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Rice is one the most popular grains around the world and is a staple in many cultures. This is for good reason, too: it can act as the core element for many dishes, or be served as a side dish. If you love cooking rice to include with healthy meals, your choice of rice cooker decides not just how fluffy and aromatic your rice is, but also its health value.

While choosing the safest rice cooker, it is crucial to inspect all aspects that can potentially render your rice unsafe. Below, we dig into the varied factors for evaluating a healthy and safe rice cooker.

1. Avoid a Toxic Inner Pot

Common inner pots are made from either metal, ceramic, or clay as the core material. Some manufacturers use additives and glazes to make the raw material easier to work with and to insulate the core material from food. While this may improve appearance, these additives and glazes can leach their chemicals into the rice.

With metal inner pots, metals are innately reactive, so these can also leach and contaminate rice and grains while cooking. Ceramics contain hundreds of toxic chemicals, with less than 10% being actual clay mixed in. In contrast, 100% clay is naturally non-toxic in its purest form, but many choose impure clay or add chemicals/glazes in production.

In this instance, pure clay without additives becomes a clear winner for being non-toxic.

2. Ensure Nutrient-Friendly Cooking

Many rice cookers focus on cutting down cooking time, but they overlook the effects on nutrients. Harsh near-infrared heat emitting from a metal or ceramic inner pot damages nutrients, especially delicate ones like complex carbs.

Moreover, many lack a steam-management mechanism, instead venting it out. Steam contains important water-soluble nutrients which must be locked inside to fortify cooked food. A quality rice cooker would keep nutrients intact and use this crucial steam in the cooking process.

3. Find Multifunctional and Versatile Options

The ability to cook rice is great, but what about the dishes that complement it? Many rice cookers can only prepare rice. Some modern rice cookers come with functions that allow for cooking more than just rice, but more features come with increased costs, complex operation, and maintenance issues with all their parts. The best kind of rice cooker is more than its name: it can prepare your healthy steamed meals in a simple fashion at a reasonable cost.

Keep reading to discover how popular rice cookers stand on health safety.

Popular Rice Cooker Review Based on Health Value

Non-Teflon Rice Cooker: Responding to the health risks of PTFE and PFOA, some brands offer non-stick rice cookers without Teflon, instead coating the ceramic pot or stainless steel pot with a ceramic non-stick coating. However, as discussed above, chemical-laden ceramics are not safe for cooking, either.

Digital Rice Cooker: These come with a LCD screen with a programmable control panel. However, they are very expensive, and typically come with a stainless steel pot, which means they are far from healthy.

Stainless Rice Cooker: Featuring a one-touch operation and automatic keep warm function, a stainless steel rice cooker comes with a stainless steel inner pot. The use of a metal pot means it can contaminate food and damage nutrients. Some healthy cooks prefer to replace the insert with a healthier alternative.

All these choices appear to have problems that compromise the health safety of your rice. What works as the healthiest rice cooker, then? Here’s our recommendation:

MEC’s Pure Clay Cooking Pot: MEC (Miriam’s Earthen Cookware) is a US-based company that offers handmade pots and pans made from lab tested primary clay without additives and glazes. Besides being non-toxic, these versatile pots offer many healthy features like gentle earthen far-infrared heat cooking (read how this heat preserves nutrients), steam management (learn more), and faster and convenient cooking among their many healthy features.

On top of that, they offer a simple pot that can cook a wide variety of dishes in addition to rice and grains. They can function on any heat source as a slow cooker, Dutch oven, yogurt maker, and much more. They are easy to clean and maintain, and they can last for years.

If you are looking for the healthiest rice cooker to enjoy perfectly cooked rice without worrying about the health risk, then MEC is your best bet. Head over to their MEC Store and order a pot today to say goodbye to unhealthy or uncooked rice forever.

People Also Ask:

Which rice cooker does not use Teflon?

Ceramic inner cooking pots, ceramic-coated stainless steel pots, and pure clay pots do not generally use Teflon. Among these, MEC pots make the healthiest non-Teflon rice cooker, because they feature no harmful coating whatsoever.