Two steps, one piece of cooking equipment, and zero problems.

The SoraNews24 office is, well, let’s call it “creatively cluttered.” That’s especially true at this time of year, when we’re still divvying up the contents of our annual lucky bag shopping spree.

As such, we’re not always able to keep a current tally of all the trinkets, gadgets, and other artifacts in our workspace. Still, we were pretty sure we didn’t have a “curry maker” appliance…or at least we were pretty sure we didn’t have one until a few days ago, when we stumbled across chatter online saying that you can cook curry in a rice cooker. Not only that, according to these rumors there’s virtually zero prep work involved in making the curry, and you don’t even need to add any water to the pot.

With this concept appealing to our base instincts of occasional laziness and consistent cravings for curry, we decided to test it out for ourselves, and procured the following ingredients:
● 2 tomatoes
● 1 onion
● 200 grams (7.1 ounces) of ground meat (we used the beef/pork mix commonly sold at Japanese supermarkets, but any kind of ground meat should work)
● 4 blocks of curry roux (equal to about 100 grams/3.5 ounces)

With those assembled, it was time to start cooking!

Step 1

Place all of the ingredients in the rice cooker.

Step 2

Close the lid and press the start button.

Step 3

Uh…there is no Step 3. That’s it. That’s all you have to do for this recipe.

If you want to get really nitpicky, we suppose you could say “Step 0” is to wash the tomatoes and peel off the very outer layer of the onion, but those are things you’d be doing regardless of what you’re using them for. Aside from that, though, there’s no prep to be done: no chopping, seasoning, or anything else.

However, seeing as how this was our first time making no-water rice cooker curry, and how sometimes our experiments don’t go as smoothly as we expect them to, we did add a Step 4, which was to have our Japanese-language reporter Seiji Nakazawa stay near our rice cooker as the curry cooked.

▼ If you don’t have access to a Seiji, feel free to substitute a Tommy, Sally, or any other good-natured person you can trust not only to make sure your kitchen appliances aren’t destroying themselves, but also not to steal your curry.

As the curry cooked, Seiji kept both an eye and ear out, monitoring for any unusual sights or sounds that would indicate some sort of problem or damage resulting from this unintended use of our rice cooker.

Luckily, no such problems occurred, although it turns out that sitting next to a rice cooker while it’s making curry can sort of mess with your sense of smell. According to Seiji’s notes, he started noticing the scent of curry drifting out of the rice cooker about 30 minutes into the cooking process, but by that point the aroma had already become much stronger to the senses of our other in-office staff that hadn’t been sitting with him in the same room for the whole time.

▼ “Whoa, smells like a straight-up curry restaurant in here!” said our writer P.K. Sanjun when he poked his head in to see how things were going.

In time, the rice cooker completed its standard cooking cycle, and it was time to see how our curry had turned out.

By the way, our rice cooker’s display in the photo above is displaying “0h.” as in “zero hours [left],” indicating that the cooking process is finished. It is not saying a subdued, unimpressed “ Oh “…but, ironically, that was pretty much our reaction when we opened up the lid.

That doesn’t look like curry at all, does it? Heck, it barley looks like food.

But…

…we grabbed a rice scoop and started stirring, and as we did the tomatoes and onion gently crumbled into smaller morsels, their moisture began mixing with the other ingredients. Before we knew it…

…we had curry!

OK, now it was time to see how it tasted! Let’s dish up a plate of rice, then pour on some curry and-

Oh, wait. We just used our rice cooker to make the curry…which means we didn’t use it to make any rice.

Thankfully, we had two easy solutions to this problem. After a quick run to the the nearby 7-Eleven, we had a piece of naan bread to dip into the roux, and we also had a pack of microwavable white rice that takes less than two minutes to heat up.

Now it was time to get this taste-test started…

…and it turns out no-water, all-rice cooker curry is really tasty!

Following our in-office rule of “He who sits by the curry as it cooks gets first taste,” taste-testing duties fell to Seiji, who reports that by not adding water to the pot when cooking the curry, the flavor of the roux is deep and direct. Everything was properly cooked, too, with no unexpected raw bits of meat or vegetable.

The result is a little different than orthodox Japanese-style curry, but honestly the rustic appearance makes it look like something you’d find on the menu at a stylish cafe on one of the backstreets leading off of Harajuku’s Omotesando shopping avenue.

There are, however, a couple things to bear in mind when following this rice cooker recipe. First, while tomatoes aren’t necessarily a must-have ingredient for Japanese curry, they might be mandatory for this cooking method. The curry roux, after all, needs some sort of liquid in order to soften and mix with the other ingredients, and in this recipe that’s being contributed by the interior moisture of the tomatoes, which got added to the pot when we broke them up with the rice scoop. With no tomatoes, odds are the roux wouldn’t “melt,” and you’d have just little curry roux chips and nothing tying the ingredients together.

Also, while the zero prep work is a big part of this recipe’s appeal, making curry this way does involve extra pot cleaning time afterwards, since some of the roux gets singed and sticks stubbornly to the inner surface.

We ended up having to scrub our rice cooker pot three times to get it all off, though in the end it looked spic and span once again.

And really, even if we had to give the rice cooker pot a triple wash, the fact that we had no knives, cutting boards, mixing bowls, or other things to wash means that this is still just about the fastest, most convenient way to cook curry that there is.

Photos ©SoraNews24
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