If you want white rice, the Instant Pot can make a batch that’s just fine if you’re not too discerning. If you want brown rice, the Instant Pot is not for you—in our tests, the Instant Pot made dense rice that was far less fluffy than a batch from the Cuckoo. Low-price cookers are often single-switch on/off affairs, with a simple lid like the kind you’d put on a saucepan. But the has an insulated lid to hold in steam and keep food warm for hours. And unlike other $50 cookers, this machine has advanced functions such as settings for brown rice and quick-cooked rice.
Moreover, you still need to go through the trouble of filling up your coffee maker each day and pressing the Ready to Brew button before you can control it remotely. To brew with voice commands or the Alexa app, you must first fill your machine with water and ground coffee, then press Ready to Brew. A green light next to the Ready to Brew button will illuminate, indicating the machine is ready to be controlled remotely. If you forget to press the Ready to Brew button, you won’t be able to control the coffee maker by voice or through the Alexa app, which is frustrating. The hamilton beach air fryer Single-Serve Blender is a personal blender that doesn’t perform very well.
The $89.99 hamilton beach air fryer Smart Coffee Maker is compact, easy to set up, and works as advertised, letting you use Alexa voice commands to turn it on and off, and set the brew strength to regular or bold. You can also use Alexa Routines so it automatically brews your coffee at a specific time each day. If you use the jar’s full capacity, it takes nearly five minutes to achieve the best results when blending ingredients like kale. You need to hold the button constantly to blend, which is annoying for such a long blend time, and it doesn’t smoothly process the ingredients. In previous testing, as much as we wanted to love the clay pot in the VitaClay 2-IN-1 Organic Rice ‘n’ Slow Cooker, we determined that this was not a cooker we would recommend for most people. Our rice stuck to the seasoned clay, and we found the nub of the scalding-hot interior lid difficult to grasp.
We like this Keurig because it’s a few steps above the original, for anyone who loves the ease of coffee pods but wants more special drinks, like lattes or mochas. It has a milk frother (for hot or cold milk), plus multiple temperature and strength settings. It can also be connected to your Wi-Fi and voice assistants like Alexa. Whether the Alexa-enabled model is worth its $65 markup over Hamilton Beach’s basic programmable coffee maker is debatable.
It’s certainly a cheap option—our recommendation for a saucepan usually costs around $50—but the process does require much more care and attention than using a rice cooker. Unlike other $50 cookers, this machine has advanced functions such as settings for brown rice and quick-cooked rice. The Zojirushi’s quick-cook setting made firm white rice that felt a little too al dente (it wasn’t nearly as good as the results from the Hamilton Beach or the Cuckoo). But we figure that if you really care about your rice, you’ll wait the extra 10 or 15 minutes it takes to churn out a delectable batch of grains.