Aroma Housewares 20 Cup Cooked (10 cup uncooked) Digital Rice Cooker, Slow Cooker, Food Steamer, SS Exterior (ARC-150SB),Black

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.

I wanted a large capacity specialty rice cooker but didn't want to pay $100 USD or more for one of a decent size. I thought for sure that a specialty rice cooker was the way to go for good rice so I avoided multi purpose units like this one thinking they'd leave water or even burn the rice. About 8 pages into my search later I gave up on a specialty cooker and then found this. It's the perfect combination of capacity, affordability and ease of use despite being the "Pro" version with lots of buttons. Why is it so great? Well, it came with EVERYTHING I need(rice measure cup, spatula, stirring ladle and even a steam tray for veggies, dumplings or meat) but I've also never had to monitor it or change the settings cause it has a "QUICK RICE" button. Contrary to the designation "QUICK RICE" it works on any kind of white rice and not just instant rice. As long as it's measured right it takes all the guesswork out of cooking rice. It has all the functionality you'd find in a specialty rice cooker despite being multi-purpose and even comes with a handy guide in the manual for how to properly use each of it's many settings on different foods and grains so if you keep it close by you'll never be without a reference. The best part is it cost only about $55 USD. Way better than spending $100+ just to cook rice. There's only 2 things about this cooker that I find slightly inconvenient and those are the automatic switch to "Hold Warm" setting and the removable tray meant to catch excess moisture is too small. There have been a few occasions where I've gotten distracted or sidetracked whilst cooking and come back to find a "crust" forming on the outer layer of the rice closest to the base of the pot or dried out rice on the very top cause the temperature of the "Hold Warm" feature is set too high. It's not really a necessary feature to have for pasta and grains anyway cause of the increased risk of accidental overcooking so the feature should be optional or at least not automatically programed into the settings for pasta and grains. This is also a slow cooker so it makes sense it would have the feature but only with the right settings. Manufacturing-wise it's a rather obvious and serious flaw to have since these are designed as multi-cookers. Has anyone ever left perfectly Al-Dente Pasta In a hot, moist pot and come back to STILL Perfectly Al-Dente Pasta? I highly doubt such an event has ever occurred or WILL ever occur. Rice is just as fragile in texture when cooked it goes from "Springy" to "Pastey" in the blink of an eye. As for the tray I've had it overflow on me several times. It's a pretty big sealed cooker it should have a tray that holds at least a half cup of liquid but this one tops out at about 1/4 cup if not less. I haven't measured it exactly but just eyeballed it over the few years I've had it. I don't mind it cause it's just water and as long as it's not on a wooden counter top it won't cause any damagr but it can be annoying cause the tray is meant to prevent that from happening as well preserve the exterior finish.

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.