Aroma Housewares Professional Plus ARC-5000SB 20 Cup (Cooked) Digital Rice Cooker, Food Steamer, Slow Cooker, Stainless Exterior/Nonstick Pot, Silver, Black, 10-cup uncooked/20-cup cooked/4QT

My husband and brother-in-law can eat! I didn’t want those little 5 cup rice cookers. I needed this. I’ve had it for almost a year now and it still works wonderfully and is very affordable for the amount it cooks. I love adding rice to a meal since it’s very filling and this is just so convenient. I cook on average 10 cups at dinner and it’s great. I put the rice to cook and focus on the main entree. I never used the measurement tool and just measured water by knuckle method or whatever you call it. My brother in law also used it and after awhile said he started to have to add more water to the rice than before or it’d get a little dry. He used the measurement tool exactly. It’s super simple to clean just make sure you wash your rice first or else the top gets nasty. Some people don’t wash their rice which is why I’m mentioning it.

So very easy to use. The directions explain any and everything you could wanna put in there. Plus, you can find plenty of alternative recipes online. I used to do mini rice in a bag to boil, but now this is my go to because it’s super easy to add flavors and chicken stock Chives and other ingredients to make rice peel off or flavored rice easily. Be sure to get the water levels right or it will not turn out correctly. That’s the same with every kind of rice though.

I often cook Asian-influenced dishes, which are inevitably accompanied by rice. Until purchasing this product, I used to cook rice manually in a conventional pot, but found that it was all too easy to overdo it, resulting in burned or stuck rice at the bottom of the pot; it required a lot of watching and stirring to insure that it didn't go wrong.The logical alternative was a rice cooker. While there are many inexpensive rice cookers available here at Amazon as well as in the usual stores like Walmart or Target, I looked carefully at the reviews, hoping to find a rice cooker that I could apply to other foods as well. This one stood out, and I'm delighted with it.It couldn't be simpler to use. I just drop a measured amount of rice and water into the non-stick interior pot, and press a button. 20-25 minutes later, it beeps, and the rice is cooked perfectly... no need to stir or watch. I can keep my attention on the stir-fry that I'm cooking, knowing that when the rice is done, the pot will switch to a 'keep warm' mode.I've also made oatmeal in this pot, and it works just as well. In addition to rice and oatmeal, there are other settings for brown or sushi rice, steaming, etc. The non-stick inside pot is easy to clean.

I don’t like cooking rice but I eat a lot of it so this is the perfect solution! Rinse rice, add to pot, add water and with no further effort or attention: perfect rice! The rice cooks perfectly every time, and the size allows me to cook a little or a lot. I have had no issues with leakage, and it’s super easy to clean. I love that the booklet includes instructions for cooking other things, like quinoa,bulgur, oats, etc., which also cook perfectly in it. Very versatile with the various functions and heat levels, I find it an excellent product and great value.

The Aroma Housewares ARC-5000SB Professional Plus multicooker is a very good multicooker.With that said, I've considered returning once and still may return. The reason I'm thinking about returning (no fault of the cooker) is the cooker is a little larger that I thought when I purchased it. I'm in the process of consolidating my countertop cookers. I have a rice cooker, a 1.5 quart slow cooker and a 3 quart slow cooker. All of these cookers are manual. I'm would like to ideally replace them with just one cooker as long as the cooker does an adequate job and fits well. When I bought this cooker, I was under the impression that this is a 4 quart cooker as that is what's listed by Amazon. But that's incorrect as this actually is a 5 quart cooker. So, it's a little large to sit on my counter top all the time.As for the cooker besides it size,, it has a logical layout of preset buttons. The ones I've use are brown rice, steam and slow cook. A main reason I bought this cooker is it has both a low and high setting on slow cook mode. I've tried two other cookers but each only had a single temperature setting. Once didn't slow cook hot enough and the other was too hot. It is nice to have a cooker that has both settings.The cooker includes an instruction booklet, a rice laddle, and a plastic steamer basket. The booklet is understandable (not broken English like in some). The rice laddle works fine. The steamer basket works well as for withstanding the heat but I did not notice the hole are a little large say if yo wish to steam older rice. Bits of rice might all through. Not too bad, but noticeable.A big disadvantage to this cooker (like so many) is the design of having a lid that doesn't detach for cleaning. The only part of the lid that detaches is the plastic vent underside the lide. This mean to clean the lid the popular way is the wipe down under the lid. I found that instead of wiping, I'd slowly have tilt the cooker about 90 degrees enough to put the lid under soapy water while taking care to not get any water in the cooking element. That approach works but is awkward to do.I was overall happy with the results of cooking with this multicooker. Brown rice turned out good (though not as good or fast as when I used a pressure cooker). The water markings on the inner pot were pretty much not readable so I had to add not referring to them. As a steamer, that turned out good too and it's nice to have preset 5,10, 15 minutes of steam time at a touch of a button. As a slow cooker, the cooker performed well in making spaghetti sauce started off first on low then changed to high for about the last two hours.Here is what I like and dislike of this multicooker:--------------------------------------------------------Likes:- low and high settings in slow cook mode that performed well- efficient pre-programmed buttons to press- stain steel outer covering- does a good job cooking brown riceDislikes:- non removeable, difficult to clean lid design- inner pot water markings not legible- inner pot not stainless steel- steamer basket not stainless steelThere are some shortcomings to the multicooker. The biggest one is the non-removeable lid that make the lid difficult to clean. But that's not enough to penalize a star since (unfortunately) that seems the consensus of most multicookers.The cooker does a great job as a cooker handling different tasks.Though I may end up returning and looking for something that better fits size wise on my countertop, I give the Aroma Housewares ARC-5000SB Digital five stars.