You may be familiar with sourdough bread as a pandemic oddity, or maybe you’re a long-time bread baker like me. Sourdough bread is one of the hardest to make, especially for beginners. Instead of taking the “long route,” you can make a sour loaf by simply adding vinegar. And it turns out that adding a little vinegar can make for an overall springier loaf.

Caring for wild yeast sourdough requires time, patience, and the ability to recognize unusual signs of life in a cup of porridge. Mixing and rising your dough requires a keen eye to judge when it’s ready to bake. Even after these many steps, and possibly four or five days of agonizing over your dough, you can still screw it up, wasting all that hard work.

I’m not saying, “Why don’t you go buy some sourdough bread?” That’s not a low-effort bread-making trick; that’s just grocery shopping. But it would be nice if there was a quick way to get the sourdough flavor into a loaf of bread instead of nursing a fermented foam for three days before you even start.

Usually when I want to make something sour, I add acid to it. And as long as you’re not giving this bread to a bread connoisseur, you can do that with bread too. If you’re making one loaf, add 1 1/2 to 2 teaspoons of white vinegar to the dough mixture. (For this measurement, a recipe for one loaf calls for about 14 to 16 ounces of total flour.) I don’t add the vinegar until after the dough has started to come together. When it has a rough consistency, sprinkle the vinegar on top.