New perspective to guide rice breeding: Evaluating the eating quality of japonica rice

Background and objectives Eating quality is an important quality index of rice, which also determines production and sales. However, previous rice breeding mainly took yield as the gold index, and almost no comprehensive consideration of its eating quality. In this study, to further select new high‐quality japonica rice variety, the eating quality differences in the physicochemical, texture, pasting properties, and volatile compounds between five newly bred varieties (JR5, JR6, JR8, JR9, and JR10) and one commercial variety (Kenyu38) were analyzed. Findings Correlation analysis results indicated that the taste value was negatively correlated with protein (r = −.953, p