be found. It had just the right of moistness – neither too dry nor too damp. This is a significant achievement as cooking short grain rice to the same standard manually is hard and the results here were even better than those achieved by the NS-TSQ10. The percentage difference in weight between the raw rice and water and the finished product was high at 23.9%.
Long grain rice cooked by the NS-YSQ10 was indistinguishable from that cooked by the NS-TSQ10. This isn’t something to complain about though – the moist, evenly cooked grains were fully separated and puffy soft too with only an occasional firm bite here and there. It did take a little longer to cook compared to its cheaper stable mate – just under 52 minutes versus 44 minutes, but variations in time are to be expected. Both Zojirushi rice cookers use a microchip and sensors to dynamically adjust the cooking time and temperature as needed.
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Keep warm mode and easy cleaning
The same smarts were used in the Keep Warm mode. Our batches of rice looked, smelt and tasted as if they had been freshly cooked, despite being kept overnight. None of the other rice cookers we’ve seen, apart from the NS-TSQ10, have been able to achieve this feat. Having high quality rice on tap isn’t a convenience to be overlooked if you have a busy household with lots of hungry mouths to feed throughout the day.
The rice cooking process produced very little mess, but the NS-YSQ10 is nonetheless easy to clean. The steam vent pops out of the top of the lid, while pressing a button releases the inner metal lid. The manual is excessively detailed, but it’s unlikely you’ll need to refer to it often. Although the onscreen menu is oddly arranged around the edges of a rectangle rather than as a list, it’s very easy to select the option you want using the clearly labelled controls.
Verdict
If money is no question, then the choice is clear – the Zojirushi NS-YSQ10 is the best rice cooker we’ve seen, producing truly brilliant results. Even so, the biggest difference between the NS-YSQ10 and the cheaper NS-TSQ10 is in the quality of the short grain rice. Unless you eat a lot of this type of rice, or just have very high standards, then the cheaper NS-TSQ10 is the better value option for most.