Malic acid substitutes

The acid of citrus fruit, and by far the easiest acid powder to buy.

Best for

sour candy, sour powder coatings, fruit gummies, drinks, seasoning blends

This is the swap almost everyone should make. Citric acid is slightly sourer per gram, so start at ¾ teaspoon and taste up. The real difference is timing rather than strength: citric acid slaps you immediately and then drops away, while malic acid climbs more slowly and then sits on the tongue and keeps puckering. A sour sweet made with citric therefore tastes sharp and then oddly flat halfway through, and the fix is to dust a little extra citric on the outside so the sourness keeps being refreshed as you chew.

The grape acid, sold as tartaric acid powder or wine acid, and the sourest of the three common powders.

Best for

hard candy, sherbet powder, Turkish delight, sour dusting

Tartaric is the sharpest and cleanest of the three, with a dry wine-like sourness and none of malic's fruity green-apple edge. Use a little less. In a hard candy or a sherbet it is arguably better than malic because the sourness is so immediate. In a chewy sour sweet it is worse, because the whole appeal of malic is that the sourness will not let go and tartaric is gone in a second.

A two-part fix that covers both the sourness and the apple character malic carries.

Best for

sour apple sweets, sour powders, rimming sugar, homemade sour spray

Malic acid does not just taste sour, it tastes faintly of unripe apple, which is why sour apple candy tastes of apple even when there is no apple in it. Grinding freeze-dried apple slices to a powder and blending them with citric acid gets you much closer than citric alone. The mix is a little cloudier and slightly sweeter, and it will clump faster because dried fruit powder holds moisture, so make it in small batches.

A weak powdered acid most kitchens already have in the baking cupboard.

Best for

mild acidity in baking, stabilising egg whites, stopping sugar crystallising

This is the pantry option, and you should know its limits before you commit a batch of sweets to it. Cream of tartar is roughly a third to a half as acidic spoon for spoon and it tastes chalky rather than sour, so a sour powder made with it is a disappointment: mildly tangy, slightly gritty, with none of the pucker. Where the acid is doing a structural job rather than a flavour job it works fine.

Liquid acid for anything wet enough to take an extra 45 ml.

Best for

drinks, sauces, marinades, sorbet and granita

Only useful when the recipe can absorb the liquid, which rules out dry blends and hard candy at the crack stage. The flavour goes clearly citrus, which is often an improvement in a drink and wrong in a green apple sweet. Lime is sharper and slightly more bitter than lemon and gets a bit closer to malic's persistence.