Sensory and instrumental texture measurement of thermally processed rice

Rice is the staple food of many countries and its sensory quality is of great concern to the consumers. Its preservation through thermal processing in retort pouches,for ready-to-eat purposes was carried out by different time-temperature schedules with and without oil to achieve a minimum F-o of 3 min. The sensory analysis of the cooked rice carried out using quantitative descriptive analysis showed that a process schedule of 118C, 8 min was optimum to have the optimal sensory characteristics. The same rice samples were subjected to instrumental texture measurements by texture analyzer using a cross-head speed of 0.5 mm/s with 90% compression for hardness and stickiness parameters. The instrumental hardness showed high correlation with sensory hardness, chewiness and overall quality (r = 0.72; r = 0.73; r = 0.79) and a negative correlation with sensory stickiness (r = -0.75). Applying principal component analysis, thermally processed rice samples were further classified based on the sensory and instrumental texture attributes.