Sanyo ECJ-N55W 5-1/2-Cup Electric Rice Cooker

Sanyo ECJ-N55W 5-1/2-Cup Electric Rice Cooker with Porridge/Soup Cooker and Steamer

I really like this Sanyo ECJ-N55W 5-1/2-Cup Rice Cooker. Everything that I have cooked in it has turned out great, including brown rice. The catch is that you must soak it for 2 hours before you start cooking. I use it frequently! It is kind of a hassle to wipe off around the steam vent, but other than that, I have noticed no problems with it. My wife and I make rice around once a week, so we use the machine a lot.


Some people say the ECJ-N55W is hard to clean, but I don't understand such complaints. I've made use of it around fifty times and have have never had to do anything more than wipe it down. The pot is really easy to clean it's shocking. Recently I read some that said bad things about these no-stick coatings - so I'm hoping I can find a stainless steel insert for it.
If I could buy it all over again, I would make sure to find something stainless. But for now I have this unit, and it works great. I have few other complaints about it.

In the past I used some Tiger rice cookers that were sold at the Asian supermarket. But those are quite high priced. This Sanyo cooks rice very nicely. One little problem is that it seems to not have good ventilation so the rice begins to get soggy after just using the warming function for about an hour. This is strangely different from the usual problem with warming features - that rice usually gets scorched and crusty. I will continue to look for a higher grade one, but for now this is a good interim rice cooker.

This is essentially a basic rice cooker with a vegetable-steamer insert. It doesn't have a separate brown rice preset function. You can make brown rice, but you have to soak the rice beforehand. Not perfect for an on-the-go lifestyle. On top of that, the water-level measuring lines on the inner-bowl are difficult to see because they are the same color (dark gray) as the bowl itself. That's no biggy, this is still a good simple rice cooker for this price range, but I thought I'd point that out.