We here at RocketNews24 have a soft spot for rice cooker innovations, as can be seen with our own Big Mac Rice and Oreo Rice.

It seems Tiger Corporation has made their contribution to our favorite field of science with their new rice cooker, tacook.

With tacook, you can cook your rice and pretty much anything else you want to go with it at the same time in the same machine.

The trick is in the design. It may seem simple enough to make a compartment to just throw some food in and let it all cook together. But a good rice cooker requires a very delicate range of steam, heat and pressure to meet the standard of Japanese diners.

Tiger has achieved that with tacook, which can maintain the right cooking environment for the rice as well as heating up a side dish like soup by using two separate pots that form a tight seal with each other.  According to their website, you can even bake a cake in the secondary dish!

As you might expect, the downside is that it can’t cook large volumes suitable for families at one time.  However, for anyone needing a housewarming gift as they embark on the single life, you probably can’t do better than this.

Every once in a while a product comes along that makes you think “Why didn’t they come up with this sooner?” In a country where rice and okazu (Japanese for something you eat with rice) go together like meat and potatoes, that product has come once again.

Our mad rice cooker scientists are already drafting ways to make use of this development.  Stay tuned.

Source: TIGER tacook (Japanese) via Gizmodo (Japanese)