One other thing: most previous models clicks right off after cooking cycle is done to save electricity. This Aroma Professional rice cooker doesn’t turn itself off. It remains on purpose, so just be aware of that prior to use.
There are a lot of buttons to set different options and use different types of grain on the control panel. For your initial trial run you chose brown rice, so the machine lit up with red bars indicating it was starting. Cooking a single cup of rice in appliance ended up taking roughly fifty minutes. That seemed like too long for me than just a single cup.
Managing the Heating Cycle
You may be tempted to keep an eye on timer as it counts down, afraid that you’ll forget about your food in there and burn it. But you’ll still need to watch it; you’ll hear a beep once your food has finished cooking but the unit stays on and won’t shut itself off.
Unlike earlier models of these cookers, which shut off automatically after beeping, this one won’t shut off for you. It just keeps right on heating until you shut it off yourself.
The screen doesn’t turn off; it shifts to display 0 minutes left and the lights flash indicating that it’s in a different mode. Without further user input, the cooker moves immediately into keep warm mode. That is, the heating element kicks back on to keep rice nice and hot, which use power.
When you lift the lid, your grains should be fluffy, not scorched on bottom, which makes sense since you can peek at them. Another sign are steam rising from the pot, which means the food is still hot inside.
If serving now, this is good; otherwise it’s wasting energy (even if it keeps your food warm for hours). In this setting, you can see what the timer does. It doesn’t freeze on one number; it continues to count upwards on digital display. Eleven minutes later, and there’s time displayed.
So we know that the cooker isn’t losing heat, it’s keeping it up.
If you’re looking to conserve a little bit of energy (or maybe you’re worried about fire safety as you leave the kitchen), it can be frustrating to realize that the machine has no self-shutoff feature. This one doesn’t: you have to take matters in your own hands. It’s an easy thing to forget, especially since most machines operate in another way.
To turn off the heater, simply press the Power Button located on the control panel. When pressed, it disconnects both the display and the heating element. All the red LED lights turns off instantly.
To double check that the unit is still on, remember there’s no automatic shutoff; you’ll need to press the power button manually to ensure your rice doesn’t dry out. You should of checked this earlier.
In case you turn it off prematurely (which you can easly do), no problem: simply double-press the power button and it will switch back to keep warm mode, so your rice don’t cool down. This gives you peace of mind.
Initially, it will take a bit to get used to not having an auto-shutoff. If you forget, your rice will dry out and you’ll waste electricity until you turn it off manually. After a few weeks, however, you’ll learn to leave the unit on by default so turning it off will became second nature.
