May 29, 2025 • 36 mins
In our season finale, we team up with the Culinary Institute of America to reverse engineer the secret recipe for Thomas’s English Muffins.
You can read our top secret muffin recipe here.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. A while ago, my colleague Bend A daff Haffrey
and I gathered to eat English muffins at the Pushkin office.
Ben had the idea to do a story about the
famous secret recipe for Thomas's English muffins. It sounded like
a fun romp. Go for it, I said, have a
(00:37):
good time, enjoy yourself. And then a couple months down
the road, Ben recorded the following voice memo.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
It's five sixteen am. I just had a dream where
I was in an Airbnb with someone who was affiliated
with benbo Bakers, who knew I was trying to reverse
engineer the muffin recipe. He's this bald guy who with
a mustache, I want to say. He was wearing a
(01:06):
card again. We were playing pool in this area, and
he said, how much flour and how much water do
you think we start with? Because if you tell me that,
it'll tell me if you're even close to knowing how
we do this.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
It was clear that Ben had gone very deep into
the nooks and crannies of this story, but this work
was too important to stop. In case you missed our
previous episode, let me catch you up. One of the
most famous trade secrets of all time is the recipe
for Thomas's English muffins. It involves how they create their
famous nooks and crannies, the most distinctive feature of a
(01:49):
nearly half a billion dollar product. The owner of Thomas's,
Bimbo Bakri's GROUPO Bimbo, say this secret was allegedly known
to only seven employees of the company, and they sued
one of them to keep him from taking another job,
which set off a whole race in corporate America to
lock up as many trade secrets as possible. Soon, the
(02:10):
corporate world could look a lot more mystical and secretive.
And all this had been many many years later to
wonder how hard can it be to make a muffin?
So he set out to try and reverse engineer the
famous Thomas's English Muffins recipe.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
I said, are you one of the seven? And it
was the recipe and he nodded ah. And he was
pretty mad at me, and he said, you're me after
my livelihood.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
You're coming after my livelihood, Ben, But it's too late
to turn back. He's in too deep. He's told me
he might even have to go to the CIA. I'm
Malcolm Gleavell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my show about
things overlooked and misunderstood. This season, we've taken on a
(03:06):
great many foes, the haters of paw Patrol, the absurd
claims of RFK Junior, the lazy interviewing style of Joe Rogan.
But now we're taking on our biggest opponent yet, Big Muffin,
because their trade secret represents a rising tide of secrecy
that's coming for us all. And so we shall persist
(03:29):
despite our nightmares. We must reverse engineer the English muffin.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
And here it is.
Speaker 4 (03:46):
The Muffin House three three seven was twentieth Street, built
as a foundry circle eighteen fifty. Samuel Beth Thomas converted
the ovens for his English muffin bakery in the early
twentieth century. I'm reading from a plaque in front of
the house where the inventor of Thomas's English muffins once baked.
It's in Chelsea, just a couple of blocks from the
(04:06):
offices of Pushkin Industries. Nineteen years ago, the owner of
the first floor apartment was taking out a radiator. He
lifted up some of the floorboards and discovered a door.
It was the remnants of Samuel bath Thomas's oven. I
was hoping somebody could show it to me. I rang
(04:27):
the doorbell, no answer. Clearly Bimbo Bakeries had gotten here first.
This was a recurring problem. I tried to hire some
culinary researchers to help reverse engineer the trademark Nooks and
Cranni's recipe, but Bimbo was a client. After all, they
are one of the largest baking conglomerates in the world.
(04:48):
I rang a bunch of doorbells and no one answered.
I sent a lot of emails that went unreturned, but
a few grave bakers were willing to talk to me
at least about the Nooks and Crannies in general. For
their own protection, we're not identifying them by name, So
am I the muffin man or not? I guess it's
a question.
Speaker 5 (05:06):
My question for you is is this like your trying
to create their exact products?
Speaker 4 (05:13):
Can we make this exact English?
Speaker 3 (05:16):
Okay?
Speaker 4 (05:17):
The vibe I was getting was mild interest, laced with
a healthy dose of are you okay?
Speaker 5 (05:23):
It's fairly intriguing, but it's also something that can be
super time consuming, So I personally don't like Thomas English muffins.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
You know, it looks like just a normal English muffin
recipe with you know, industrialized ingredient.
Speaker 5 (05:38):
Sorry lesson than soy rye, soybean oil, sort big acid,
those kind of things that are going to give it
that gumminess to it.
Speaker 4 (05:46):
The nificent creates come from holes in the dough, and
holes in the dough come from higher hydation. Lots of
good information on what makes a muffin an English muffin,
but little enthusiasm for my quest to make one exactly
like Thomas's. For me, this was way bigger than muffins alone.
I've learned that companies can use trade secrets as a
(06:07):
way to control their employees. The muffin trade secret had
put a man named Chris Botticella out of a job
Bimbo Bakeries. His employer claimed there was some deep mystery
to how Thomas's English muffins were manufactured, and this, it
seemed to me, had given them all too much power.
My plan was to test a reverse engineered muffin against
Thomas's to see if anyone could tell the difference. If not,
(06:31):
that would end the mystical power of their secret. But
I lacked the necessary skills to do this alone. One
baker asked me for several thousand dollars to do the job.
That's not crazy, seeing as the secret recipe brings in
almost half a billion a year for Bambo, But for
a complicated set of reasons involving journalistic ethics and poverty,
(06:52):
it was a non starter. I needed a true believer.
I needed a zealot. I needed a superstar.
Speaker 6 (07:00):
On this Donut Showdown, three superstar bakers elevate the humble
donut to new culinary heights.
Speaker 4 (07:07):
This is a clip from a twenty fourteen episode of
the short lived Cooking Channel show Donut Showdown. If you've
never seen Donut Showdown, congratulations.
Speaker 6 (07:16):
Let's say hello to our competitors.
Speaker 4 (07:18):
Three contestants compete in a variety of donut baking challenges
for a ten thousand dollars prize. This episode featured a
former architect, a pastry chef with a background in molecular
gastronomy who says things like.
Speaker 7 (07:31):
I'm the overlord of pastry.
Speaker 4 (07:33):
Overlord, and Rachel Wyman, head baker at the Montclair Bread Company.
Speaker 5 (07:39):
I've been baking since I was old enough to hold
a pastry bag. I literally wrote my name with a
pastry bag before pencils.
Speaker 4 (07:46):
Rachel Wyman has a baker's warmth about her angular red hair,
a little like Knuckles and Sonic the Hedgehog. She's a
total badass. She's got a tattoo on her arm that
says flower water, yeast, salt. Of course she makes it
to the final showdown. It's Rachel versus the Overlord of pastry.
Speaker 6 (08:04):
At least one of your donuts must include avocado.
Speaker 4 (08:11):
Rachel lands on avocado whipped cream on a treslacious donut
with the Sangreea filling. The food Scientist is going with
a notcho flavored donut. To my mind, these both sound disgusting,
but in the midst of it all, Rachel is having
a beautiful mind moment with her flower.
Speaker 5 (08:29):
The flower that I'm used to using is about eleven
percent twelve percent protein, and my options were a nine
percent protein or thirteen percent protein, So we had to
lend the flowers together. The last thing that I want
is to send the judges chewy donuts.
Speaker 4 (08:44):
It turns out that Rachel is a doe genius. But
was it enough?
Speaker 6 (08:49):
Rachel, you made two perfect does, but your sangreea filling
was a risk that didn't pay off. The winner of
this donut showdown is Rachel. Congratulations, one of ten thousand
(09:09):
dollars Russ Rachel.
Speaker 4 (09:12):
Rachel gets emotional. I get emotional because what I see
before me at last is a baker who just might
be crazy enough to take on the secret recipe for
Thomas's English muffin.
Speaker 3 (09:25):
I look her up.
Speaker 4 (09:26):
She teaches baking and pastry arts at the Culinary Institute
of America, the most prestigious culinary school in the country,
the CIA.
Speaker 5 (09:36):
So what I was going to tell you a couple
things because I neglected to send you the anything about me.
I used to do recipe development for a company that
created products for grocery stores all over the country, so
reverse engineering. It was like my jam, Oh, I'm saying, yeah,
this is exactly what would happen. They would bring me
(09:59):
a sample of something they wanted, and this was Wegman's
and Target and Whole.
Speaker 4 (10:03):
Foods, and I worked with that.
Speaker 3 (10:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (10:06):
No, so I made the bread on the cheese cake
factory table.
Speaker 3 (10:10):
Oh my god.
Speaker 5 (10:11):
So I lived in this space that you're doing this
story on.
Speaker 4 (10:14):
I didn't even know that this was a space. I
mean it is a big space. Rachel checked in with
the CIA green light. She and I were going to
reverse engineer Thomas's nooks and crannies. The trade secret of
the muffin involves the process, recipe and machines, but any
major baking company knows how to make bread at scale.
(10:35):
It's the principles behind the nooks and crannies that were
the key thing. We began to have regular debriefing calls.
Speaker 5 (10:42):
I I'm driving home from school, so uh yeah, it's
going really well.
Speaker 4 (10:50):
Rachel was all in. She even enlisted her students in
the effort, and I have.
Speaker 5 (10:55):
So many English muffins in the classroom.
Speaker 4 (10:58):
The first recipes were a bust. No nooks or crannies.
Speaker 5 (11:02):
The inside of the Thomases almost reminds me of like
a dense pancake, like a batter that's almost poured. So
we decided that we need to add more hydration to
our dough. We're gonna overproof it on purpose, so it
sits a little flatter on the griddle. Our our's got
(11:24):
a lot of loft, so we kind of have to
make them a little crappier.
Speaker 4 (11:29):
But making things crappier turned out to be a bit
of a challenge for Rachel.
Speaker 5 (11:34):
Like, the difficulty is that the Thomas's muffin is gray
and ours is uh not, So I think I can
just get a lower quality flower and work with that.
And also I've been buttering the griddle, but like also
we're using you know, plue gras, like eighty four percent
butter fat butter. It's like super yellow. I mean, so
(11:55):
I need to get I think I'm just gonna oil it.
And then the students even pointed out there's no butter
in the ingredient deck, so they're not using butter on
any surface, So I'll just use the same oil.
Speaker 4 (12:07):
Students are keeping you honest.
Speaker 5 (12:09):
I know they are, they really are. I mean the
flavor yesterday was amazing, but not like Thomas, And they're like, chef,
you just need to make it taste worse.
Speaker 4 (12:22):
Rachel and her students kept tinkering for about a week.
Every so often she'd send me photos their muffins went
from a flat surface on the interior to these big,
uneven lunar craters. I was starting to think that maybe
this really was a secret, uncrackable recipe, but then Rachel
sent me a photo of two muffins riddled with these small, deep,
(12:43):
perfect nooks and crannies. Other than the color, I couldn't
tell a difference between the classes nooks and crannies and Thomas's.
It was time for me to come up to the
CIA at Hyde Park to meet her in person, finalize
the recipe, and then put it to a blind taste
test to see if she'd actually pulled it off. Like
(13:13):
all the great American culinary schools, the Culinary Institute of
America is in a fight to the death with federal
law enforcement acronym versus acronym, the CIA versus the Central
Intelligence Agency. You would think that at some point in
its nearly seventy five years of existence, the president of
the Culinary Institute of America would have said, you know what,
(13:37):
our acronym has become a distraction. It's the American Culinary Institute.
Now you can have its spooks, take the bugs out
of my office, stop following me home. But no, the
Culinary Institute of America is not changing its name for anyone.
(14:00):
I took the train up in April. The campus sits
along the Hudson River in Hyde Park, New York, on
the grounds of an old Jesuit novitiate, gracious brick buildings,
photos of famous alumni on the wall, Anthony Bourdain. It's
a kind of culinary temple, little chapels, vaulted ceilings, stained glass.
The doors to the main hall have a crest with
(14:20):
three griffins and the school's motto cybus vite est Food
is Life.
Speaker 8 (14:28):
There's a reoccurring themale around the campus too, of like
what came first, the chicken or the egg.
Speaker 4 (14:33):
I'm getting a tour from baking business student Hannah Dawkins.
She was graduating in a semester and was filling me
in on campus lore. Do you have a strong position, Yeah.
Speaker 8 (14:43):
I feel like the egg definitely came first.
Speaker 4 (14:46):
We were walking through a library, one floor of which
is all recipe books organized according to a system I
had never before encountered nutrition, gastronomy, kitchen equipment. As we
walked through campus, I noticed all the pedestrian crossing signs
had a cartoon person in a chef's hat a toque, which,
true to life, was what everyone wore or the teachers,
at least the students all had these small skull caps on.
(15:09):
You know you've chosen a great profession when only at
the highest rank, do you get to wear the silliest hat?
We entered the baking building.
Speaker 8 (15:17):
So in this class they learned how to do sugar work,
chocolate show pieces, and fondant, So that swan is totally
made out of sugar.
Speaker 4 (15:24):
Why is she using a steamer on her cake over there?
Speaker 8 (15:27):
It gives it like a nice, like glossy look.
Speaker 4 (15:31):
It was becoming clear to me that this is the
greatest college in America.
Speaker 8 (15:36):
This is contemporary Cakes, Chocolates, Advanced baking principles, Late of
Dessert's class. Like, there's the freshman what at fifteen at
other schools, I would say, being at the culinary, it's
more like a freshman fifty.
Speaker 4 (15:50):
The plan was to use CIA students as guinea pigs
in our muffin test. Could they tell the difference between
the reverse engineered muffin and the real Thomases except as
handon toward me around campus? I was slowly realizing that
this particular audience of testers might be a little too smart.
Speaker 7 (16:09):
Vitamond was essentially testing a claim that adding baking soda
to onions when catamalizing them can reduce the cook diime
in half.
Speaker 8 (16:17):
I wanted to look at how refrigerating cookie dough before
baking is going to affect the final alcohol differences between
ricotta made with vinegar, citric acid, and lemon juice.
Speaker 4 (16:27):
So do you even know that you could make that?
Speaker 1 (16:28):
You made ricotta with any of Yeah, so you make
ricotta with an acigilant.
Speaker 4 (16:33):
So that's an acid A sigilant who says is vigilant.
Even the school's fight song was inscrutable.
Speaker 8 (16:42):
Okay, So it's mirror pla, mere pae dice about chop
it up, put it in the stew, mer Pa.
Speaker 4 (16:52):
She could not believe I didn't know the meaning of
the word mirror pla. Do you know the meaning of
the word mir pa? Well, as I learned, it is
a ratio for soup bass two parts onion, one part carrot,
one part celery, and four parts esoteric. You're welcome. And
here I was thinking these food geniuses could be fooled
(17:13):
by my taste test. I headed over to Rachel's classroom
Bakeshop nine. Rachel was communing with the muffin dough.
Speaker 5 (17:23):
Like every time you stretch gluten, it freaks out a
little bit, and you have to let it rest so
that it will relax enough to do the next thing.
I took the dough out of the refrigerator and I
have flattened it into a pan. So it's the right
(17:44):
thickness for our muffins.
Speaker 4 (17:46):
If anyone could pull this off, it was going to
be Rachel. We were making English muffins from two recipes.
She'd created one using the ingredients listed on the Thomas's package,
including vinegar. Now having that list is helpful, but the
ingredients only tell you so much. Baking, like mir POAs,
is all about ratios and process. Rachel was making a
(18:08):
second batch with sour though, which was her own spin.
We were going to taste both see which was closer
to Thomas's, and then put it up against the real
thing in the blind taste test.
Speaker 5 (18:19):
I can open this one to this perfect that's pretty amazing.
Speaker 4 (18:24):
Look at that. That looks really good.
Speaker 5 (18:26):
It's a little bit.
Speaker 4 (18:27):
I don't see a difference. I don't see a difference.
Speaker 5 (18:30):
Oh my gosh, look at that.
Speaker 4 (18:31):
They look identical. But it was amazing. I called the
students over see what they made of it. Do you
really think this is gonna work?
Speaker 1 (18:39):
I actually do.
Speaker 4 (18:41):
I do very optimistic because I just by looking at them,
they look completely like exactly the same. We ran a
mini test where the kids tasted the fresh muffins against Thomas's,
and I quickly learned that they did not think as
highly of Thomas's English muffins as I did.
Speaker 5 (18:56):
So, I don't like English muffins.
Speaker 4 (18:57):
Doesn't it taste like so you just spat it out.
Speaker 5 (19:01):
I've never liked English muffins my whole life, because this
is what I've always been offered. It smells like box,
like cardboards.
Speaker 4 (19:08):
You think if it gets stale, there might be a
chance we pull this off that people can't tell.
Speaker 5 (19:12):
I think it'll be pulled off. Well.
Speaker 4 (19:18):
The key was to let our muffins get stale so
they matched Thomas's. Rachel had made a batch the day before,
which she'd left out in the open for this purpose.
For the test, we were gonna cut the muffins into
sixteenths and put them in egg cartons. That would give
us enough samples for about one hundred tests. But as
we cut up Rachel's muffins from the day before, it
was clear that they were a little too crusty. We
(19:41):
left them out uncovered, and they'd gotten very stale. We
were both worried, and then Rachel found a bag of
muffins under her desk.
Speaker 5 (19:52):
These have been sitting in a bag.
Speaker 4 (19:53):
For like all week, so these are the same as
the final recipe.
Speaker 5 (19:59):
These are the vinegar recipe.
Speaker 4 (20:00):
Look at that, it looks like exactly like a Thomas's.
It looked exactly like a Thomas's, and to me it
tasted exactly like a Thomas's. We began furiously slicing them up.
This kind of last minute dramatic switch of the plan
is exactly there's two minutes until the test starts. We
(20:23):
finished right on schedule. We wheeled our samples out into
the packed student cafeteria.
Speaker 5 (20:29):
You know, it's like when you when your kids play
sports and you're like super nervous for them, even though
it has no bearing ones.
Speaker 4 (20:42):
It was time to pit our formula against the greatest
culinary minds in America. Cue the fight song. Hello everybody,
My goodness. At some point in your life, I hope
(21:03):
you experience a moment so absurd, so profoundly unrecognizable, that
you haven't of body experience. For me, that moment was
standing in the cafeteria at the CIA, addressing a crowd
of culinary students in white uniforms and skull caps regarding
the several hundred egg cartons I had filled with English muffins.
(21:23):
So in each of these cartons there's a slice of
English muffin. Two of them the same, are the same,
one of them is different. Using tastes, I want you
to tell me which number is different. I had marked
each muffin section with numbers like three oh two, three
forty eight, and one twenty nine, blinding codes so people
wouldn't be biased by ABC or one two three. In
(21:46):
each test, you either had two Thomases and one Rachel's
or two Rachels and one Thomas's. Exactly. I knew which
numbers marked the odd muffin out. The goal was to
see if they could tell. If they could, we'd failed,
which one do you think is different than the others?
That was a wrong answer, but most of.
Speaker 5 (22:04):
Them see, I think it was four.
Speaker 4 (22:07):
That's different, ninety nine is different, it's one, nine, pretty sure,
it's one. Pretty quickly it became clear that we were
on track for over sixty percent of people correctly guessing
which muffin was not like the others. This was not working.
We're getting smoke so far, we're invasively destroying it. Looked
(22:29):
like our entire plan was going to fail. We took
on Bimbo Bakeri's legendary trade secret, and just like in
Bimbo Bakeries versus Cris Botaicella, we were losing and the
secret was winning. We'll be right back. I want to
(22:50):
leave the muffin test for a moment to tell you
about a rabbit hole. I fell down while researching this episode.
I was trying to articulate why the idea that the
nooks and crannies were a trade secret bothered me so much,
so I began studying other trade secrets and secret recipes.
One of the most famous is for cur called chartreuse.
(23:11):
Chartreuse has been made by a French monastic order, the Carthusians,
based on a mysterious recipe that was gifted to them
in sixteen oh five. This recipe is a very closely
guarded secret. Nooks and crannies for fancy cocktails. I learned
that one of the Carthusian monks who'd been in charge
of chartreuse production had left the order and now lived
(23:33):
in New York City, so I wrote to him. His
name is father Michael Hollerin. I visited him at the
parish offices of Saint Monica's Church on the Upper East Side,
just a few days after Easter. What is known about
the origin of that recipe.
Speaker 7 (23:47):
No one ever seems to have researched it. We never
knew anything more about it trying to trace it back further.
I've never seen anything on that. But the main reason
that it's different is that that it is a secret
and has been kept a secret all this time. Is
because it was simply for the support of the monks.
They were pure contemplatives. There was no sense that we
(24:10):
want to become rich with this, we want to make
a name for ourselves. No, all we want to do
is support ourselves, so you don't have to worry about,
you know, outside support. We can support ourselves, and had
to be kept secret so obviously so people wouldn't steal
the formula and make their own.
Speaker 4 (24:26):
Originally, Chartruse was a health flixer. People took it for
all kinds of ailments, apoplexy, toothaches, palpitations, indigestion, fever. Eventually,
the monks dropped the elixir claim and it just became
a liqueur. But it still has this weird power. When
I drink it, I tend to have strange dreams. It
has a spicy, sweet complexity, and its color is this vivid,
(24:50):
alluring green.
Speaker 7 (24:52):
There's a whole cabinet in own of counterfeits, controfess of
people who tried to steal it. But there have been
efforts to use the name or use something that duplicated
the formula in some way, which of course is impossible
because it's so complex, very complex. You can't just, you know,
set up a shop and make it.
Speaker 4 (25:12):
Father Michael told me he was the first American Carthusian ever.
In the nineteen eighties, he lived in France at the
Grand Chartruse Monastery in the Unforgiving Mountains of the French Wilderness.
The Carthusians are famously silent order, and Father Michael was restless,
so the monks put him in charge of chartreuse. It's
not easy to make. There are one hundred and thirty
(25:35):
herbs that are treated in a number of different ways.
The recipe is kept on sheets and sheets of old
paper that now Father Michael had access to. But eventually,
when he left the Carthusian order and came back to
the United States with that recipe in his mind, the
monks just let him walk away. I'm curious what if
(25:57):
you could tell me about the process of leaving the
Carthusian Order, and whether there was any sort of effort
to make sure that you never share the recipe or
how it was conveyed to you that you should not
spread this.
Speaker 7 (26:13):
Absolutely nothing nobody ever told me not to no where,
Nobody ever expressed fear that I might. Nobody ever threatened
me that I shouldn't do it. They simply trusted that
I wouldn't, And of course I wouldn't, you know, because
you know it was dedicated to them and to the
to the order. The other thing is that you know
(26:34):
it's too complicated to make anyway. As I said from
the beginning, I could never could never really do it,
nor have I been kidnapped, And people, a lot of
a lot of people know that that I know the recipe.
Speaker 4 (26:44):
The formula for chartruse really is worth money. It's kept
the Carthusians afloat for centuries. But when Father Michael left,
they didn't threaten, punish or sue him or tell them
not to join another order, because the secret was a
bond between them, not a tool for control.
Speaker 7 (27:03):
It's a it's a mysterious formula, but it's the service
of an even greater mystery, which is the monastic life
and people in community together, you know, in silence and
solitude to find union with God. So it's at the
service of a real mystery. It's even greater than the
formula for sure.
Speaker 4 (27:20):
Truth is there in your mind a hierarchy between a
secret and a mystery? And how would you how would
you illustrate the difference if there is one.
Speaker 7 (27:28):
Well, a mystery? I think I haven't thought of it,
but I think the mystery is a broader concept. You
speak about the mystery of God, the mystery of life,
not just like a mystery that you would read a
detective mystery. Mystery is not something that's that you don't know,
something that's unknowable in rational terms.
Speaker 4 (27:45):
And a secret can you know and someone could, yeah.
Speaker 7 (27:48):
And the secret is it just can be something trivial.
But a mystery in its original sense, it's just something
that's very deep and wonderful. It can never be conceptualized,
but has to be lived.
Speaker 4 (28:02):
I realized that that's what bothered me about the idea
that the nooks and crannies were some legendary trade secret,
not just that an English muffin is mostly flour and water,
while chartreuse has one hundred and thirty ingredients. But that
Thomas's English muffins have all the mystification of a monastic
order and none of the mystery. It debates his mystery
(28:24):
and puts it in the service of corporate control. Maybe
that all sounds like a stretch to you, But it
turned out Father Michael was closer to my story than
even I had realized. I told him about our reverse
engineering project at the Culinary Institute of America and he said, well, I.
Speaker 7 (28:43):
Used to live, oh really well before it became the CIA.
It was a jesuit the Vision.
Speaker 4 (28:50):
He used to live on the grounds of the institute,
used to live there.
Speaker 7 (28:54):
Yeah, we closed it. We were the last class there.
We closed it in nineteen sixty nine. I lived there
for two years, and we closed it as a jesuit
theavision in sixty nine, and that's when the CIA took
it over. That's where I first tasted the mystical life,
you know, the life of union was gone, and I
didn't realize, Wow, this exists. We weren't tart that in
grammar school or even in high school. Did you catch
(29:14):
that where I first tasted the mystical life. When we
ran that first test in the CIA cafeteria, it failed.
I felt like we'd let everyone down. In the end,
about sixty one percent of people could tell the difference
between our muffin and Thomas's. The perfect result would have
(29:38):
been thirty three percent. But then we ran one more test.
Speaker 4 (29:45):
The next is a paired preference test, which will tell
us which they all liked better. Our first test only
told us if people knew the difference between our muffin
and the real thing. It didn't tell us if the
difference was good or bad. But now we were running
a test called paired preference. We used up all those
old vinegar based muffins Rachel found in her bag, so
(30:05):
we decided to use her sourdough recipe instead. Thomas' was
number one hundred and forty two and Rachel's was five
ninety eight.
Speaker 8 (30:14):
I like five hundred ninety eight, five ninety eight, five
ninety eight, five hundred and ninety eight.
Speaker 4 (30:20):
Nearly eighty percent of people preferred Rachel's recipe.
Speaker 8 (30:24):
Five ninety eight has like like a like salty taste,
like it's more flavorable.
Speaker 4 (30:31):
So no, we didn't perfectly reverse engineer the secret recipe
and process for a Thomas's English muffin. Rachel In the
students at the CIA spent a couple of weeks reverse
engineering an old secret recipe, and they made a muffin
that had the exact same nooks and crannies. It just
tasted way better some secret. When I started working on
(31:02):
this story, I reached out to the defendant in the case,
Chris Boticella, the baking executive Beambo accused of trying to
take the secret muffin recipe to a competitor. In all
the many pieces I'd read on the case, I'd never
seen a quote from him. For a long time, I
couldn't reach him. Then a few weeks after I got
back from the CIA, just as I was about to
(31:23):
put this story to bed, I finally heard from him.
After a few letters and emails, Chris and I spoke
on the phone.
Speaker 3 (31:31):
I'm Italian, you can obviously you know you from accent.
Speaker 4 (31:36):
He told me how he'd gotten into baking, working as
a kid at the same baking company his parents did
when they immigrated from Italy. After we'd gone over some
details of the case, I asked him how he felt
about baking.
Speaker 3 (31:47):
Now, I love baking, you know. So the answer is
that to you is yeah, I still love baking. I
just don't like what happened. And yeah, I love baking.
Why do you love it well? Because you know, I
think I am one of the best bakers around. And
in your vein it's not only the blood, but it's flour.
(32:13):
I love it.
Speaker 4 (32:14):
Chris told me he actually thinks Bimbo is a good
company to work for. He just wound up in a
bad situation. Towards the end of our conversation, I asked
him how he felt about that secret recipe at the
center of the case. I was expecting he'd be reverent
about the nooks and crannies, like Father Michael with the
formula for sure, Truce.
Speaker 3 (32:33):
No, Ben, Listen, it's a bullshit. A muffin is a muffin.
It cannot be the freaking difficult to produce. A muffin
is a muffin.
Speaker 4 (32:42):
Hear and Chris say this a couple of months ago
would have saved me a lot of time.
Speaker 9 (32:47):
Every person that does the mixing of the product can
see it. So it's not a secured formula formula that
they keep secret. You know, in a bold somewhere. It's
it's left on the floor. It's really nobody knows the formula.
Speaker 4 (33:03):
Bimbo Bakeries hadn't replied to repeated requests for comment by
the time we recorded this episode, but by now I
could believe this secret recipe was all nonsense. The best
secrets bring us together. They bind us like a monastic order.
They don't trap us. I suspect that even if someone
(33:23):
got into that monastery and stole the full recipe for
ar Truths, people would still rather get a bottle of
it from the monks themselves, because the secret means something
coming from them, tied as it is, to an even
greater mystery. That's why Bembo's still pretending these are Samuel
Thomas's English muffins, a century after his death. But these
(33:46):
Thomas's nooks and crannies now they're just a bit of marketing,
a myth that somehow became a legal standard. Anyways, the
best way to protect your nooks and crannies isn't a
trade secret. It's opening your muffins with a fork a
knife just ruins the whole thing.
Speaker 1 (34:08):
The secret recipe for Rachel Wyman's improved Thomas's English muffins
can be found in our show notes. We've put the
vinegar version in there too. If you want the authentic
Thomas's flavor, leave them in a bag for a week
so they get stale. The key thing is to overproof
and refrigerate the dough. Why just ask Rachel.
Speaker 5 (34:30):
If they were kept at room temperature, it would be
kind of like this. It wouldn't have enough body. I
guess it slows down the fermentation, so yeast.
Speaker 4 (34:41):
It's like.
Speaker 5 (34:43):
A toddler. If it's warm and you give it sugar,
it's gonna go crazy and then it's gonna die.
Speaker 4 (34:50):
You you give your kids sugar, but you just keep
them very cold.
Speaker 5 (34:54):
Yeah, yeah, exactly totally and then and then they slow down,
so exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
Revision's History is produced by Ben Dafhaffrey with Lucy Sullivan
and Nina Bird Lawrence. This episode was edited by Julia Barton,
fact checking by Kate Ferby, original scoring by Luis Kerra.
Mixing and mastering on this episode by Echo Mountain. Our
executive producer is Jacob Smith. Production support from Sarah Buguer
and Luke LeMond at Pushkin. Thanks to Karen Schakerji Jake Flanagan,
(35:31):
Greta Cone, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Amy Hagadorn, Kira Posey,
Morgan Ratner, and Jordan McMillan.
Speaker 4 (35:39):
Special thanks to Chelsea Burgas, Jonathan Frishtick, Susan Reed, William
Woyse Weaver, Corey Theodore at the Anti Conquest Baking Company,
Becky Cooper for introducing me to Shartrus, Julia Conrad, Robin
Dando and Jonathan A. Zerfoss for helping us with our
triangle test methodology, and all the students at the CIA.
Happy graduation. I'm Ben Mattafaffrey.
Pushkin. A while ago, my colleague Bend A daff Haffrey
and I gathered to eat English muffins at the Pushkin office.
Ben had the idea to do a story about the
famous secret recipe for Thomas's English muffins. It sounded like
a fun romp. Go for it, I said, have a
(00:37):
good time, enjoy yourself. And then a couple months down
the road, Ben recorded the following voice memo.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
It's five sixteen am. I just had a dream where
I was in an Airbnb with someone who was affiliated
with benbo Bakers, who knew I was trying to reverse
engineer the muffin recipe. He's this bald guy who with
a mustache, I want to say. He was wearing a
(01:06):
card again. We were playing pool in this area, and
he said, how much flour and how much water do
you think we start with? Because if you tell me that,
it'll tell me if you're even close to knowing how
we do this.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
It was clear that Ben had gone very deep into
the nooks and crannies of this story, but this work
was too important to stop. In case you missed our
previous episode, let me catch you up. One of the
most famous trade secrets of all time is the recipe
for Thomas's English muffins. It involves how they create their
famous nooks and crannies, the most distinctive feature of a
(01:49):
nearly half a billion dollar product. The owner of Thomas's,
Bimbo Bakri's GROUPO Bimbo, say this secret was allegedly known
to only seven employees of the company, and they sued
one of them to keep him from taking another job,
which set off a whole race in corporate America to
lock up as many trade secrets as possible. Soon, the
(02:10):
corporate world could look a lot more mystical and secretive.
And all this had been many many years later to
wonder how hard can it be to make a muffin?
So he set out to try and reverse engineer the
famous Thomas's English Muffins recipe.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
I said, are you one of the seven? And it
was the recipe and he nodded ah. And he was
pretty mad at me, and he said, you're me after
my livelihood.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
You're coming after my livelihood, Ben, But it's too late
to turn back. He's in too deep. He's told me
he might even have to go to the CIA. I'm
Malcolm Gleavell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my show about
things overlooked and misunderstood. This season, we've taken on a
(03:06):
great many foes, the haters of paw Patrol, the absurd
claims of RFK Junior, the lazy interviewing style of Joe Rogan.
But now we're taking on our biggest opponent yet, Big Muffin,
because their trade secret represents a rising tide of secrecy
that's coming for us all. And so we shall persist
(03:29):
despite our nightmares. We must reverse engineer the English muffin.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
And here it is.
Speaker 4 (03:46):
The Muffin House three three seven was twentieth Street, built
as a foundry circle eighteen fifty. Samuel Beth Thomas converted
the ovens for his English muffin bakery in the early
twentieth century. I'm reading from a plaque in front of
the house where the inventor of Thomas's English muffins once baked.
It's in Chelsea, just a couple of blocks from the
(04:06):
offices of Pushkin Industries. Nineteen years ago, the owner of
the first floor apartment was taking out a radiator. He
lifted up some of the floorboards and discovered a door.
It was the remnants of Samuel bath Thomas's oven. I
was hoping somebody could show it to me. I rang
(04:27):
the doorbell, no answer. Clearly Bimbo Bakeries had gotten here first.
This was a recurring problem. I tried to hire some
culinary researchers to help reverse engineer the trademark Nooks and
Cranni's recipe, but Bimbo was a client. After all, they
are one of the largest baking conglomerates in the world.
(04:48):
I rang a bunch of doorbells and no one answered.
I sent a lot of emails that went unreturned, but
a few grave bakers were willing to talk to me
at least about the Nooks and Crannies in general. For
their own protection, we're not identifying them by name, So
am I the muffin man or not? I guess it's
a question.
Speaker 5 (05:06):
My question for you is is this like your trying
to create their exact products?
Speaker 4 (05:13):
Can we make this exact English?
Speaker 3 (05:16):
Okay?
Speaker 4 (05:17):
The vibe I was getting was mild interest, laced with
a healthy dose of are you okay?
Speaker 5 (05:23):
It's fairly intriguing, but it's also something that can be
super time consuming, So I personally don't like Thomas English muffins.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
You know, it looks like just a normal English muffin
recipe with you know, industrialized ingredient.
Speaker 5 (05:38):
Sorry lesson than soy rye, soybean oil, sort big acid,
those kind of things that are going to give it
that gumminess to it.
Speaker 4 (05:46):
The nificent creates come from holes in the dough, and
holes in the dough come from higher hydation. Lots of
good information on what makes a muffin an English muffin,
but little enthusiasm for my quest to make one exactly
like Thomas's. For me, this was way bigger than muffins alone.
I've learned that companies can use trade secrets as a
(06:07):
way to control their employees. The muffin trade secret had
put a man named Chris Botticella out of a job
Bimbo Bakeries. His employer claimed there was some deep mystery
to how Thomas's English muffins were manufactured, and this, it
seemed to me, had given them all too much power.
My plan was to test a reverse engineered muffin against
Thomas's to see if anyone could tell the difference. If not,
(06:31):
that would end the mystical power of their secret. But
I lacked the necessary skills to do this alone. One
baker asked me for several thousand dollars to do the job.
That's not crazy, seeing as the secret recipe brings in
almost half a billion a year for Bambo, But for
a complicated set of reasons involving journalistic ethics and poverty,
(06:52):
it was a non starter. I needed a true believer.
I needed a zealot. I needed a superstar.
Speaker 6 (07:00):
On this Donut Showdown, three superstar bakers elevate the humble
donut to new culinary heights.
Speaker 4 (07:07):
This is a clip from a twenty fourteen episode of
the short lived Cooking Channel show Donut Showdown. If you've
never seen Donut Showdown, congratulations.
Speaker 6 (07:16):
Let's say hello to our competitors.
Speaker 4 (07:18):
Three contestants compete in a variety of donut baking challenges
for a ten thousand dollars prize. This episode featured a
former architect, a pastry chef with a background in molecular
gastronomy who says things like.
Speaker 7 (07:31):
I'm the overlord of pastry.
Speaker 4 (07:33):
Overlord, and Rachel Wyman, head baker at the Montclair Bread Company.
Speaker 5 (07:39):
I've been baking since I was old enough to hold
a pastry bag. I literally wrote my name with a
pastry bag before pencils.
Speaker 4 (07:46):
Rachel Wyman has a baker's warmth about her angular red hair,
a little like Knuckles and Sonic the Hedgehog. She's a
total badass. She's got a tattoo on her arm that
says flower water, yeast, salt. Of course she makes it
to the final showdown. It's Rachel versus the Overlord of pastry.
Speaker 6 (08:04):
At least one of your donuts must include avocado.
Speaker 4 (08:11):
Rachel lands on avocado whipped cream on a treslacious donut
with the Sangreea filling. The food Scientist is going with
a notcho flavored donut. To my mind, these both sound disgusting,
but in the midst of it all, Rachel is having
a beautiful mind moment with her flower.
Speaker 5 (08:29):
The flower that I'm used to using is about eleven
percent twelve percent protein, and my options were a nine
percent protein or thirteen percent protein, So we had to
lend the flowers together. The last thing that I want
is to send the judges chewy donuts.
Speaker 4 (08:44):
It turns out that Rachel is a doe genius. But
was it enough?
Speaker 6 (08:49):
Rachel, you made two perfect does, but your sangreea filling
was a risk that didn't pay off. The winner of
this donut showdown is Rachel. Congratulations, one of ten thousand
(09:09):
dollars Russ Rachel.
Speaker 4 (09:12):
Rachel gets emotional. I get emotional because what I see
before me at last is a baker who just might
be crazy enough to take on the secret recipe for
Thomas's English muffin.
Speaker 3 (09:25):
I look her up.
Speaker 4 (09:26):
She teaches baking and pastry arts at the Culinary Institute
of America, the most prestigious culinary school in the country,
the CIA.
Speaker 5 (09:36):
So what I was going to tell you a couple
things because I neglected to send you the anything about me.
I used to do recipe development for a company that
created products for grocery stores all over the country, so
reverse engineering. It was like my jam, Oh, I'm saying, yeah,
this is exactly what would happen. They would bring me
(09:59):
a sample of something they wanted, and this was Wegman's
and Target and Whole.
Speaker 4 (10:03):
Foods, and I worked with that.
Speaker 3 (10:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (10:06):
No, so I made the bread on the cheese cake
factory table.
Speaker 3 (10:10):
Oh my god.
Speaker 5 (10:11):
So I lived in this space that you're doing this
story on.
Speaker 4 (10:14):
I didn't even know that this was a space. I
mean it is a big space. Rachel checked in with
the CIA green light. She and I were going to
reverse engineer Thomas's nooks and crannies. The trade secret of
the muffin involves the process, recipe and machines, but any
major baking company knows how to make bread at scale.
(10:35):
It's the principles behind the nooks and crannies that were
the key thing. We began to have regular debriefing calls.
Speaker 5 (10:42):
I I'm driving home from school, so uh yeah, it's
going really well.
Speaker 4 (10:50):
Rachel was all in. She even enlisted her students in
the effort, and I have.
Speaker 5 (10:55):
So many English muffins in the classroom.
Speaker 4 (10:58):
The first recipes were a bust. No nooks or crannies.
Speaker 5 (11:02):
The inside of the Thomases almost reminds me of like
a dense pancake, like a batter that's almost poured. So
we decided that we need to add more hydration to
our dough. We're gonna overproof it on purpose, so it
sits a little flatter on the griddle. Our our's got
(11:24):
a lot of loft, so we kind of have to
make them a little crappier.
Speaker 4 (11:29):
But making things crappier turned out to be a bit
of a challenge for Rachel.
Speaker 5 (11:34):
Like, the difficulty is that the Thomas's muffin is gray
and ours is uh not, So I think I can
just get a lower quality flower and work with that.
And also I've been buttering the griddle, but like also
we're using you know, plue gras, like eighty four percent
butter fat butter. It's like super yellow. I mean, so
(11:55):
I need to get I think I'm just gonna oil it.
And then the students even pointed out there's no butter
in the ingredient deck, so they're not using butter on
any surface, So I'll just use the same oil.
Speaker 4 (12:07):
Students are keeping you honest.
Speaker 5 (12:09):
I know they are, they really are. I mean the
flavor yesterday was amazing, but not like Thomas, And they're like, chef,
you just need to make it taste worse.
Speaker 4 (12:22):
Rachel and her students kept tinkering for about a week.
Every so often she'd send me photos their muffins went
from a flat surface on the interior to these big,
uneven lunar craters. I was starting to think that maybe
this really was a secret, uncrackable recipe, but then Rachel
sent me a photo of two muffins riddled with these small, deep,
(12:43):
perfect nooks and crannies. Other than the color, I couldn't
tell a difference between the classes nooks and crannies and Thomas's.
It was time for me to come up to the
CIA at Hyde Park to meet her in person, finalize
the recipe, and then put it to a blind taste
test to see if she'd actually pulled it off. Like
(13:13):
all the great American culinary schools, the Culinary Institute of
America is in a fight to the death with federal
law enforcement acronym versus acronym, the CIA versus the Central
Intelligence Agency. You would think that at some point in
its nearly seventy five years of existence, the president of
the Culinary Institute of America would have said, you know what,
(13:37):
our acronym has become a distraction. It's the American Culinary Institute.
Now you can have its spooks, take the bugs out
of my office, stop following me home. But no, the
Culinary Institute of America is not changing its name for anyone.
(14:00):
I took the train up in April. The campus sits
along the Hudson River in Hyde Park, New York, on
the grounds of an old Jesuit novitiate, gracious brick buildings,
photos of famous alumni on the wall, Anthony Bourdain. It's
a kind of culinary temple, little chapels, vaulted ceilings, stained glass.
The doors to the main hall have a crest with
(14:20):
three griffins and the school's motto cybus vite est Food
is Life.
Speaker 8 (14:28):
There's a reoccurring themale around the campus too, of like
what came first, the chicken or the egg.
Speaker 4 (14:33):
I'm getting a tour from baking business student Hannah Dawkins.
She was graduating in a semester and was filling me
in on campus lore. Do you have a strong position, Yeah.
Speaker 8 (14:43):
I feel like the egg definitely came first.
Speaker 4 (14:46):
We were walking through a library, one floor of which
is all recipe books organized according to a system I
had never before encountered nutrition, gastronomy, kitchen equipment. As we
walked through campus, I noticed all the pedestrian crossing signs
had a cartoon person in a chef's hat a toque, which,
true to life, was what everyone wore or the teachers,
at least the students all had these small skull caps on.
(15:09):
You know you've chosen a great profession when only at
the highest rank, do you get to wear the silliest hat?
We entered the baking building.
Speaker 8 (15:17):
So in this class they learned how to do sugar work,
chocolate show pieces, and fondant, So that swan is totally
made out of sugar.
Speaker 4 (15:24):
Why is she using a steamer on her cake over there?
Speaker 8 (15:27):
It gives it like a nice, like glossy look.
Speaker 4 (15:31):
It was becoming clear to me that this is the
greatest college in America.
Speaker 8 (15:36):
This is contemporary Cakes, Chocolates, Advanced baking principles, Late of
Dessert's class. Like, there's the freshman what at fifteen at
other schools, I would say, being at the culinary, it's
more like a freshman fifty.
Speaker 4 (15:50):
The plan was to use CIA students as guinea pigs
in our muffin test. Could they tell the difference between
the reverse engineered muffin and the real Thomases except as
handon toward me around campus? I was slowly realizing that
this particular audience of testers might be a little too smart.
Speaker 7 (16:09):
Vitamond was essentially testing a claim that adding baking soda
to onions when catamalizing them can reduce the cook diime
in half.
Speaker 8 (16:17):
I wanted to look at how refrigerating cookie dough before
baking is going to affect the final alcohol differences between
ricotta made with vinegar, citric acid, and lemon juice.
Speaker 4 (16:27):
So do you even know that you could make that?
Speaker 1 (16:28):
You made ricotta with any of Yeah, so you make
ricotta with an acigilant.
Speaker 4 (16:33):
So that's an acid A sigilant who says is vigilant.
Even the school's fight song was inscrutable.
Speaker 8 (16:42):
Okay, So it's mirror pla, mere pae dice about chop
it up, put it in the stew, mer Pa.
Speaker 4 (16:52):
She could not believe I didn't know the meaning of
the word mirror pla. Do you know the meaning of
the word mir pa? Well, as I learned, it is
a ratio for soup bass two parts onion, one part carrot,
one part celery, and four parts esoteric. You're welcome. And
here I was thinking these food geniuses could be fooled
(17:13):
by my taste test. I headed over to Rachel's classroom
Bakeshop nine. Rachel was communing with the muffin dough.
Speaker 5 (17:23):
Like every time you stretch gluten, it freaks out a
little bit, and you have to let it rest so
that it will relax enough to do the next thing.
I took the dough out of the refrigerator and I
have flattened it into a pan. So it's the right
(17:44):
thickness for our muffins.
Speaker 4 (17:46):
If anyone could pull this off, it was going to
be Rachel. We were making English muffins from two recipes.
She'd created one using the ingredients listed on the Thomas's package,
including vinegar. Now having that list is helpful, but the
ingredients only tell you so much. Baking, like mir POAs,
is all about ratios and process. Rachel was making a
(18:08):
second batch with sour though, which was her own spin.
We were going to taste both see which was closer
to Thomas's, and then put it up against the real
thing in the blind taste test.
Speaker 5 (18:19):
I can open this one to this perfect that's pretty amazing.
Speaker 4 (18:24):
Look at that. That looks really good.
Speaker 5 (18:26):
It's a little bit.
Speaker 4 (18:27):
I don't see a difference. I don't see a difference.
Speaker 5 (18:30):
Oh my gosh, look at that.
Speaker 4 (18:31):
They look identical. But it was amazing. I called the
students over see what they made of it. Do you
really think this is gonna work?
Speaker 1 (18:39):
I actually do.
Speaker 4 (18:41):
I do very optimistic because I just by looking at them,
they look completely like exactly the same. We ran a
mini test where the kids tasted the fresh muffins against Thomas's,
and I quickly learned that they did not think as
highly of Thomas's English muffins as I did.
Speaker 5 (18:56):
So, I don't like English muffins.
Speaker 4 (18:57):
Doesn't it taste like so you just spat it out.
Speaker 5 (19:01):
I've never liked English muffins my whole life, because this
is what I've always been offered. It smells like box,
like cardboards.
Speaker 4 (19:08):
You think if it gets stale, there might be a
chance we pull this off that people can't tell.
Speaker 5 (19:12):
I think it'll be pulled off. Well.
Speaker 4 (19:18):
The key was to let our muffins get stale so
they matched Thomas's. Rachel had made a batch the day before,
which she'd left out in the open for this purpose.
For the test, we were gonna cut the muffins into
sixteenths and put them in egg cartons. That would give
us enough samples for about one hundred tests. But as
we cut up Rachel's muffins from the day before, it
was clear that they were a little too crusty. We
(19:41):
left them out uncovered, and they'd gotten very stale. We
were both worried, and then Rachel found a bag of
muffins under her desk.
Speaker 5 (19:52):
These have been sitting in a bag.
Speaker 4 (19:53):
For like all week, so these are the same as
the final recipe.
Speaker 5 (19:59):
These are the vinegar recipe.
Speaker 4 (20:00):
Look at that, it looks like exactly like a Thomas's.
It looked exactly like a Thomas's, and to me it
tasted exactly like a Thomas's. We began furiously slicing them up.
This kind of last minute dramatic switch of the plan
is exactly there's two minutes until the test starts. We
(20:23):
finished right on schedule. We wheeled our samples out into
the packed student cafeteria.
Speaker 5 (20:29):
You know, it's like when you when your kids play
sports and you're like super nervous for them, even though
it has no bearing ones.
Speaker 4 (20:42):
It was time to pit our formula against the greatest
culinary minds in America. Cue the fight song. Hello everybody,
My goodness. At some point in your life, I hope
(21:03):
you experience a moment so absurd, so profoundly unrecognizable, that
you haven't of body experience. For me, that moment was
standing in the cafeteria at the CIA, addressing a crowd
of culinary students in white uniforms and skull caps regarding
the several hundred egg cartons I had filled with English muffins.
(21:23):
So in each of these cartons there's a slice of
English muffin. Two of them the same, are the same,
one of them is different. Using tastes, I want you
to tell me which number is different. I had marked
each muffin section with numbers like three oh two, three
forty eight, and one twenty nine, blinding codes so people
wouldn't be biased by ABC or one two three. In
(21:46):
each test, you either had two Thomases and one Rachel's
or two Rachels and one Thomas's. Exactly. I knew which
numbers marked the odd muffin out. The goal was to
see if they could tell. If they could, we'd failed,
which one do you think is different than the others?
That was a wrong answer, but most of.
Speaker 5 (22:04):
Them see, I think it was four.
Speaker 4 (22:07):
That's different, ninety nine is different, it's one, nine, pretty sure,
it's one. Pretty quickly it became clear that we were
on track for over sixty percent of people correctly guessing
which muffin was not like the others. This was not working.
We're getting smoke so far, we're invasively destroying it. Looked
(22:29):
like our entire plan was going to fail. We took
on Bimbo Bakeri's legendary trade secret, and just like in
Bimbo Bakeries versus Cris Botaicella, we were losing and the
secret was winning. We'll be right back. I want to
(22:50):
leave the muffin test for a moment to tell you
about a rabbit hole. I fell down while researching this episode.
I was trying to articulate why the idea that the
nooks and crannies were a trade secret bothered me so much,
so I began studying other trade secrets and secret recipes.
One of the most famous is for cur called chartreuse.
(23:11):
Chartreuse has been made by a French monastic order, the Carthusians,
based on a mysterious recipe that was gifted to them
in sixteen oh five. This recipe is a very closely
guarded secret. Nooks and crannies for fancy cocktails. I learned
that one of the Carthusian monks who'd been in charge
of chartreuse production had left the order and now lived
(23:33):
in New York City, so I wrote to him. His
name is father Michael Hollerin. I visited him at the
parish offices of Saint Monica's Church on the Upper East Side,
just a few days after Easter. What is known about
the origin of that recipe.
Speaker 7 (23:47):
No one ever seems to have researched it. We never
knew anything more about it trying to trace it back further.
I've never seen anything on that. But the main reason
that it's different is that that it is a secret
and has been kept a secret all this time. Is
because it was simply for the support of the monks.
They were pure contemplatives. There was no sense that we
(24:10):
want to become rich with this, we want to make
a name for ourselves. No, all we want to do
is support ourselves, so you don't have to worry about,
you know, outside support. We can support ourselves, and had
to be kept secret so obviously so people wouldn't steal
the formula and make their own.
Speaker 4 (24:26):
Originally, Chartruse was a health flixer. People took it for
all kinds of ailments, apoplexy, toothaches, palpitations, indigestion, fever. Eventually,
the monks dropped the elixir claim and it just became
a liqueur. But it still has this weird power. When
I drink it, I tend to have strange dreams. It
has a spicy, sweet complexity, and its color is this vivid,
(24:50):
alluring green.
Speaker 7 (24:52):
There's a whole cabinet in own of counterfeits, controfess of
people who tried to steal it. But there have been
efforts to use the name or use something that duplicated
the formula in some way, which of course is impossible
because it's so complex, very complex. You can't just, you know,
set up a shop and make it.
Speaker 4 (25:12):
Father Michael told me he was the first American Carthusian ever.
In the nineteen eighties, he lived in France at the
Grand Chartruse Monastery in the Unforgiving Mountains of the French Wilderness.
The Carthusians are famously silent order, and Father Michael was restless,
so the monks put him in charge of chartreuse. It's
not easy to make. There are one hundred and thirty
(25:35):
herbs that are treated in a number of different ways.
The recipe is kept on sheets and sheets of old
paper that now Father Michael had access to. But eventually,
when he left the Carthusian order and came back to
the United States with that recipe in his mind, the
monks just let him walk away. I'm curious what if
(25:57):
you could tell me about the process of leaving the
Carthusian Order, and whether there was any sort of effort
to make sure that you never share the recipe or
how it was conveyed to you that you should not
spread this.
Speaker 7 (26:13):
Absolutely nothing nobody ever told me not to no where,
Nobody ever expressed fear that I might. Nobody ever threatened
me that I shouldn't do it. They simply trusted that
I wouldn't, And of course I wouldn't, you know, because
you know it was dedicated to them and to the
to the order. The other thing is that you know
(26:34):
it's too complicated to make anyway. As I said from
the beginning, I could never could never really do it,
nor have I been kidnapped, And people, a lot of
a lot of people know that that I know the recipe.
Speaker 4 (26:44):
The formula for chartruse really is worth money. It's kept
the Carthusians afloat for centuries. But when Father Michael left,
they didn't threaten, punish or sue him or tell them
not to join another order, because the secret was a
bond between them, not a tool for control.
Speaker 7 (27:03):
It's a it's a mysterious formula, but it's the service
of an even greater mystery, which is the monastic life
and people in community together, you know, in silence and
solitude to find union with God. So it's at the
service of a real mystery. It's even greater than the
formula for sure.
Speaker 4 (27:20):
Truth is there in your mind a hierarchy between a
secret and a mystery? And how would you how would
you illustrate the difference if there is one.
Speaker 7 (27:28):
Well, a mystery? I think I haven't thought of it,
but I think the mystery is a broader concept. You
speak about the mystery of God, the mystery of life,
not just like a mystery that you would read a
detective mystery. Mystery is not something that's that you don't know,
something that's unknowable in rational terms.
Speaker 4 (27:45):
And a secret can you know and someone could, yeah.
Speaker 7 (27:48):
And the secret is it just can be something trivial.
But a mystery in its original sense, it's just something
that's very deep and wonderful. It can never be conceptualized,
but has to be lived.
Speaker 4 (28:02):
I realized that that's what bothered me about the idea
that the nooks and crannies were some legendary trade secret,
not just that an English muffin is mostly flour and water,
while chartreuse has one hundred and thirty ingredients. But that
Thomas's English muffins have all the mystification of a monastic
order and none of the mystery. It debates his mystery
(28:24):
and puts it in the service of corporate control. Maybe
that all sounds like a stretch to you, But it
turned out Father Michael was closer to my story than
even I had realized. I told him about our reverse
engineering project at the Culinary Institute of America and he said, well, I.
Speaker 7 (28:43):
Used to live, oh really well before it became the CIA.
It was a jesuit the Vision.
Speaker 4 (28:50):
He used to live on the grounds of the institute,
used to live there.
Speaker 7 (28:54):
Yeah, we closed it. We were the last class there.
We closed it in nineteen sixty nine. I lived there
for two years, and we closed it as a jesuit
theavision in sixty nine, and that's when the CIA took
it over. That's where I first tasted the mystical life,
you know, the life of union was gone, and I
didn't realize, Wow, this exists. We weren't tart that in
grammar school or even in high school. Did you catch
(29:14):
that where I first tasted the mystical life. When we
ran that first test in the CIA cafeteria, it failed.
I felt like we'd let everyone down. In the end,
about sixty one percent of people could tell the difference
between our muffin and Thomas's. The perfect result would have
(29:38):
been thirty three percent. But then we ran one more test.
Speaker 4 (29:45):
The next is a paired preference test, which will tell
us which they all liked better. Our first test only
told us if people knew the difference between our muffin
and the real thing. It didn't tell us if the
difference was good or bad. But now we were running
a test called paired preference. We used up all those
old vinegar based muffins Rachel found in her bag, so
(30:05):
we decided to use her sourdough recipe instead. Thomas' was
number one hundred and forty two and Rachel's was five
ninety eight.
Speaker 8 (30:14):
I like five hundred ninety eight, five ninety eight, five
ninety eight, five hundred and ninety eight.
Speaker 4 (30:20):
Nearly eighty percent of people preferred Rachel's recipe.
Speaker 8 (30:24):
Five ninety eight has like like a like salty taste,
like it's more flavorable.
Speaker 4 (30:31):
So no, we didn't perfectly reverse engineer the secret recipe
and process for a Thomas's English muffin. Rachel In the
students at the CIA spent a couple of weeks reverse
engineering an old secret recipe, and they made a muffin
that had the exact same nooks and crannies. It just
tasted way better some secret. When I started working on
(31:02):
this story, I reached out to the defendant in the case,
Chris Boticella, the baking executive Beambo accused of trying to
take the secret muffin recipe to a competitor. In all
the many pieces I'd read on the case, I'd never
seen a quote from him. For a long time, I
couldn't reach him. Then a few weeks after I got
back from the CIA, just as I was about to
(31:23):
put this story to bed, I finally heard from him.
After a few letters and emails, Chris and I spoke
on the phone.
Speaker 3 (31:31):
I'm Italian, you can obviously you know you from accent.
Speaker 4 (31:36):
He told me how he'd gotten into baking, working as
a kid at the same baking company his parents did
when they immigrated from Italy. After we'd gone over some
details of the case, I asked him how he felt
about baking.
Speaker 3 (31:47):
Now, I love baking, you know. So the answer is
that to you is yeah, I still love baking. I
just don't like what happened. And yeah, I love baking.
Why do you love it well? Because you know, I
think I am one of the best bakers around. And
in your vein it's not only the blood, but it's flour.
(32:13):
I love it.
Speaker 4 (32:14):
Chris told me he actually thinks Bimbo is a good
company to work for. He just wound up in a
bad situation. Towards the end of our conversation, I asked
him how he felt about that secret recipe at the
center of the case. I was expecting he'd be reverent
about the nooks and crannies, like Father Michael with the
formula for sure, Truce.
Speaker 3 (32:33):
No, Ben, Listen, it's a bullshit. A muffin is a muffin.
It cannot be the freaking difficult to produce. A muffin
is a muffin.
Speaker 4 (32:42):
Hear and Chris say this a couple of months ago
would have saved me a lot of time.
Speaker 9 (32:47):
Every person that does the mixing of the product can
see it. So it's not a secured formula formula that
they keep secret. You know, in a bold somewhere. It's
it's left on the floor. It's really nobody knows the formula.
Speaker 4 (33:03):
Bimbo Bakeries hadn't replied to repeated requests for comment by
the time we recorded this episode, but by now I
could believe this secret recipe was all nonsense. The best
secrets bring us together. They bind us like a monastic order.
They don't trap us. I suspect that even if someone
(33:23):
got into that monastery and stole the full recipe for
ar Truths, people would still rather get a bottle of
it from the monks themselves, because the secret means something
coming from them, tied as it is, to an even
greater mystery. That's why Bembo's still pretending these are Samuel
Thomas's English muffins, a century after his death. But these
(33:46):
Thomas's nooks and crannies now they're just a bit of marketing,
a myth that somehow became a legal standard. Anyways, the
best way to protect your nooks and crannies isn't a
trade secret. It's opening your muffins with a fork a
knife just ruins the whole thing.
Speaker 1 (34:08):
The secret recipe for Rachel Wyman's improved Thomas's English muffins
can be found in our show notes. We've put the
vinegar version in there too. If you want the authentic
Thomas's flavor, leave them in a bag for a week
so they get stale. The key thing is to overproof
and refrigerate the dough. Why just ask Rachel.
Speaker 5 (34:30):
If they were kept at room temperature, it would be
kind of like this. It wouldn't have enough body. I
guess it slows down the fermentation, so yeast.
Speaker 4 (34:41):
It's like.
Speaker 5 (34:43):
A toddler. If it's warm and you give it sugar,
it's gonna go crazy and then it's gonna die.
Speaker 4 (34:50):
You you give your kids sugar, but you just keep
them very cold.
Speaker 5 (34:54):
Yeah, yeah, exactly totally and then and then they slow down,
so exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
Revision's History is produced by Ben Dafhaffrey with Lucy Sullivan
and Nina Bird Lawrence. This episode was edited by Julia Barton,
fact checking by Kate Ferby, original scoring by Luis Kerra.
Mixing and mastering on this episode by Echo Mountain. Our
executive producer is Jacob Smith. Production support from Sarah Buguer
and Luke LeMond at Pushkin. Thanks to Karen Schakerji Jake Flanagan,
(35:31):
Greta Cone, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Amy Hagadorn, Kira Posey,
Morgan Ratner, and Jordan McMillan.
Speaker 4 (35:39):
Special thanks to Chelsea Burgas, Jonathan Frishtick, Susan Reed, William
Woyse Weaver, Corey Theodore at the Anti Conquest Baking Company,
Becky Cooper for introducing me to Shartrus, Julia Conrad, Robin
Dando and Jonathan A. Zerfoss for helping us with our
triangle test methodology, and all the students at the CIA.
Happy graduation. I'm Ben Mattafaffrey.
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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