Basmati, a popularly grown rice cultivar in India has a well-balanced combination of alluring aroma, fluffy texture, and elongated grain. These cultivars are commonly subjected to pretreatments namely steaming and parboiling to increase profitability. However, these processes may expressively affect the cooked rice textural attributes which can subsequently have an impact on the consumer acceptability. An upcoming textural evaluation technique namely electromyography (EMG), which is an in vivo, innovative and non-invasive procedure, was applied in this study to comprehensively elucidate the effect of these pretreatments on the cooked rice texture. The effect of steaming and parboiling on the physico-chemical characteristics of rice cultivars were also examined. For this study, raw, steamed and parboiled samples of Pusa 1121 and Pusa 1509 were selected. Steaming, which is used as an artificial aging process, resulted in increase in length to breadth ratio (L/B) while L/B ratio decreased with parboiling. Fat and ash contents increased with steaming and parboiling whereas moisture, protein and fiber contents decreased after these two post-harvest processes. Steaming had negligible effect on color of rice of both the cultivars and resulted in improved sensory aroma, taste, appearance, texture and overall acceptability. On the other hand, parboiling of rice resulted in darker rice with very low sensory acceptability. The bioelectrical activities of the chewing muscles, as acquired by EMG, during mastication of cooked rice samples were found to be reproducible. Out of twenty three acquired EMG parameters, fifteen masticatory parameters could significantly (p < 0.05) detect textural differences among the cooked rice samples. To summarize the results, a cluster analysis followed by principal component analysis was conducted which reduced these fifteen EMG parameters to two meaningful principal components namely PC1 and PC2. These two principal components, PC1 and PC2, were found to explain a data variance of 49.3% and 36.4%, respectively. In nutshell, EMG parameters namely chew number, amplitude per chew, middle amplitude, cycle time, early burst duration and late muscle activity related significantly (p < 0.05) with cooked rice sensory textural parameters signifying EMG's applicability in successfully establishing the effect of steaming and parboiling on the textural attributes of cooked rice samples.
