The downside is that cooking in a rice cooker is a low fidelity way of cooking.
If you invest in a PID controller (Auber Instruments sells a particularly well-known line of them), you can make your rice cooker the highest-fidelity cooking appliance in your kitchen. The PID controller reads the temperature in the cooker with a thermocouple probe and strobes the power to the cooker to maintain a precise temperature, resulting in a temperature-controlled water bath.
Temperature-controlled water bath cooking ("low temp" cooking, or, inaccurately, "sous vide" cooking) is the future of the modern kitchen. Most proteins, most starches, and many vegetables benefit from it, it's almost as easy to execute as Ebert's rice cooker meals, and has the huge advantage of taking precise timing out of the equation; most low-temp preparations can be started in the morning and plated when you get back from work, like slow-cooker meals.
If you're remotely interested in cooking, low-temp cooking is about the nerdiest way you can go about it, and the results really are pretty spectacular: you can get perfect custard-texture egg yolks (not to mention reliably perfect custards of all sorts), an absolutely perfect end-to-end medium rare steak, reliably perfect pork chops, a week's worth of perfect chicken breasts for cold prep (sandwiches and salads) or last-minute pasta dishes, perfect glazed root vegetables --- I keep using the word "perfect" because when you have a small computer making sure your food never goes over or under its ideal target finish temperature by more than a degree or so, that's what you end up with.
I have a Polyscience circulator now, but I used to use a Black & Decker rice cooker and an Auber PID controller, and while there are benefits to the professional circulator (I'm pretty sure I can circulate a bathtub and cook a whole pig in it if I really wanted to), pretty much any DIY plan you find on the Internet will do just fine; you can even try what Serious Eats recommends and do your first couple of experiments with a beer cooler.
Also, regarding this particular meal: try chicken thighs instead of chicken breasts. Chicken breasts are particularly expensive (everyone wants them), but chicken thighs are more delicious, more forgiving of time/temperature variation, and in long-cooking applications like this, all the downsides (fattiness and toughness) are mitigated by the cook time.
If you're just now thinking about starting to cook instead of going out every night, and you don't want to go too nuts with it, I'd recommend a crock pot / slow cooker. They're not sexy, but wow are they ever useful. You can buy a Costco block of chicken thighs and chuck them in your freezer, and then each morning just open one package of them into your slow cooker with an onion and some garlic, salt, and pepper. Run on "slow" all day. Done. Same thing with any cheap chuck cut of beef, or with pork shoulder. Everyone I talk to that "discovers" the slow cooker falls in love with it.
I have always been fascinated by "sous vide" cooking, but could simply not put up with the idea of eating food that has been in contact with plastics for hours in a hot environment.
Most plastics do leach some very nasty compounds, not to mention the whole estrogen controversy (which has been known by the FDA since the 30s). Besides, I am sure it is very eco-unfriendly to use them to routinely cook foods since all those plastic bags will end up somewhere in the ocean for the next hundred years...
Therefore, does anyone know of any hacks for cooking in low temps and vacuum WITHOUT the damned plastics bags?
A combi oven does what you want: it creates a temperature-controlled humid environment, but uses steam instead of a circulating water bath. Unfortunately, they're extremely expensive.
You don't have to bag the food, for whatever it's worth. You don't even have to use water as your cooking medium; people have circulated butter for lobster. But the bag prevents the flavor from the product from leaching out into the cooking liquid and being diluted away.
I wonder if you could take a stock rice cooker and fit a constantly running evacuation pump to the steam vent hole in the glass lid. It could partially evacuate the chamber and hold it there while you cooked. The pot and lid are obviously not designed for the stress of vacuum so you wouldn't want to go past, say, a quarter atmosphere.
I wish there were a way to keep a pot cold (freezer or fridge temp), then low-temp cook. That way you could basically leave food ready for prep and have it cook when you're at work, ready for when you get home.
Make a device with 20 slots and you could have your whole weekly meal plan pre-positioned.
Curious - what are the energy costs for running this rice cooker for a whole hour...or this crockpot sous vide stuff for hours at a time, whole day even...is that a concern at all ? Personally I've never cooked anything beyond 10-15 minutes. I don't eat rice, so never looked into these things. Maybe I'm missing out on a whole parallel universe of foodies.
I have an Aroma 10 "cup" model that is about a decade old. Plugged it into a Kill-a-Watt.
It consumes 27W in warming mode and 619W in cooking mode.
I also have a 4 year old Crockpot slow cooker (8 "quart" IIRC) which consumes 47W in warm, 160W in low and 206W in high.
Edit: I just made something as substantially similar as their chicken & rice dish as I could and it also took 45 minutes and 0.4kWh. That works out at 5c in electricity costs (or 9c when taking into account my California marginal kWh costs). Not counted are the costs in water and electricity to wash the container after use which are pretty negligible as it is non-stick and just needs a mild clean/wipe. I can also confirm that power use did not change during the whole cooking process.
Going to just point out (perhaps I misunderstand), but sous vide is not a crockpot way to cook. It's pretty easy (toss things into a bag, place in warm water) and it's delicious.
Since the temperature of the water bathing the meat (or veggie, etc) is a constant, you know exactly when your steak is a perfect medium rare. Not only is it cooked perfectly, the fats and marinade and etc are all sealed (quite literally) with the meat so the food is chock-full of flavor.
Every low-temp recipe is basically the same: find the ideal temperature for your protein (135 for steak, 145 for pork and chicken, &c). Make a guess as to how much collagen is in the meat --- in other words, how tough is the cut? --- if there's lots, cook for 24-48 hours; if there's only a little, cook for 1-8 hours (you're good after 1).
A good place to start on equipment is Serious Eats; search for "sous vide" (again, we're abusing that term). The Cooking Issues website Dave Arnold ran had an excellent guide, but seems to be down.
If you want to geek out, here's the best setup I've seen online; I own a pro circulator and still want to build this thing:
I've never been a fan of slow cookers because it pretty much just turns any meal into a flavorless mash of carbs and partially digested protein. Everything ends up overcooked. Perhaps because my slow cooker is junk with just a "low" and "hi" setting. the Auber PID controller sounds like a much better solution. It should be a piece of cake to replicate it with an Arduino, temp sensor and a high amp relay, after some experimentation and calibration with a candy thermometer, you could even "program" your meals.
Slow cookers are only good for braise cuts: beef chuck, chicken thighs, pork shoulder. You want to put some liquid in, but not too much. You want aromatics (a whole head of garlic, an onion). I never put starches in my slow cooker anymore.
The low-temp water bath is definitely much more precise. You can't cook a steak in a slow cooker; the cooker runs near the boiling point of water.
If you invest in a PID controller (Auber Instruments sells a particularly well-known line of them), you can make your rice cooker the highest-fidelity cooking appliance in your kitchen. The PID controller reads the temperature in the cooker with a thermocouple probe and strobes the power to the cooker to maintain a precise temperature, resulting in a temperature-controlled water bath.
Temperature-controlled water bath cooking ("low temp" cooking, or, inaccurately, "sous vide" cooking) is the future of the modern kitchen. Most proteins, most starches, and many vegetables benefit from it, it's almost as easy to execute as Ebert's rice cooker meals, and has the huge advantage of taking precise timing out of the equation; most low-temp preparations can be started in the morning and plated when you get back from work, like slow-cooker meals.
If you're remotely interested in cooking, low-temp cooking is about the nerdiest way you can go about it, and the results really are pretty spectacular: you can get perfect custard-texture egg yolks (not to mention reliably perfect custards of all sorts), an absolutely perfect end-to-end medium rare steak, reliably perfect pork chops, a week's worth of perfect chicken breasts for cold prep (sandwiches and salads) or last-minute pasta dishes, perfect glazed root vegetables --- I keep using the word "perfect" because when you have a small computer making sure your food never goes over or under its ideal target finish temperature by more than a degree or so, that's what you end up with.
I have a Polyscience circulator now, but I used to use a Black & Decker rice cooker and an Auber PID controller, and while there are benefits to the professional circulator (I'm pretty sure I can circulate a bathtub and cook a whole pig in it if I really wanted to), pretty much any DIY plan you find on the Internet will do just fine; you can even try what Serious Eats recommends and do your first couple of experiments with a beer cooler.
Also, regarding this particular meal: try chicken thighs instead of chicken breasts. Chicken breasts are particularly expensive (everyone wants them), but chicken thighs are more delicious, more forgiving of time/temperature variation, and in long-cooking applications like this, all the downsides (fattiness and toughness) are mitigated by the cook time.
If you're just now thinking about starting to cook instead of going out every night, and you don't want to go too nuts with it, I'd recommend a crock pot / slow cooker. They're not sexy, but wow are they ever useful. You can buy a Costco block of chicken thighs and chuck them in your freezer, and then each morning just open one package of them into your slow cooker with an onion and some garlic, salt, and pepper. Run on "slow" all day. Done. Same thing with any cheap chuck cut of beef, or with pork shoulder. Everyone I talk to that "discovers" the slow cooker falls in love with it.