It all begins with a question: What should we name our sourdough starter?

The prolonged quarantine, and limitations with commercial yeast supply chains, inspired a renewed interest in sourdough baking. While scientists and professional bakers can help us understand many things about making sourdoughs— how to make one, what microbes are inside your sourdough starter, where they might come from, and even how you can use a sourdough aroma wheel to describe your starter—they can't help with one important aspect:

How to name your sourdough starter?

So, during quarantine, Anne A. Madden, founder of this institute and published sourdough microbiologist, partnered with her software developer fiancé, Michael Pellegrini, to help solve this… “problem.” 

First, they developed a machine learning (AI) algorithm to name their sourdough starter. 

“We needed to name our own sourdough starter as part of the new Wild Sourdough citizen science research project. We decided that the least efficient, but potentially most fun approach we could take would be to enlist the help of AI,” stated Dr. Madden.

They used a type of Machine Learning called a recurrent neural network. They trained it on over 1,000 unique sourdough names gathered from across many sourdough-relevant Facebook groups, subreddits, The Quest for Sourdough Library, and community posts. 

If you’re familiar with sourdough names you know they fall into a number of categories.

The names of sourdough starters are often characteristics of how the starters look, smell, or behave (e.g., “bubbles,” “the blob,” “Frank the farter.”) Other popular categories include names of famous people, or friends (e.g., “Rupert,” “Lilly,” “Mildred”, “Barack”), literary or movie references (e.g., “My Precious,” “The Borg,” “Mr. Darcy”), descriptions of origins— time, place, and lineage (e.g., “Quaran-Tina,” “Grandma's sourdough,” “San Francisco”), or a head-nod to the remarkable magic of these microbes bringing life to the inanimate water and flour (e.g., “Lazarus,” “Jesus,” “Frankenstein,” “Genesis.”) Perhaps the most amusing names are those involving puns (e.g., “Vladamir Gluten,” “Clint Yeastwood,” “Ms. Pandoughmic,” “The Kneady One,” “Jane Dough,” and the very popular “Yeasty Boys.”) These, and many others, were used as a training set.

The first sourdough starter names created by AI

After training the model and tweaking the parameters, here are few of the original names the algorithm generated:

• Bread Party

• Stinky bubbles

• Brancisco

• Space Bread

• Germus

• Bordough Sourdough

• Sour Francisco

• Bread Baby Cakespeare

• The BreaDad

• Sponge Tart

• Fan Ob’s Dough

• The Beastwood

• San Frank

• Gerda

• Sourdough Stan

• Breading Boy

• Dough Bay

• Old Yeaston

But if you have experience with AI, you know that not all names are “winners.” The AI algorithm also generated these names:

• Scufflurdough

• Aple

• BLoab

• Mscicedipeore

• KrengBwhif the yeast

• Dorge D

• Puddesian

• Yeastann

• Funch

Improvements so you can name your own sourdough starter

Given the inconsistency of the AI approach, Mike developed a new version of the sourdough starter name generator. It produces unique names from a larger list of >3,000 original sourdough starter names—perhaps the largest collection of original sourdough names EVER(?!)—and then uses a step involving natural language processing. This non-AI approach is now available for you to use to create your own unique sourdough starter name:

Try the sourdough name generator

Your Sourdough Starter’s Name is:

One note of caution: This algorithm generates unique names somewhat randomly. It is therefore impossible to predict if some of the resultant names will be inappropriate for young audiences, or include unintended innuendos. We ask that you interpret them with the same whimsy that was embraced when creating this project. Particularly enamored with the name generated for your sourdough starter? Feel free to share it on social media with the hashtag #SourdoughNameGenerator

Example Names generated with this Sourdough Name Generator

• Biggie Pat

• Honey Sourdough

• Kitchen Willie

• Chef Party!

• And so many hundreds of thousands more

Next steps…

Beyond helping them name their own sourdough starter, Dr. Madden and Mr. Pellegrini hope that this project inspires others to make a sourdough starter and participate in the Wild Sourdough citizen science project.

And so what did they end up naming their starter?

“Whindough Bready,” a pun devised by AI, that speaks to Dr. Madden’s interest in using sourdough starters as a “window” into the microbial world.

To find out more about this project, and other similar projects related to microbial research, education, and art—- both the serious and whimsical-- visit other initiatives of The Microbe Institute. To learn more about sourdough research and how you can make your own sourdough starter and help contribute data to various projects, visit our Wild Sourdough Project and our partners at The Public Science Lab. 

The creators of this name generator humbly thank the people who shared their starter names with the world. The creators were inspired by you and hope you feel that this pays respect to your starters.

Affiliations

Anne A. Madden, Ph.D. is a scientist, 5x-TED/TED speaker, and Founder and President of The Microbe Institute. She is also an Adjunct Associate Professor at North Carolina State University in the department of Applied Ecology. She is on twitter and instagram @AnneAMadden

Michael R. Pellegrini is a software developer with expertise in big data, search, and eating sourdough.

They live in the Greater Boston area, with their cat “Puffin” and their sourdough starter “Whindough Bready.”