Customer Reviews

Panasonic SR-NA18 10-Cup Rice Cooker/Warmer with Advanced Fuzzy Logic Technology

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have this 10 cup SR-NA18 rice cooker for over a year now. I got it when it just came out. I was going to wait to see some reviews before I decided, but oh well, I just bought it. It works great! Excellent I would say. I'm Asian (we eat rice every day!!) Everything comes out just right. White rice comes out soft, steamed rice comes out tender and sticky (using the steamer) The trick is I kindda put more water than they recommend (just a little bit)

A+ for easy to clean. Parts are easy to take in and out. I clean it real good every single time I use it. No one can tell it's year old (even I use it everyday)

This is a kind of rice cooker we use in Asia. Highly recommended!


- Chef, Mom to be, and a house wife

I have the 5.5 cup version of this for 2+ years now and I loved it. I bought this 10 cup version as a gift. The 10 cup version seems to be slightly better in not bubbling nearly as much starch protein into the lid creating a filmy mess up there. I can say if you are interested in this type of quality rice cooker, the larger 10 cup version is worth the extra cost.

I bought this particular rice cooker-steamer because it is the same brand that Jessica Seinfeld used on the Oprah show. It's a great machine. My only complaints are about the depth of the steamer basket and the instructions for cooking. The instructions are not very good for actually cooking the rice. The only recipe that came with the machine was for chocolate cake! I ended up buying a rice cooker recipe book and have been very pleased with the results. Also, I wish the steamer basket was deeper. I could not fit an entire head of cauliflower in the basket.

I was a little skeptical of buying a rice cooker from an electronic company like Panasonic, but after buying the ZOJIRUSHI NS-MYC18 Rice Cooker, I needed a better cooker that could keep rice longer than 1 day. My family had a prior Zojirushi rice cooker for 10 years before it quit working, so I bought the NS-MYC18 thinking it had the same quality craftsmanship and was disappointed with how lowsy it maintained the rice after 1 day. One day = crusty rice. 2 days = rock hard rice with smell. 3 days = spoiled rice. Resulting in unsanitary clean up. The Panasonic, on the other hand is able to cook rice fluffy and so far has been able to maintain the rice up to 3 days with limited drying, and no crust has formed yet. I don't like to keep rice longer than 3 days, but I wouldn't be surprised if this excellent product was able to keep edible rice a couple more days. I only had this product for 4 days, so the only question is how long the product will last me. Here's hoping that it will last as long as my prior Zojirushi, which was made with higher quality parts than my second Zojirush purchase. I would highly recommend this product to consumers that eat rice on a daily basis and expect more than 1 day from their rice cooker.

Once I got past the confusing booklet of instructions, the Panasonic SR-NA18 was easy to use. This is a good product with a really bad info booklet. I tried 3 different kinds of rice and it cooked each well. I even baked a cake with not great results. If using a cake mix, you would have to pour only half the batter into the heating bowl because otherwise the cake is undercooked. It's easier and quicker to bake in your oven. Clean-up is a breeze. All parts are removable and easy to clean. The retractable cord is the best I've seen on any appliance . I would recommend this product.

Use it daily for 6m now. Very easy to use. Two timer can be setup earily so it can finish cooking at the time specified (say breakfast and/or dinner). It can keep rice warm for 3+ days w/o causing rice drying. We had a early model from Panasonic w/ similar function which had served us very well for 15+ yrs. Believe it or not, Panasonic has been using this Fuzzy Logic tech for quite some time, and it's just great. My only complain is the "portege" function is below-par compare w/ the early model we had. Overall, great rice cooker and I'm pretty sure it'll last many yrs to come. Panasonic brand w/ control function (v.s. dummy start/stop button) rice cooker will be the only one I recommend.

Pro: It works wonderfully well. I don't leave rice for more than two days, but obviously the rice gets a little bit drier as times goes by (I would be surprised if it didn't). For two day, however, the effect is very small.
We used both long, medium rice, brown, and Japanese type rice. The brown rice mode takes a long time.
Update: after almost three years, two things happened: 1) rice becomes drier fast (I'm guessing b/c the rubber that seals the pan when closed is getting old); 2) internal pan has three small spots where the non-stick coat is gone (wash very carefully to make it last longer).

I'm new to rice cookery. I actually was first motivated to get one based on recommendations of using the porridge cycle to make steel cut oatmeal, which relies on using the porridge cycle. I wanted something with good capacity, because I typically make oatmeal once a week and eat it reheated all week (with steel cut oats you can get away with that :) ).

I also figured I'd jump in whole hog and get The Ultimate Rice Cooker Cookbook, which is highly recommended.

The cookbook arrived first, since they came from different locations, and I spent the last 4 days pouring over it, looking to see what I might want to try when the cooker arrived. Many of the recipes implicity or explicitly note to start with the recipes that came with your cooker so you can get a feel for how it works. The porridge cycle recipes, and there are several, all refer to "THE Porridge Cycle". There are comments in many places about referring to your manual. All of this set me up for high expectations about the manual for when the machine arrived today.

Unfortunately, it comes nowhere close to living up to the expectations. I guess that if I already knew what I was doing, this is probably a fantastic rice cooker. But the manual is not terribly well translated, and the translations are all intermixed in a style that isn't even consistent (i.e. two pages of english, two of french, two of one asian script, two of another....then two pages with all four languages laid out horizontally across the page....then back to alternating pages). It says that there are 5 lengths of time you can set your porridge cycle to, with absolutely NO guidance as to which time might be appropriate for what use. There are no recipes, unless you count "make plain white rice" as a recipe.

With 5 possible porridge cycles, I'm at a loss for how to cook my oatmeal, much less anything else that goes beyond a basic cycle. The Panasonic website has no help that I could find. Google hasn't found me much guidance so far either....

Since the cookbook leaves it to your manual to explain the details of time, it doesn't provide any timing itself for the most part. That's not the author's fault, I don't think. It should be reasonable to expect an appliance manual to explain more than the obvious 'if you set the cooker to brown rice setting it will make brown rice'. Hopefully with some experimentation I will be happy with the cooker itself, but the manual is such little help I expect to ruin several batches of rice before I get there.

I've been using this rice cooker for over a year now. It's been serving us well.
All the good things have been said in previous reviews. Actually, there's not much to it. It's designed to make rice cooking simple, and it accomplishes that... mostly.
Here's a couple of oddities that have not been mentioned.
For white rice the normal (default) cooking time is about 55 minutes. However, there's an Express cycle, which does it in about 22 minutes. That's a significant difference, so I was curious to see what the difference was. We can tell absolutely no difference in the quality and taste of the rice. We always select the Express, but it takes extra button pushing. I wonder why the express is not the default.
The non-stick pot is great and easy to clean, but it seems they've forgotten (or tried to cut costs) to provide a US version of that part. Ours came with the markings (rice types and scales) all in Japanese. Does anybody else observe this?

I bought this rice cooker because of its timer function. The rice is now ready when we get home at night. In addition, the vapor doesn't spill to the counter like our previous $20 cooker.