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Can This Chef Make A 3-Course Meal With A Rice Cooker? • Tasty

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Tasty hands one of its chefs a rice cooker and dares her to build an entire menu.

Tasty’s “Can This Chef Make A 3-Course Meal With A Rice Cooker?” strips a trained cook down to the most limited kitchen tool most people own: a basic electric rice cooker with one heating element, one bowl, and a couple of buttons. Chef Alexis deBoschnek takes on the challenge, tasked with producing an appetizer, an entrée, and a dessert without a stove, an oven, or a second pot to fall back on. The video, produced by BuzzFeed Video and Claire Nolan, turns a device built for one job into the entire cooking setup for a three-course dinner.

• Alexis deBoschnek attempts a full three-course meal — appetizer, entrée, and dessert — using nothing but a standard electric rice cooker.
• She repeatedly runs into the machine’s automated heating and shut-off cycle, a system designed for cooking rice, not for the multi-step dishes she’s trying to force through it.
• At one point she says on camera, “It feels like something is wrong with this machine. It can’t be me… I know about machines,” summing up the frustration of the whole format.

One Appliance, Three Courses

The rules are simple and brutal: the rice cooker’s inner bowl is the only vessel, its heating plate is the only burner, and its preset buttons are the only controls. There’s no searing pan, no broiler, no double boiler to lean on when a dish needs more than gentle, even heat. Alexis has to sequence three separate dishes through one bowl, which means cleaning, resetting, and re-timing the machine between courses rather than working multiple components at once the way a real kitchen allows.

That constraint is exactly the appeal of Tasty’s format — watching a chef who normally has a full range and a walk-in fridge get reduced to arguing with a $20 appliance. It’s a similar spirit to the kind of stripped-down, one-tool cooking content that shows up in Healthy Indian Style Cooking, where the technique has to bend around a single pot instead of the other way around.

Fighting the Machine’s Automatic Shut-Off

The biggest obstacle isn’t the recipes themselves — it’s the rice cooker’s programming. These machines are built to sense when water has evaporated and flip from “cook” to “warm” automatically, which is perfect for rice and terrible for anything requiring sustained high heat or careful reduction. Alexis has to fight that internal logic repeatedly, coaxing the machine to stay in cooking mode longer than it wants to, or restarting cycles it insists are finished.

“It feels like something is wrong with this machine. It can’t be me… I know about machines.”

That line captures the whole tension of the episode: a skilled cook second-guessing a $30 kitchen gadget because it simply wasn’t built to do what she’s asking of it. The rice cooker doesn’t know it’s supposed to be a stovetop, a saucepan, and an oven all at once — it just knows its one job, and it keeps trying to do that job whether or not there’s a chicken breast or cake batter sitting in the bowl.

Testing a Kitchen Staple’s Limits

Rice cookers are one of the most common small appliances in home kitchens, prized for exactly the reliability that makes this challenge so hard — they’re built to shut themselves off and stay out of the way. Pushing one through an appetizer, an entrée, and a dessert means treating a device meant for hands-off simplicity as if it were a full cooking suite, and Alexis has to adapt her technique course by course to work around a machine that keeps trying to finish the job on its own terms.

By the time the three courses are plated, the rice cooker’s little indicator light clicking between “cook” and “warm” has effectively dictated how each dish turns out — which is the whole bit Tasty built this format around: hand a trained chef exactly one appliance it wasn’t designed for and see what breaks first.