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It was ingenious, but crude: rustic wooden tubs lined with aluminum filaments. Instead of a sleek radio, it was an electric rice cooker. This led to the fledgling company’s very first invention. Their payment for fixing radios often partly consisted of uncooked rice. However bright the future was, Ibuka’s engineers lived in post-war Japan.
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The next year, Ibuka wrote down the words that would become iconic to the company that in 1958 would become known as Sony: “Purpose of incorporation: Creating an ideal workplace, free, dynamic, joyous.” In 1945, while war-torn Japan faced years of rebuilding, an engineer named Masaru Ibuka opened a radio workshop, choosing as his first headquarters an abandoned telephone-switchboard room in a vacant department store. In fact, one iconic Japanese company had an early stumble due to bad rice. And people are very, very picky about how their rice should be.” Other ideal elements include a sticky texture, separate grains, and a lot of moisture: all hard to obtain, says Itoh, “without any automated way to do it. “With Japanese rice, what you’re looking for is for some of the starch to almost convert to sugar so that it tastes rather sweet,” explains Itoh. But rice cookers for the home were still years away, and there was a high bar to clear. In the 1930s, the Japanese military deployed a multi-cooker for the field. The dawn of the rice cooker, Itoh notes, started in 1923 when Mitsubishi Electric released a simple industrial model. (A contemporary restaurant in Nara, Japan, offers a kamado-cooking experience that starts with 15 minutes of pumping a bellows to fan the flames.) For centuries, Japanese cooks prepared rice upon kamado stoves. “And that, with a wood-burning stove, is very difficult.” Each day, Japanese women rose at dawn and labored for several sweaty hours to make rice. Cooking rice this way, says columnist and food writer Makiko Itoh, takes heat modulation: high heat until the water and rice boils, then low heat, then high heat again. In fact, it took decades of inventive leaps, undertaken by some of the biggest names in Japanese technology.įor centuries, most Japanese cooks made rice with a kamado, a box-shaped range topped with a heavy iron pot. But creating an automatic rice cooker was not so easy. So long as you add water and rice in the right proportions, it’s nearly impossible to mess up, as the machines stop cooking at exactly the right point for toothsome rice.
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The automatic rice cooker is a mid-century Japanese invention that made a Sisyphean culinary labor as easy as measuring out grain and water and pressing a button. “World War Two is over, use technology!” he admonished viewers in a follow-up on his Instagram. In a recent viral video, Malaysian comedian Nigel Ng reacted dramatically to a BBC personality cooking rice with a saucepan rather than using a rice cooker. But for others, making rice is as easy as pressing a button. Without a keen sense of timing, you end up with undercooked grains. Add too much water and you end up with porridge. This article has been viewed 375,014 times.Cooking rice on a stovetop can be fraught. This article received 36 testimonials and 89% of readers who voted found it helpful, earning it our reader-approved status. WikiHow marks an article as reader-approved once it receives enough positive feedback. There are 8 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. Eric holds a BA in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and an MEd in secondary education from DePaul University. He was the winner of the Paul Carroll award for outstanding achievement in creative writing in 2014, and he was a featured reader at the Poetry Foundation’s Open Door Reading Series in 2015. His digital chapbook, The Internet, was also published in TL DR Magazine. A former educator and poet, his work has appeared in Carcinogenic Poetry, Shot Glass Journal, Prairie Margins, and The Rusty Nail. Eric McClure is an editing fellow at wikiHow where he has been editing, researching, and creating content since 2019. This article was co-authored by wikiHow staff writer, Eric McClure.