"You cannot cook anything good in a rice maker anymore than you can a microwave except, of course, rice."
Apparently you are unfamiliar with Sous-Vide cooking style. I've only recently discovered it, and I have been making the best chicken I've ever tasted.
Sous-Vide (roughly french for under-vacuum), is a technique whereby you vacuum seal the food you wish to cook in a bag (usually proteins, but veggies will work too). You then cook this sealed food in water at the precise temperature you wish the center to be. In other words, I want my chicken to be 148F through out, so I get the water temperature steady at 148F (with chicken in place). You have to cook it for a longer time to be sure it is safe to eat, but man is it worth it. There are charts out there that show the time-vs-temperature relation for safe cooking.
After you have cooked it long enough, you can leave it in the water until guests arrive. Then do the final prep. For me this means heating a pan to about 400F with oil and seasoning and then quickly searing the chicken. Or sometimes I'll shred the chicken for a caserole.
It's marvelous.
I do this on a gas stove top, which requires practice to keep the temperature level, but you can buy a machine to do it for you. High end restaurants use these to perfectly cook a steak, and then do a final sear. Sous-Vide Supreme is one brand I know.
However if you wish to do it yourself, all you need is a simple rice cooker with an on off switch and a PID temperature controller. You can buy a PID controller, or make one yourself with arduino.
It's really a fantastic way to cook. Best food ever. From a rice cooker.
I am familiar with sous-vide, but it is very much not a rice cooker. That's like saying assembly is the same as Python.
A good poly-science costs what, $700? I did see a cool-looking immersion circulator on Kickstarter for I think under $200 a few months back, I should try to find it again.
And you still need to rip and char at the end for maillard reactions! But yeah, they're bad ass. Easiest way to poach an egg too.
Hook a $100-ish PID controller up to the rice cooker. (Personally I hook it up to a crockpot but, more or less, same difference--some say a big rice cooker is actually better for this than a crock pot.) You do of course, need, a vacuum sealer as well although you can experiment with ziplocks that you've squeezed the air out of.
I'm actually not really a sous vide religious convert. But I did put together a setup and, for certain types of food, it's actually really convenient.
You don't need to circulate the water in a rice cooker. You do get more variation in temperature than you would get with a real circulator, but it's not enough to matter unless you're doing fussy egg cooking. For most cooking, a noncirculated rice cooker water bath worked just great for me.
The only people who really need Polyscience circulators are restaurants and food service professionals. The advantage of the Polyscience circulator over the $200-$300 alternatives (or the $100-150 Auber DIY setups, or the $50-75 full DIY setups) is mostly volume. If you need to queue up 100 servings of protein every day, the cheap setup isn't going to cut it, and also poses HACCP issues.
I use an Auber PID [1] with a crockpot. I "vacuum" seal by submerging food in ziploc baggies in a sink full of water. It all works fine, I've never felt like I needed to drop hundreds of dollars on fancy equipment.
Apparently you are unfamiliar with Sous-Vide cooking style. I've only recently discovered it, and I have been making the best chicken I've ever tasted.
Sous-Vide (roughly french for under-vacuum), is a technique whereby you vacuum seal the food you wish to cook in a bag (usually proteins, but veggies will work too). You then cook this sealed food in water at the precise temperature you wish the center to be. In other words, I want my chicken to be 148F through out, so I get the water temperature steady at 148F (with chicken in place). You have to cook it for a longer time to be sure it is safe to eat, but man is it worth it. There are charts out there that show the time-vs-temperature relation for safe cooking.
After you have cooked it long enough, you can leave it in the water until guests arrive. Then do the final prep. For me this means heating a pan to about 400F with oil and seasoning and then quickly searing the chicken. Or sometimes I'll shred the chicken for a caserole.
It's marvelous.
I do this on a gas stove top, which requires practice to keep the temperature level, but you can buy a machine to do it for you. High end restaurants use these to perfectly cook a steak, and then do a final sear. Sous-Vide Supreme is one brand I know.
However if you wish to do it yourself, all you need is a simple rice cooker with an on off switch and a PID temperature controller. You can buy a PID controller, or make one yourself with arduino.
It's really a fantastic way to cook. Best food ever. From a rice cooker.