Despite its name, sourdough bread doesn’t have to taste sour. Actually, sourdough bread that is too sour can put a lot of people off, especially my children. So I had to learn how to make a milder-tasting sour bread.
After quite a few tries I finally managed to make a sourdough bread that is not sour at all. To help people that are in the same situation as me, I decided to write this article containing the 21 things that you can do to make sourdough bread less sour tasting.
So here are 21 different ways in which you can make your sourdough bread less sour.
1. Short Fermentation Time Decreases Sourness
Sourdough bread relies on the good bacteria that live in the starter to grow. Those bacteria eat the sugar and starches in the bread and produce two distinct things, acetic acid, and lactic acid.
Acetic acid is responsible for the sour taste, while lactic acid is responsible for the mild taste.
To make your bread less sour you should give the bacteria as little time as possible to eat the sugar in the bread, and to produce acetic acid.
For the average loaf of sourdough bread, you shouldn’t let it ferment (rise) for more than 6 hours if you want mild-tasting bread.
Through the article, you will see me mentioning the bacteria that live in the sourdough, if you don’t know about them, you should know that this is completely normal for sourdough to have them, they are good bacteria that don’t even make it into the bread itself, and they are also called probiotics. If you want to know more about them, you can check out my article: Does Sourdough Contain Probiotics? (+ What They Do)
Another thing that you will see mentioned often is acetic acid. Acetic acid is produced by the bacteria in the sourdough, and this acid is what makes sourdough taste sour.
2. Enrich Your Sourdough
Enriched sourdough tastes amazing, adding just a little butter or some olive oil can give the bread a great texture and a unique flavor. And it will also reduce the sourness of the bread.
All enrichments, whether they are butter, milk, yogurt, or oil, will make sourdough bread taste sweater.
Traditionally sourdough is made using only flour, water, salt, and starter, which is also a combination of water and flour. Those basic ingredients are what made sourdough bread be known as a sour bread, but by adding an extra ingredient you can drastically reduce the sourness of the sourdough.
And make sure that you only enrich the dough, not the starter itself.
3. Don’t Use Whole Grain Flour
The main difference between whole grain flour and plain white flour is that the white flour doesn’t use the whole grain, it only uses one part of it, while the whole grain, as the name implies, uses all of it.
The whole grain has more nutrients, which allows the bacteria in sourdough to produce more acetic acid, which makes sourdough bread taste sour.
4. Use All-Purpose White Flour
Out of all possible flour types, plain white all-purpose flour will produce the least sour taste.
Due to its unique enzymes, complex carbohydrates, and sugars, all-purpose flour keeps the bacteria at a relatively low activity level, which means that they produce less acetic acid.
While adding a few grams of a different type of flour will slightly increase the sourness of your bread, as long as you use 90% all-purpose flour you should barely feel the extra sourness.
The only type of flour that you should completely avoid is rye flour. Rye flour is like a superfood for sourdough, that makes the bacteria extremely active. The switch makes them produce more acetic acid, which is responsible for the sour taste.
5. Feed Your Starter Often
When the starter doesn’t get fresh flour and water for a long period of time it will start to develop more acetic acid, which is responsible for the sour taste.
So to stop this from happening you have to feed your starter as often as it needs. From my experience 2 times, a day should be enough. But I noticed that during very hot summers I have to increase that to 3 times a day, this is because the heat makes the bacteria very active and hungry.
6. Slowly Incorporate a Different Type of Flour
Most starters aren’t made with all-purpose flour, because it will take the starter a long time to properly stabilize. So most starters are made with either a combination of all-purpose and whole grain or just whole grain.
But after the starter has stabilized, in most cases between 2 to 4 weeks, you can slowly start changing the flour that you use to feed it. This will reduce the sourness of the starter considerably.
Here is how you should do it. If for example, you were feeding your starter 50 grams of whole wheat flour, you can change that to 5 grams of white all-purpose flour and 45 grams of whole wheat. And the next day 10 grams of wheat and 40 grams of white flour. And so on until you change it completely.
This way your starter will have an easier time adjusting to the new flour, and it won’t need as much time to get back to full strength.
7. Don’t Mix the Hooch (The Liquid on Top)
This liquid that appears on top of the starter is referred to as hooch. When you don’t feed your starter enough, it will start developing a liquid on top, alongside the acetic acid.
A common piece of advice is to simply mix the starter with the liquid until it blends in completely, and while this is a good thing to do, you do it, unless you want sour bread.
So if your starter develops hooch, you should simply drain as much as possible and throw it away. Your starter doesn’t need it to stay healthy.
8. Don’t Mix Your Starter Too Much
It’s really important to mix your starter really well when feeding it, if you don’t do it the water and the flour won’t incorporate properly and the starter will take longer to break the nutrients down.
But overdoing it will increase the sourness of the bread.
Oxygen is essential for the development of acetic acid, without a proper supply of oxygen the bacteria won’t be able to make as much acid as they would have otherwise. And while the oxygen in the air surrounding the jar will also help with the development of the acid, giving the starter a really good stir will incorporate more oxygen in the starter, which will produce more acid. So don’t stir your starter any more than it’s necessary.
And don’t tighten the lid on the starter, while too much oxygen will make it sour, no oxygen at all is not good either.
9. Keep Your Starter at Warm Temperatures
Low temperatures will slow down the fermentation process, and by slowing it down, the starter becomes even more sour.
So avoid keeping your starter in low temperatures. But also make sure that you don’t go overboard with the temperature.
If the temperature is very high the starter will become very active, which means it will finish eating faster and it will produce more acetic acid.
On average you should try to keep your starter at a temperature between 70-75°F (22-24°C). At this temperature, the starter will be at the perfect activity level, so there won’t be any extra sourness.
10. Use the Starter Before It Peaks
The moment you combine your starter with the rest of the ingredients for the bread will significantly change the taste of the bread.
A sourdough starter can be used before it reaches its peak. When it reaches its peak, and after it reaches it, each option will make the bread have a different level of sourness.
To obtain the least sour taste you should use the starter before it reaches its peak. At this point, the bacteria haven’t completely eaten all the sugar, and they haven’t produced that much acetic acid.
To be sure that you chose the right moment you should use a marker and keep track of how high your shoulder has risen. The moment you notice that your sourdough gets close to its previous peak, that is the moment you will get the least amount of sourness.
If you want to know what other effects this will have on your bread you should check out this article where I give a more in-depth look at the subject and provide detailed photos as well: When Will a Sourdough Starter Reach Its Peak? (With Pictures).
11. Use Warm Water
Most sourdough recipes require you to use warm water to help the ingredients mix better together, but there is another reason you should be using warm water if you want less sour-tasting bread.
Warm water activates the bacteria in the starter quicker, which means that they will have less time to create acetic acid.
Just make sure you don’t go overboard with the temperature of the water, as you can easily harm the bacteria if the water is too hot.
A good water temperature, for a mild sourdough bread, is 90°F (32°C). Going too much over this is not recommended.
12 .Use a Fresh Starter
An old, mature, starter will usually have more sourness to it than a new and fresh starter.
A mature starter had fermented for longer and had enough time to develop its taste, while a fresh starter hasn’t fermented for that long and the sourness hasn’t reached its full potential.
So if your old starter has become too sour for you, you can always start a new one from scratch.
If you don’t have your starter for that long I would suggest you start a new one. But if you are attached to your starter you could try some of the other methods described in this article and see if you can adjust its sourness to your liking.
But you have to keep in mind that starters have the tendency to get sourer as they age.
13. Use Dechlorinated Water
Tap water usually has small amounts of chlorine in it, which has been used to make the water drinkable.
The problem is that those small amounts of chlorine can destroy some of the good bacteria living in the starter. While this won’t completely ruin your dough or your starter, the bacteria will take longer to do their job, so they will produce more acetic acid.
14. Don’t Fold Your Dough Too Much
While the bread is rising, try to fold it as little as you can.
While stretching and folding the bread you are moving the bacteria from one place to another. So you are basically helping them find food faster.
Now, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t fold and stretch your bread at all, this is an important part of making sourdough bread that shouldn’t be skipped. But try not to overdo it, as this will increase the sourness of the bread.
15. Keep the Dough in a Warm Room During the Second Rise
Keeping the dough in a warm room during the second rise will shorten the fermentation period and as a result, there will be less acetic acid in the bread, so it won’t be as sour.
16. Add Some Sugar
When you want to make something sweater you add sugar to it. This also applies to sourdough bread.
Adding sugar to the sourdough dough will have two effects.
The first one is that it will sweeten the bread, as this is what sugar does.
And the second is that it will reduce the time the bread needs to ferment. Sugar will make the whole fermentation process considerably shorter, so the bacteria will have less time to produce acetic acid.
17. Use a Large Quantity of Starter
This one is a little counterintuitive, but let me explain to you why using more starter will make the bread taste less sour.
The role of the starter is to make the rest of the ingredients, in this case, flour, and water, ferment (rise). If you use a big quantity of starter, the dough will ferment quicker, so it won’t ferment for too long. So the bacteria won’t have too much time to consume the sugar and to produce acetic acid.
18. Use Other Levains
A levain is the thing that makes the bread rise, in the case of sourdough bread, it’s the starter. For other types of bread, it can refer to yeast or baking soda.
If you add a little bit of yeast or baking soda to the mix the dough will rise faster, and the bacteria in the sourdough will eat less of the sugar and won’t produce as much acetic acid.
19. Don’t Use a Preferment
A common practice when making sourdough bread is to use a preferment.
A preferment is a combination of starter with water and flour. Making a preferment is like making the dough for a sourdough bread, and then stopping and using the dough that you made as a starter for another dough.
Doing this will increase the sourness of your bread because it will make the fermentation process(the rise of the bread) last longer, and in this time more acetic acid will be produced.
20. Use a Very Wet Starter
Most starter recipes that you will find on the internet are for a wet starter or a 100% hydration starter. This means that you will mix equal amounts of water and flour to make the starter.
But this is not the only type of starter that exists, there are also solid, or stiff, starters. A solid, or a stiff starter, is a starter that has more flour than water in its composition.
As we discussed, the bacteria in the starter produce two different things that influence the taste, acetic acid, and lactic acid. The acetic acid has a sour taste, while the lactic acid has a milder, slightly sweet taste.
The water in the starter facilitates the production of lactic acid, which is what you want for a mild, or sweet sourdough bread.
So try adding a little more water to your starter, this way you will get a sweater bread.
21. External Factors
Another important role in the sourness of sourdough bread is played by external factors, like temperature and humidity.
High temperature and low humidity will result in mild, slightly sweet bread, while low temperature and low humidity will result in sourer bread.
While there are a lot of ways to control the temperature and humidity in our homes, it will still partially be influenced by the weather outside. So a bread that is made on a hot rainy day won’t be as sour as one made on a cold dry day.
Final Thoughts
So there you have 21 different ways in which you can make your sourdough bread less sour.
From my experience, if you apply all 21 of them you will get a slightly sweet tasting sourdough bread, without any hint of sourness.
But if you still want to have a little bit of sourness you can feel free to ignore some of them. The only ones I wouldn’t recommend you to skip over are the ones about flour type and the fermentation time, as two things make the biggest difference.