First off, I'm defining "good food" rather strictly. Something you'd see in a chef-owned restaurant, where the chef either went to culinary school or worked in prestigious restaurants. (Cooking, like programming, can be learned without school.) I'm not saying they have to have a Michelin star, but they have to be making a real effort to make good food, so not Olive Garden. Most of the people who disagree with me simply don't like my definition of good food (and perhaps find it snobbish) which is totally fine.
So imagine you took a list of everything on those menus, and started filtering out anything using a technique a rice cooker is incapable of. I suppose my statement might not be literally true, there might still be SOMETHING left on the list, but we'd be talking less than a percent.
There are a number of things you just can't do (I think) in a rice cooker that you do at least one of in pretty much every dish you'd see at such a restaurant. You can't cook something at more than one temperature, for instance. You can't cook at any temperature above or below 100 celsius. You can't get a Maillard reaction (the browning of a steak or toast and it's associated flavors) or caramelization to happen. Right there you've knocked out almost everything cooked that you'll see on such a menu.
You can't roast or sear or sautee anything. A rice cooker cooks only with conduction in a wet environment. (I'm assuming convection occurs too when there's still enough liquid in the pot.) It's too hot to simmer and too cold to braise.
Even one pot dishes (and anything that isn't a one pot dish, which is the vast majority of the food I've described, is out by definition unless you have numerous rice cookers) usually take multiple steps. For instance toss the chicken in to brown, remove, sweat some onions, toss in some peppers, put in some plum tomatoes and white wine, raise the heat a little to deglaze and burn off the alcohol, lower the heat, add the chicken back in, braise. Etc. (Season the chicken with salt and a little piment d'esplette in the beginning and you've got poulet basquaise! You're welcome HN.)
So what can you do in a rice cooker? Boil stuff, that's it. You rarely in any decent restaurant will be served something that has had nothing done to it but boiling, in fact, I can't think of anything and like I said, I'm a foodie. I travel around a lot and have been to a lot of restaurants.
By the same token, you can't cook soup in a deep fryer or tea in a sauce pan.
I probably wouldn't cook a fish in a rice cooker. But I've cooked a meal of chopped and deboned chicken legs, glutinous rice, fresh crushed garlic, salt, fresh crushed pepper, chopped green onions right from my garden, and a few fresh ginger slices in a 10 year old cheapo rice cooker that was a great accompaniment to my butter pan fried basa (dried for a couple hours, then salt and liberal pepper and paprika'd). The butter helps with the Maillard reaction ;)
My chef friend asked for the recipe.
Entire meal prep was probably a total of 15 minutes, active cook time probably less than 15, rice cooker spent an hour or so working on the rice and chicken.
There's literally nothing wrong with boiling meat. It's a perfectly cromulent cooking technique. You just have to know what you are doing. Boiled meat dishes have been royal court food for thousands of years in some places.
The French (God bless 'em) just never got it down.
"There's literally nothing wrong with boiling meat. It's a perfectly cromulent cooking technique. You just have to know what you are doing. Boiled meat dishes have been royal court food for thousands of years in some places."
I second this motion: boiled (at least 2 hours) meat plus an appropriate base (rice, pasta) and sauce along with a steamed or boiled vegetable makes a wonderful and absolutely foolproof meal. Be sure to cook the meat to the point where it just begins to fall apart.
Meat: the cheapest cuts from the local market, with or without bones (the meat will fall off the bone).
Base: rice, any pasta, Ramen noodles prepared as you wish.
Sauces: anything that appeals, from plain soy sauce to Ramen noodle flavor packets to prepared pepper sauces from the local Chinese market (esp. Szechuan pepper sauces).
First off, I'm defining "good food" rather strictly. Something you'd see in a chef-owned restaurant, where the chef either went to culinary school or worked in prestigious restaurants. (Cooking, like programming, can be learned without school.) I'm not saying they have to have a Michelin star, but they have to be making a real effort to make good food, so not Olive Garden. Most of the people who disagree with me simply don't like my definition of good food (and perhaps find it snobbish) which is totally fine.
So imagine you took a list of everything on those menus, and started filtering out anything using a technique a rice cooker is incapable of. I suppose my statement might not be literally true, there might still be SOMETHING left on the list, but we'd be talking less than a percent.
There are a number of things you just can't do (I think) in a rice cooker that you do at least one of in pretty much every dish you'd see at such a restaurant. You can't cook something at more than one temperature, for instance. You can't cook at any temperature above or below 100 celsius. You can't get a Maillard reaction (the browning of a steak or toast and it's associated flavors) or caramelization to happen. Right there you've knocked out almost everything cooked that you'll see on such a menu.
You can't roast or sear or sautee anything. A rice cooker cooks only with conduction in a wet environment. (I'm assuming convection occurs too when there's still enough liquid in the pot.) It's too hot to simmer and too cold to braise.
Even one pot dishes (and anything that isn't a one pot dish, which is the vast majority of the food I've described, is out by definition unless you have numerous rice cookers) usually take multiple steps. For instance toss the chicken in to brown, remove, sweat some onions, toss in some peppers, put in some plum tomatoes and white wine, raise the heat a little to deglaze and burn off the alcohol, lower the heat, add the chicken back in, braise. Etc. (Season the chicken with salt and a little piment d'esplette in the beginning and you've got poulet basquaise! You're welcome HN.)
So what can you do in a rice cooker? Boil stuff, that's it. You rarely in any decent restaurant will be served something that has had nothing done to it but boiling, in fact, I can't think of anything and like I said, I'm a foodie. I travel around a lot and have been to a lot of restaurants.