Texture determinants in cooked, parboiled rice. I: Rice starch amylose and the fine stucture of amylopectin

Abstract

Abstract The constituent starches from eleven cultivars of non-waxy rice with different degrees of cooking hardness were subjected to detailed analysis. No significant differences were observed in the granule morphology, crystallinity and size distribution of the starch granules that could be correlated with the textures of the cooked, parboiled rices. Differences in the contents of amylose and the fine structures of amylopectin were detected, however, which did correlate with texture. It appeared that the texture of the rices was critically controlled by the proportion of the longest (DP 92–98) and shortest (DP&lE25) amylopectin chains but not the intermediate (DP 43–68) chains. Hard cooking rice tended to have a higher amylose content (or amylose:amylopectin ratio) and more longer chain amylopectin than soft cooking rice, which feature is thought to encourage more extensive intra and/or inter molecular interactions with other components in rice grain, such as protein, lipid and non-starch polysaccharides and results in a firmer texture. The different amylopectin structures may explain why rices that possess similar amylose contents can have different textural properties. Such a correlation suggests that the structure of the starches determined from the SE–HPLC profile of the debranched amylopectin could be useful as a sensitive screening method in the classification of cooked rice texture.