Can instrumental characterization help predicting sour taste perception of wheat sourdough bread?

Sourdough bread is known to have a characteristic sour taste. To guarantee consumer acceptability, sour taste should be monitored to assure constant bread quality. However, little is known about bread sour taste perception, especially how it evolves during tasting, neither if some simple measurements could help predict it.

The effect of organic wheat flour by-products on sourdough performances assessed by a multi-criteria approach.

In this study, we determined the effect of organic (i) flour ash content (1%-1.4%) and (ii) flour by-product addition (bran, shorts and germ) on sourdough performances. After five consecutive back-sloppings, sourdough was used for bread-making and its bread-related properties were assessed.

A polyphasic approach to study the dynamics of microbial population of an organic wheat sourdough during its conversion to gluten-free sourdough.

To develop a method for organic gluten-free (GF) sourdough bread production, a long-term and original wheat sourdough was refreshed with GF flours. The dynamics of the sourdough microbiota during five months of back-slopping were analyzed by classical enumeration and molecular methods, including PCR-temporal temperature gel electrophoresis (PCR-TTGE), multiplex PCR, and pulsed field gel electrophoresis (PFGE). The results showed that the yeast counts remained constant, although Saccharomyces cerevisiae, present in the initial wheat sourdough, was no longer detected in the GF sourdough, while lactic acid bacteria (LAB) counts increased consistently.