Sanyo ECJ-HC55S 5-1/2-Cup Micro-Computerized Rice Cooker and Slow Cooker, White Review
Sanyo ECJ-HC55S 5-1/2-Cup Micro-Computerized Rice Cooker and Slow Cooker, White
- Micro-computerized 5-1/2-cup rice cooker and slow cooker
- Steaming function with programmable timer; slow cook up to 12 hours
- LCD clock; keep-warm function; carrying handle for easy transport
- Includes tofu container, steaming tray, measuring cup, spatula, and recipes
- Measures approximately 13 by 10 by 8 inches
The latest in micro-computerized technology combines with innovation in this new multi-use kitchen appliance from Sanyo. Cook top quality rice dishes, slow cook stews or soups, steam veggies, boil eggs and even make tofu in this impressive machine! The unit includes two separate inner pots and inner lids to keep slow cooked dishes separate from rice, thereby maintaining the integrity of the rice flavor. To help the need for perfectly cooked rice, the 5.5 cup (11 cups cooked) rice cooker has a variety of multi-menu, one touch selections, including programs for white, brown, mixed, rinse-free, sushi and haiga rice. Depending on the program entered, automatic adjustments in the temperature and cooking times are done by the micro-computer chip technology in the cooker to insure great tasting rice. The steaming function steams veggies with a timer programmable for up to 58 minutes. It will also take on the tasks of a slow cooker. For cooking soups or stews, you can program slow cooking for
Rating: 
(out of 59 reviews)
List Price: $ 159.99
Price: $ 107.53
Review by R. Sprague for Sanyo ECJ-HC55S 5-1/2-Cup Micro-Computerized Rice Cooker and Slow Cooker, White
Rating:
Purchased this rice cooker for my wife. We are both enjoying it a lot. The parts are solid and simply feel like high quality. There are two bowls. The rice cooking bowl has a better non-stick coating on it. The other bowl for non-rice cooking is easy enough to clean, but might take a little soaking for those challenging situations.
Selection is easy to understand. The slow-cook options are partially what sold me on this unit. You can cook so many things in this cooker, because you can manually cook instead of always having to follow a programmed option.
Rice can be kept warm up to 12 hours. It has a great sealing system, so it does stay fresh.
The unit looks very nice on the counter. The battery runs the clock, unless you keep the unit plugged into the outlet. The battery is suppose to run for 4 years or so.
Quality of rice cooked — The rice has been PERFECT every time we have cooked rice. We are using a Jasmine rice bought from a local asian market. We simply wash the rice twice, put in the required amount of water, and set it to cook. So far it has been perfect each time.
I ended up buying this over the Zojirushi based on price and couldn’t be happier. I saved maybe a $100 and am 100% happy with the product. We’ve been using this for 3 weeks now.
Cleaning is easy and fast. The removable lid/seal is great and easy to clean. It is not possible to latch the cover if the removable cover is not in place — a nice feature and great engineering.
The steam collector works well. Be careful not to put your hand close to the exit hole as steam is not fully condensed coming out and could burn you. This is not really a safety concern for me and my wife. Cleaning the collector is not a problem so far. Simply remove and shake out the water. Any water dripping down is caught in a silicon seal. You can easily take a towl and soak up the very small amount of water that might drip out. It is only water and doesn’t mess anything up.
I would buy this over again based on my experience so far. Can’t speak about reliability yet. I can only hope Sanyo brand will be good. I don’t usually buy their products.
Review by William M. Hartke for Sanyo ECJ-HC55S 5-1/2-Cup Micro-Computerized Rice Cooker and Slow Cooker, White
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Spent way too much time researching the various brands and finally decided on the Sanyo due to the slow cooking option. The first day I tried simple Jasmine rice and it came out perfect. Next Day tried Botan ( Medium Grain) rice and once again it was cooked just like a resturant. Decided to try a simple slow cook chicken stew recipe from the internet, came out good and the slow cook function worked very well. Granted it’s only been a week since I’ve had it but I have to highly recommend it due to it’s versitility. Some of the feature that stand out for me are;
1. 12 hour clock ( not 24 hour like some brands)
2. Contacted Sanyo about changing Battery (clock) and it can be changed by the user without shipping to Sanyo. ( does take a little common sense though)
3. Comes with two pans, one for Rice, other for slow cook along with a steaming tray and tofu tray.
4. EASY TO USE!
5. Makes great rice! I don’t think I needed to spend more money for better taste.
6. Looks to be built well. For those who are wondering, it’s manufactured in China.
I’m very happy with this cooker!
Review by AK for Sanyo ECJ-HC55S 5-1/2-Cup Micro-Computerized Rice Cooker and Slow Cooker, White
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Sanyo ECJ-HC55S 5-1/2-Cup Micro-Computerized Rice Cooker and Slow Cooker, White
I have now used the Sanyo ECJ-HC55S about 50+ times since I bought it from Amazon. Hopefully, my review will help prospective buyers make an informed decision.
As of 2009, Sanyo is offering 3 types of 5-cup Sanyo rice cookers in this price range ($100 to $135). There’s the D55S, F50S, and HC55s. It was definitely a chore to sort through the marketing lingo and specs sheets. The final conclusions are as such: The D55s is at the low end of the spectrum, with fewer features and a thinner bowl. Both the F50S and HC55S occupy the slot above it. Between these two, the HC55S is the newer model. Features unique to it include: the tofu maker, the option to fine-tune rice texture (soft, regular, firm), and a dedicated slow cooker bowl. The HC55S also has low/hi mode for the slow cooking process. However, the older F50S retains one big advantage: Its rice cooker bowl is actually thicker (3.5mm vs 3.0mm). Thicker bowls are theoretically better at heat distribution. The thicker bowl explains why the F50S has a slightly smaller cooking capacity than the HC55S (5.0 cups vs 5.5 cups)
I decided to go with the HC55S, and it definitely exceeds my expectations. There are plenty of great things about this product, but it’s not perfect. I only have two complaints, and I will go over those first:
1. Non-stick bowl is only non-stick for white rice. I’ve cooked various white rice in this unit (Sticky Rice, Jasmine White) and the non-stick feature works as advertised. Very easy to clean. But brown rice is a different matter. I rinse my brown rice throughly 3-4 times, soak them for a few hours, before cooking. And every single time, there are little deposits that get encrusted to the bowl. I’ve used two types of brown rice (Thai Jasmine Brown, and Mahatma Brown) with the same results. And the hardened crust is DIFFICULT to clean up with a soft sponge! Soaking the bowl overnight doesn’t help either. I have had to resort to using the “rough” side of my sponge to lightly scrub the crusts off. This method quickly takes the crusts off… but I worry about the long term impact of lightly scrubbing the non-stick bowl.
2. My only other complaint? The unit is not designed to cook rice & steam vegetables simultaneously. It’s technically possible — there’s enough room in the bowl for the steamer and about 1.5 cups of rice. But the steamer tray doesn’t hang off the lid of the bowl. Instead, the plastic tray needs to sit on top of the rice. Making things more icky is the tray has 4 rubber feet on it — presumably to prevent scratching on the bowl. I am definitely not comfortable with the idea of having the plastic tray, the rubber feet, and my rice all submerged together in boiling water for the duration of the cooking process.
Those two are the only complaints I have with this unit. Everything else about the Sanyo ECJ-HC55s is fantastic. Rice comes out perfect — individual grains retain their consistency, and don’t come out as clumpy as they did with ordinary rice cookers. The unit is also highly efficient at retaining heat. Other than the little steam vent, there’s virtually no place for heat to escape the rice cooker. It is sealed extremely well — heat and moisture are perfectly contained. I don’t even bother using the “keep warm” function of the rice cooker. Even with the warmer function turned off, rice that was cooked at noon will remain perfectly moist and somewhat lukewarm at 6pm. This is a far cry from ordinary rice cookers I had been using for the past 30 years.
Computerized rice cookers are notorious for their sloooow cooking times, and the Sanyo ECJ HC55S is no exception. 1.5 cups of white rice takes about 45 minutes to cook, and brown rice needs about 90 minutes. When I bought this unit, I was definitely apprehensive about the long cooking times. But it turns out that it was no inconvenience at all. All I needed to do was adapt my routines to the new features offered by the HC55S. As a life-long rice eater, I had the habit of preparing rice about 30 minutes before lunch/dinner time. Given the long cooking times of these new rice cookers, I needed to alter my routine. I now use the timer function almost exclusively. Every night, I put the rice & water into the rice cooker at my leisure, and enter my approximate schedule into the panel (i.e. 11:30 AM tomorrow). And the next morning — like magic — I would find my rice freshly cooked at exactly 11:30 AM. Definitely very convenient. A precise schedule isn’t necessary though, since the unit is great at keeping the rice fresh for many hours after it’s cooked.
Overall, I highly recommend the Sanyo ECJ-HC55S. I would’ve given it 4.5 stars, but Amazon’s rating system doesn’t allow for 1/2 stars…
Review by delving mind for Sanyo ECJ-HC55S 5-1/2-Cup Micro-Computerized Rice Cooker and Slow Cooker, White
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This cooker replaced the National fuzzy logic that I had used at least 3-4 times a week for 5 years. With all the new rice cookers on the market it was hard to find one that had the features that I wanted, without a bunch that I didn’t need. I really don’t need to bake a cake in my rice cooker!! What I use the most are the slow cooker options and the rice options. I mostly make short grain brown rice and this model cooks it much faster than my old National. I also loved that this cooker came with an extra pan and lid for the slow cooker…which makes it a great value.
If it is important for you to know the length of the cook cycles, I suggest that you time them the first time you use them because the instruction booklet does not give the times for the cycles. My old National would show the length of the cycle when you started each cycle, i.e. when using the regular cycle it would show 43 minutes on the clock. This cooker only shows the time left when it gets down around 15 minutes. The brown rice cycle cooks in 75 minutes. I cooked quinoa on the quick cycle the other day and it was done in approximately 30 minutes.
Another option I like on this model compared to the National is that, so far, the lid is easier to clean. The national used to bubble up through the steam vent and make a mess that was not easy to clean from the rubber gasket, but the Sanyo doesn’t do that and the lid barely needs to be washed after cooking a batch of rice. I wish these types of cookers would make removable upper lids so that they could be kept cleaner.
I also love that this model has the slow cooker and that there is both high and low slow cook cycles.
This cooker is just right for a small family or couple, but if you generally cook for more than 3 people, I would recommend the larger model. I can make enough soup for 4 people if bread and salad were served, but it may only serve several people if they had large appetites. It definitely does not have enough room in the slow cooker to do large roasts.
Great value, great cooker, I highly recommend it.
Review by A. Marks for Sanyo ECJ-HC55S 5-1/2-Cup Micro-Computerized Rice Cooker and Slow Cooker, White
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I read an NYTimes article about rice cookers around the same time I was starting a diet which recommended whole grains and steal cut oatmeal… so I read obsessively about all the different kinds of rice cookers, the reviews etc., and settled on this one based on combination of features and price.
Yes, $132 isn’t cheap, but OMG! What a FANTASTIC appliance! Well-deigned, very well-built (nothing cheap feeling) and it does EXACTLY what it says really, really well. So far I’ve made oatmeal every day, brown rice, and I’ve steamed veggies and they’ve all come out fantastic! There’s a bit of a learning curve on the veggies – what’s the right amount of time for the veg. you select for the doneness you prefer, but that’s expected. I’m looking forward to really using the slow cooker this winter.
And the oatmeal! Check it out – you can put in your steel-cut oatmeal and water the night before, set the time, and it’ll be cooked and waiting when you wake up! Soaking the oatmeal just helps it cook faster in the morning, it doesn’t ruin it, like setting your coffee timer, only better!
I’m single, and I like to cook, but I’m also really busy so I love the “Set it and forget it” way you can cook with this. As for size, I probably could have done with a smaller one (being a single girl), but I’d rather have too much than too little and I did have space for it. Maybe if I had a family, I’d want a bigger model – hard to say.
But barring the size, I’d go with a Sanyo with this exact feature set and I just can’t imagine you wanting anymore.
My only criticism is the instruction manual is pretty lousy. nevertheless, I love my ECJ-HC55S and it makes me wonder why all appliances can’t meet such a high level of quality.