Your £20 Rice Cooker Is Secretly the Best Chef in the House

Let's be honest about the rice cooker. Most of us own one, and most of us use it exactly once a week — usually on a Wednesday when we've got a jar of sweet chilli sauce going spare and nothing else in the fridge. The rest of the time it sits on top of the fridge like a neglected bread maker.

This is a waste of a very good machine. Because here's the thing nobody tells you when you buy one from Argos or nab it from a housemate who's emigrating: the rice cooker isn't a rice machine. It's a low-effort, self-regulating, one-button cooking pot that happens to be brilliant at rice. Everything else it can do is a bonus.

Why the rice cooker wins at British kitchen life

British kitchens are small. Student flats, first-time-buyer galas, that rented place in Salford where the oven door doesn't fully close — the rice cooker doesn't care. It needs one plug socket and about the same counter space as a kettle.

It's also essentially unburnable. A basic cooker switches itself to 'keep warm' when the water runs out, which means you can forget about it entirely. Try that with a pan of rice on the hob and you'll be chiselling a carbon sculpture off the bottom of a Le Creuset at 10pm.

And unlike the oven, it doesn't heat the whole flat to Mediterranean temperatures in July, nor does it cost a fortune to run. Twenty minutes of a rice cooker uses a fraction of the energy of preheating the oven for a single tray of fish fingers. In the current climate — both the weather and the bills — that matters.

The Sunday trick: poached chicken, no watching

Hainanese-style poached chicken is the gateway drug. Put a whole chicken breast (or two thighs, skin on, bone in — better flavour) in the pot with a splash of Shaoxing wine, a couple of slices of ginger and a spring onion, then cover with water or light stock. Hit cook. When it clicks over to warm, leave it to sit for fifteen minutes. The chicken comes out silken, the poaching liquid becomes a proper stock, and you've made dinner with roughly forty seconds of effort.

Shred it, pour over a quick sauce of grated ginger, spring onion and hot oil, and serve with — naturally — rice, which you can cook in the same machine afterwards using the flavoured stock. Two courses, one appliance, zero stress.

Monday: steamed fish that tastes like a £30 restaurant

A steaming rack balanced over the rice (or a scrunched-up foil ring in an inch of water) turns your cooker into a proper steamer. Lay a couple of sea bass or pollock fillets on top with sliced ginger, a splash of light soy and a drizzle of sesame oil, and steam them while the rice cooks below. The fish picks up the ginger perfume and comes out more tender than anything you'd achieve in a screaming-hot oven.

Pollock works beautifully here and it's about a fiver from the fish counter at Tesco. Finish with a spoonful of crispy chilli oil and some coriander. Total active cooking time: two minutes.

Midweek: congee, the ultimate fridge-clearer

If you've got leftover roast chicken, a bit of bacon, or a sad-looking pak choi, you've got congee. One part jasmine rice to eight parts water or stock, whatever scraps you fancy stirred in, cook button pressed, walk away for an hour. What emerges is a silky, savoury porridge that costs about 40p a bowl and cures hangovers, colds and general Tuesday-ness in equal measure.

Top it with a jammy egg, some fried shallots from the Chinese supermarket, and a violent amount of white pepper. Congee purists, look away — we won't tell.

The curveball: cake

Yes, really. A basic butter sponge batter — equal weights of butter, sugar, flour and eggs — poured into a greased, lined rice cooker pot and cooked through one full cycle (plus a second cycle if it needs it) comes out golden, dense and gloriously moist, because the steam has nowhere to escape. It won't have the crust of an oven bake, but it will vanish faster. My niece requests the 'rice cake' over birthday cake now, which is either a compliment or a damning indictment of my oven.

A week, no oven required

• Monday: Ginger soy steamed pollock with rice
• Tuesday: Poached chicken rice, ginger-spring onion sauce
• Wednesday: Leftover chicken congee
• Thursday: Steamed dumplings from the freezer (we've tested plenty — you know the ones we rate) with a foil-tray rig
• Friday: Rice cooker chilli, ladled over fresh rice
• Saturday: Sponge cake, because you've earned it
• Sunday: Steamed veg and eggs over congee, a gentle reset before Monday

Which one to buy

If you're starting from scratch, don't overthink it. A basic £20–£30 model with just 'cook' and 'warm' does everything in this article — the fancy fuzzy-logic Japanese ones are lovely, but they're a luxury, not a requirement. The only non-negotiable is a decent capacity: 1.8 litres will feed four comfortably and still handle a solo congee night.

The oven's a lovely thing for a Sunday roast. But for the other six days of the week, the cheapest appliance in your kitchen might just be the hardest working one. Dust it off. Plug it in. Let it do the work.