June 12, 2025 • 36 mins
In Revisionist History's season finale, senior producer Ben teams up with the Culinary Institute of America to reverse engineer the secret recipe for Thomas’s English Muffins.
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Speaker 1 (00:16):
Pushkin. Last week we shared part one of an investigation
into the secret recipe for Thomas's English muffins. Today on
the show, we joined forces with a legendary baker to
try and reverse engineer the recipe and end the trade secret.
You can listen to Revisionist History wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Enjoy the episode.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
A while ago, my colleague Bendadaf 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 good time, enjoy yourself.
And then a couple months down the road, Ben recorded
(01:02):
the following voice memo.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
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 with a mustache,
I want to say, he was wearing a card again.
(01:26):
We were playing pool in this airbnb 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 3 (01:45):
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
(02:08):
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 at 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
(02:29):
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, as that are.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
You one in the seven and it was the recipe
and he notdded ah, and he was pretty mad at me,
and he said, you're ero me after my livelihood.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
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 him.
Malcolm Gleavell, you're listening to Revisionist History, my show about
things overlooked and misunderstood. This season we've taken on a
(03:25):
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
(03:48):
despite our nightmares. We must reverse engineer the English muffin.
Speaker 4 (04:02):
And here it is.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
The Muffin House three three seven was twentieth Street, built
as a foundry circa 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 blocks from the offices
(04:26):
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 the doorbell,
(04:49):
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. I rang
a bunch of doorbells in no one answer. I sent
(05:10):
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?
Speaker 5 (05:24):
I guess it's a question.
Speaker 6 (05:26):
My question for you is is this like you're trying
to create their exact products.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Yeah, can we make this exact English?
Speaker 7 (05:35):
Okay?
Speaker 1 (05:36):
The vibe I was getting was mild interest laced with
a healthy dose of are you okay? It's fairly intriguing,
but it's also something that's going to be super time consuming.
Speaker 6 (05:46):
So I personally don't like Thomas English buffets.
Speaker 8 (05:49):
You know, it looks like just a normal English.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Muffin recipe with you know, industrialized.
Speaker 6 (05:57):
Ingredient, sorry, lesson than soy rye, soybean oil, sort of acid,
those kind of things that are going to give it
that gumminess to it.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
The niok and creates come from holes in the dough,
and holes in the dough from higher hydreation. 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'd learned that companies can use trade secrets as a
(06:26):
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,
(06:50):
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 Bimbo, But for
a complicated set of reasons involving journalists, ethics, and poverty,
(07:11):
it was a non starter. I needed a true believer.
I needed as zealot. I needed a superstar.
Speaker 5 (07:19):
On this Donut Showdown, three superstar bakers elevate the humble
donut to new culinary heights.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
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 5 (07:35):
Let's say hello to our competitors.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
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 I'm the Overlord of pastry
Overlord and Rachel Wyman, head baker at the Montclair Bread Company.
Speaker 9 (07:58):
I've been baking since i was old enough to hold
a pastry bag. I literally wrote my name with a
pastry bag before pencil.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
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 5 (08:23):
At least one of your donuts must include avocado.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
Rachel lands on avocado whipped cream on a treslatious donut
with the sangree of 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 9 (08:48):
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 1 (09:03):
It turns out that Rachel is a doe genius.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
But was it enough?
Speaker 5 (09:08):
Rachel? You made two perfect doze, but your sangreea filling
was a risk that didn't pay off. The winner of
this donut showdown is Rachel. Congratulations, and you're one the
ten thousand dollars.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
Frize, Rachel. 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. I look her up. She
teaches baking and pastry arts at the Culinary Institute of America,
(09:50):
the most prestigious culinary school in the country, the CIA.
Speaker 6 (09:55):
So what I was going to tell you a couple
things because I neglected to send you anything about me.
I used to do recipe development for a company that
created products for grocery stores all over the country reverse engineering.
It was like my jam Oh, I'm saying, yeah, this
is exactly what would happen. They would bring me a
(10:18):
sample of something they wanted, and this was Wegman's and
Target and.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Whole Foods and.
Speaker 6 (10:25):
Yeah no, so I made the bread on the cheesecake
factory table.
Speaker 7 (10:29):
Oh my god, So I lived in this space that
you're doing this story on.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
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. It's
(10:55):
the principles behind the nooks and crannies that were the
key thing. We began to have regular debriefing calls.
Speaker 9 (11:02):
I I'm driving home from school, so uh yeah, it's.
Speaker 7 (11:07):
Going really well.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
Rachel was all in. She even enlisted her students in
the effort.
Speaker 7 (11:13):
And I have so many English muffins in the classroom.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
The first recipes were a bust, no nooks or crannies.
Speaker 9 (11:21):
The inside of the Thomases almost reminds me of like
a dense pancake, you know, like a batter that's almost poured,
so we decided that we need to add more hydration
to our dough. We're gonna overprove it on purpose, so
it sits a little flatter on the griddle. Our our's
(11:43):
got a lot of loft, so we kind of have
to make them a little crappier.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
But making things crappier turned out to be a bit
of a challenge for Rachel.
Speaker 9 (11:53):
Like, the difficulty is that the Thomas's muffin is gray
and ours is uh not, So I think I can.
Speaker 6 (12:01):
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, clu.
Speaker 7 (12:08):
Gra like eighty four butter flat butter. It's like super yellow.
I mean, so I need to get I think I'm
just gonna oil it.
Speaker 9 (12:16):
And then the students even pointed out there's no butter
in the ingredient decks, so they're not using butter on
any surface.
Speaker 7 (12:23):
So I'll just use the same oil.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
Students are keeping you honest.
Speaker 7 (12:28):
I know they are, they really are.
Speaker 6 (12:30):
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 1 (12:41):
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,
(13:02):
perfect nooks and crannies. Other than the color, I couldn't
tell a difference between the classes nooks and crannies. And
Tom 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.
(13:32):
Like 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
(13:55):
know what, our acronym has become a distraction. It's the
American Culinary Institute. Now you can have it, 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. I took the train up in April.
(14:21):
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 three griffins in the school's motto,
(14:42):
sybas vite est Food is Life.
Speaker 10 (14:47):
There's a reoccurring female around the campus too, of like
what came first, the chicken or the egg.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
And 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.
Speaker 10 (15:02):
Yeah, I feel like the egg definitely came first.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
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.
(15:28):
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 10 (15:36):
So in this class they learned how to do sugar work,
chocolate show pieces.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
And fondon.
Speaker 10 (15:41):
So that swan is totally made out of sugar.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Why is she using a steamer on her cake over there?
Speaker 10 (15:47):
It gives it like a nice, like glossy look.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
It was becoming clear to me that this is the
greatest college in America.
Speaker 10 (15:55):
This is contemporary Cakes, Chocolates, Advanced baking Principles, Late of
Desserts 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 1 (16:09):
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
handan toward me around in campus. I was slowly realizing
that this particular audience of testers might be a little
too smart.
Speaker 8 (16:27):
My experiment was essentially testing a claim that adding baking
soda to onions when catamalizing them can reduce the cook
time in half.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
I wanted to look at how refrigerating cookie dough before
baking is going to affect the final alcohol.
Speaker 10 (16:41):
Differences between ricotta made with vinegar, citric acid, and lemon juice.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
So you even know that you could make that you
made ricotta with any of those things.
Speaker 3 (16:49):
Yeah, so you make ricotta with an acigilant.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
So that's an acid A sigilant who says is vigilant.
Even the school's fight song was inscrutable.
Speaker 10 (17:01):
Okay, so it's mirror pwa mere pae dice about chop
it up, put it in the stew.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
She could not believe I didn't know the meaning of
the word mirror, plaw. Do you know the meaning of
the word mirror, pa? Well, as I learned, it is
a ratio for soup base two parts onion, one part carrot,
one part celery, and four parts esoteric.
Speaker 7 (17:27):
You're welcome.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
And here I was thinking these food geniuses could be
fooled by my taste test. I headed over to Rachel's
classroom Bakeshop nine. Rachel was communing with the muffin dough.
Speaker 9 (17:42):
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.
Speaker 7 (17:53):
I took the dough.
Speaker 9 (17:54):
Out of the refrigerator and I have.
Speaker 7 (18:00):
Flattened it into a pan, so it's the right thickness
for our muffins.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
If anyone could pull this off, it was going to
be Rachel. We were making lush muffins from two recipes.
She'd created one using the ingredients listed on the Thomas' package,
including vinegar. Now having that list is helpful, but the
ingredients only tell you so much. Baking, like mir Pois,
is all about ratios and process. Rachel was making a
(18:27):
second batch with sour dough, 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 7 (18:38):
I can open this one to this pert.
Speaker 6 (18:41):
That's pretty amazing.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
Look at that. That looks really good.
Speaker 7 (18:46):
It's a little bit I don't see a difference.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
I don't see a difference.
Speaker 7 (18:49):
Oh my gosh, look at that.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
They look identical. But it was amazing. I called the
students over to see what they made of it. Do
you really think this is going to work? I actually do.
I do very optimistic because I just by looking at them,
they look completely like the exactly the same. We ran
a mini test where the kids tasted the fresh muffins
against tom misses, and I quickly learned that they did
(19:11):
not think as highly of Thomas's English muffins as I did.
Speaker 7 (19:15):
So, I don't like English muffins.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
Doesn't it taste like so? You just spat it out.
Speaker 9 (19:20):
I've never liked English muffins my whole life, because this
is what I've always been offered.
Speaker 7 (19:24):
It smells like box, like cardboards.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
Do you think if it gets stale there might be
a chance we pull this off? Other people can't tell.
Speaker 7 (19:32):
I think it'll be pulled off.
Speaker 9 (19:33):
Well.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
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 going to 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.
(20:00):
We 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 7 (20:11):
These have been sitting in a bag for like all week.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
So these are the same as the final recipe.
Speaker 7 (20:18):
These are the vinegar recipe.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
Look at that it looks like exactly like a Thomass.
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
(20:42):
finished right on schedule. We wheeled our samples out into
the packed student cafeteria.
Speaker 9 (20:48):
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 one.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
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
(21:22):
you experience a moment so absurd, so profoundly unrecognizable, that
you have an out 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. So in each of these cartons there's
(21:45):
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
h two, three forty eight and one twenty nine blinding
codes so people wouldn't be biased by ABC or one
two three. In each test, you either had two Thomases
(22:07):
and one Rachel's or two rachels in one Tom misses 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 8 (22:24):
Them excuse me.
Speaker 7 (22:25):
I think it was five thirty four.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
That's different. Three ninety nine is different.
Speaker 7 (22:29):
It's one o nine, pretty sure, it's one four.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
Two one two is stretty 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 destroy
It looked like our entire plan was going to fail.
We took on Bimbo Baker's legendary trade secret, and just
(22:55):
like in Biambo Bakeries versus Cris Botticella, we were losing
and the secret was winning. We'll be right back. I
want to leave the muff and test for a moment
to tell you about a rabbit hole. I fell down
while researching this episode. I was trying to articulate why
(23:17):
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 lequeur called chartreuse. 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.
(23:39):
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 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
(24:01):
Church on the Upper East Side just a few days
after Easter. What is known about the origin of that recipe?
Speaker 11 (24:07):
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
(24:30):
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 I
had to be kept secret so obviously, so people wouldn't
steal the forma and make their wrong.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
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
(25:09):
vivid or in green.
Speaker 11 (25:11):
There's a whole cabinet in Boaron of counterfeits, controfessor 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 1 (25:32):
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
(25:53):
hundred and thirty 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 them walk away. I'm curious what
(26:16):
if 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 11 (26:32):
Absolutely nothing nobody ever told me not to 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 it's still complicated
(26:54):
to make anyway. As I said from the beginning, I
could never could never really do it, nor have I
been kidnapped. People A lot of a lot of people
know that that I know the recipe, the.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
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 11 (27:22):
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 finding 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 (27:39):
Truth.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
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 11 (27:48):
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, and.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
A secret can you know and someone could.
Speaker 11 (28:07):
Yeah, and a secret is 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 1 (28:21):
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 mystery
(28:43):
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, wow,
(29:03):
oh really.
Speaker 11 (29:04):
Well, before it became the CIA, it was a Jesuit
and the vision.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
He used to live on the grounds of the institute.
Speaker 11 (29:13):
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
and the vision in sixty nine, and that's when the
CIA took it over. That's where I first tasted the
mystical life. You know that the life of union was gone,
and I didn't realize, Wow, this exists. We weren't taught
that in grammar school or even in high school.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
Did you catch 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
(29:53):
the difference between our muffin and Thomas's. The perfect result
would have been thirty three percent. But then we ran
one more test. The next is a paired preference test,
which will tell us which they like better. Our first
test told us if people knew the difference between our
muffin and the real thing. It didn't tell us if
(30:14):
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 we decided to use her sourdough recipe instead. Thomas's
was number one hundred and forty two and Rachel's was
five ninety eight.
Speaker 10 (30:34):
I like five hundred ninety eight, five ninety eight, five
ninety eight eight, five hundred ninety eight.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
Nearly eighty percent of people preferred Rachel's recipe.
Speaker 10 (30:43):
Five ninety eight has like like a slight salty taste,
like a more flavorabul.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
So no, we didn't perfectly reverse engineer the secret recipe
and process for a Thomas's English muffin. Rachel and 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
(31:21):
this story, I reached out to the defendant in the case,
Chris Boughticella, the baking executive Bembo 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.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
Quote from him.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
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 put this story to bed,
I finally heard from him. After a few letters and emails.
Chris and I spoke.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
On the phone.
Speaker 4 (31:51):
I'm Italian, you can obviously you know here from accent.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
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 8 (32:06):
Now, I love baking, you know, so the answer is
that to you, yeah, I still love baking.
Speaker 4 (32:11):
I just don't like what happened. And yeah, I love baking.
Speaker 1 (32:16):
Why do you love it?
Speaker 4 (32:17):
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. I love it.
Speaker 1 (32:34):
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 4 (32:53):
No, Ben, listen, it's a bullshit.
Speaker 8 (32:56):
A muffin is a muffin.
Speaker 4 (32:57):
It cannot be the freaking difficult to produce. A muffin
is a muffin.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
Youri and Chris say this a couple of months ago
would have saved me a lot of time.
Speaker 8 (33:06):
Every person that does the mixing of the product can
see it. So it's not a secured 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 format.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
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
(33:42):
got into that monastery and stole the full recipe for
ur Truce, 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 Bimbo's still pretending these are Samuel
Thomas's English muffins a century after his death. But these
(34:05):
Thomas's nooks and crannies now They're just a bit of marketing.
If that somehow became a legal standard. Anyways, the best
way to protect your nooks and crannies isn't the trade secret.
It's opening your muffins with a fork a knife just
ruins the whole thing.
Speaker 3 (34:27):
The secret recipe for Rachel Wyman's improved Toms'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, Well, if.
Speaker 9 (34:49):
They were kept at room temperature, it would be kind
of like this.
Speaker 7 (34:53):
It wouldn't have enough body.
Speaker 9 (34:56):
I guess it slows down the fermentation, so yeast.
Speaker 7 (35:00):
It's like a toddler. If it's warm and you give
it sugar.
Speaker 9 (35:05):
It's going to go crazy and then it's going to die.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
You you give your kids sugar, but you just keep
them very cold.
Speaker 9 (35:13):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, totally, and then and then they slow down, so.
Speaker 4 (35:19):
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 (35:27):
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 Kara.
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,
(35:51):
Greta Cone, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Amy Hagadorn, Kira Posey,
Morgan Ratner, and Jordan McMillan.
Speaker 1 (35:59):
Special thanks to Chelsea Burgess, Jonathan Frishtick, Susan Reed, William
Woyse Weaver, Corey Theodore at the Anti Conquest Baking Company,
Becky Cooper for introducing me to Shartruce, Julia Conrad, Robin
Dando and Jonathan A. Zeer Foss for helping us with
our triangle test methodology, and all the students at the
CIA Happy Graduation. I'm Ben Mattafaffrey.
Pushkin. Last week we shared part one of an investigation
into the secret recipe for Thomas's English muffins. Today on
the show, we joined forces with a legendary baker to
try and reverse engineer the recipe and end the trade secret.
You can listen to Revisionist History wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Enjoy the episode.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
A while ago, my colleague Bendadaf 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 good time, enjoy yourself.
And then a couple months down the road, Ben recorded
(01:02):
the following voice memo.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
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 with a mustache,
I want to say, he was wearing a card again.
(01:26):
We were playing pool in this airbnb 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 3 (01:45):
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
(02:08):
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 at 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
(02:29):
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, as that are.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
You one in the seven and it was the recipe
and he notdded ah, and he was pretty mad at me,
and he said, you're ero me after my livelihood.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
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 him.
Malcolm Gleavell, you're listening to Revisionist History, my show about
things overlooked and misunderstood. This season we've taken on a
(03:25):
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
(03:48):
despite our nightmares. We must reverse engineer the English muffin.
Speaker 4 (04:02):
And here it is.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
The Muffin House three three seven was twentieth Street, built
as a foundry circa 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 blocks from the offices
(04:26):
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 the doorbell,
(04:49):
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. I rang
a bunch of doorbells in no one answer. I sent
(05:10):
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?
Speaker 5 (05:24):
I guess it's a question.
Speaker 6 (05:26):
My question for you is is this like you're trying
to create their exact products.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Yeah, can we make this exact English?
Speaker 7 (05:35):
Okay?
Speaker 1 (05:36):
The vibe I was getting was mild interest laced with
a healthy dose of are you okay? It's fairly intriguing,
but it's also something that's going to be super time consuming.
Speaker 6 (05:46):
So I personally don't like Thomas English buffets.
Speaker 8 (05:49):
You know, it looks like just a normal English.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Muffin recipe with you know, industrialized.
Speaker 6 (05:57):
Ingredient, sorry, lesson than soy rye, soybean oil, sort of acid,
those kind of things that are going to give it
that gumminess to it.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
The niok and creates come from holes in the dough,
and holes in the dough from higher hydreation. 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'd learned that companies can use trade secrets as a
(06:26):
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,
(06:50):
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 Bimbo, But for
a complicated set of reasons involving journalists, ethics, and poverty,
(07:11):
it was a non starter. I needed a true believer.
I needed as zealot. I needed a superstar.
Speaker 5 (07:19):
On this Donut Showdown, three superstar bakers elevate the humble
donut to new culinary heights.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
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 5 (07:35):
Let's say hello to our competitors.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
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 I'm the Overlord of pastry
Overlord and Rachel Wyman, head baker at the Montclair Bread Company.
Speaker 9 (07:58):
I've been baking since i was old enough to hold
a pastry bag. I literally wrote my name with a
pastry bag before pencil.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
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 5 (08:23):
At least one of your donuts must include avocado.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
Rachel lands on avocado whipped cream on a treslatious donut
with the sangree of 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 9 (08:48):
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 1 (09:03):
It turns out that Rachel is a doe genius.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
But was it enough?
Speaker 5 (09:08):
Rachel? You made two perfect doze, but your sangreea filling
was a risk that didn't pay off. The winner of
this donut showdown is Rachel. Congratulations, and you're one the
ten thousand dollars.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
Frize, Rachel. 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. I look her up. She
teaches baking and pastry arts at the Culinary Institute of America,
(09:50):
the most prestigious culinary school in the country, the CIA.
Speaker 6 (09:55):
So what I was going to tell you a couple
things because I neglected to send you anything about me.
I used to do recipe development for a company that
created products for grocery stores all over the country reverse engineering.
It was like my jam Oh, I'm saying, yeah, this
is exactly what would happen. They would bring me a
(10:18):
sample of something they wanted, and this was Wegman's and
Target and.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Whole Foods and.
Speaker 6 (10:25):
Yeah no, so I made the bread on the cheesecake
factory table.
Speaker 7 (10:29):
Oh my god, So I lived in this space that
you're doing this story on.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
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. It's
(10:55):
the principles behind the nooks and crannies that were the
key thing. We began to have regular debriefing calls.
Speaker 9 (11:02):
I I'm driving home from school, so uh yeah, it's.
Speaker 7 (11:07):
Going really well.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
Rachel was all in. She even enlisted her students in
the effort.
Speaker 7 (11:13):
And I have so many English muffins in the classroom.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
The first recipes were a bust, no nooks or crannies.
Speaker 9 (11:21):
The inside of the Thomases almost reminds me of like
a dense pancake, you know, like a batter that's almost poured,
so we decided that we need to add more hydration
to our dough. We're gonna overprove it on purpose, so
it sits a little flatter on the griddle. Our our's
(11:43):
got a lot of loft, so we kind of have
to make them a little crappier.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
But making things crappier turned out to be a bit
of a challenge for Rachel.
Speaker 9 (11:53):
Like, the difficulty is that the Thomas's muffin is gray
and ours is uh not, So I think I can.
Speaker 6 (12:01):
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, clu.
Speaker 7 (12:08):
Gra like eighty four butter flat butter. It's like super yellow.
I mean, so I need to get I think I'm
just gonna oil it.
Speaker 9 (12:16):
And then the students even pointed out there's no butter
in the ingredient decks, so they're not using butter on
any surface.
Speaker 7 (12:23):
So I'll just use the same oil.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
Students are keeping you honest.
Speaker 7 (12:28):
I know they are, they really are.
Speaker 6 (12:30):
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 1 (12:41):
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,
(13:02):
perfect nooks and crannies. Other than the color, I couldn't
tell a difference between the classes nooks and crannies. And
Tom 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.
(13:32):
Like 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
(13:55):
know what, our acronym has become a distraction. It's the
American Culinary Institute. Now you can have it, 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. I took the train up in April.
(14:21):
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 three griffins in the school's motto,
(14:42):
sybas vite est Food is Life.
Speaker 10 (14:47):
There's a reoccurring female around the campus too, of like
what came first, the chicken or the egg.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
And 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.
Speaker 10 (15:02):
Yeah, I feel like the egg definitely came first.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
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.
(15:28):
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 10 (15:36):
So in this class they learned how to do sugar work,
chocolate show pieces.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
And fondon.
Speaker 10 (15:41):
So that swan is totally made out of sugar.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Why is she using a steamer on her cake over there?
Speaker 10 (15:47):
It gives it like a nice, like glossy look.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
It was becoming clear to me that this is the
greatest college in America.
Speaker 10 (15:55):
This is contemporary Cakes, Chocolates, Advanced baking Principles, Late of
Desserts 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 1 (16:09):
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
handan toward me around in campus. I was slowly realizing
that this particular audience of testers might be a little
too smart.
Speaker 8 (16:27):
My experiment was essentially testing a claim that adding baking
soda to onions when catamalizing them can reduce the cook
time in half.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
I wanted to look at how refrigerating cookie dough before
baking is going to affect the final alcohol.
Speaker 10 (16:41):
Differences between ricotta made with vinegar, citric acid, and lemon juice.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
So you even know that you could make that you
made ricotta with any of those things.
Speaker 3 (16:49):
Yeah, so you make ricotta with an acigilant.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
So that's an acid A sigilant who says is vigilant.
Even the school's fight song was inscrutable.
Speaker 10 (17:01):
Okay, so it's mirror pwa mere pae dice about chop
it up, put it in the stew.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
She could not believe I didn't know the meaning of
the word mirror, plaw. Do you know the meaning of
the word mirror, pa? Well, as I learned, it is
a ratio for soup base two parts onion, one part carrot,
one part celery, and four parts esoteric.
Speaker 7 (17:27):
You're welcome.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
And here I was thinking these food geniuses could be
fooled by my taste test. I headed over to Rachel's
classroom Bakeshop nine. Rachel was communing with the muffin dough.
Speaker 9 (17:42):
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.
Speaker 7 (17:53):
I took the dough.
Speaker 9 (17:54):
Out of the refrigerator and I have.
Speaker 7 (18:00):
Flattened it into a pan, so it's the right thickness
for our muffins.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
If anyone could pull this off, it was going to
be Rachel. We were making lush muffins from two recipes.
She'd created one using the ingredients listed on the Thomas' package,
including vinegar. Now having that list is helpful, but the
ingredients only tell you so much. Baking, like mir Pois,
is all about ratios and process. Rachel was making a
(18:27):
second batch with sour dough, 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 7 (18:38):
I can open this one to this pert.
Speaker 6 (18:41):
That's pretty amazing.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
Look at that. That looks really good.
Speaker 7 (18:46):
It's a little bit I don't see a difference.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
I don't see a difference.
Speaker 7 (18:49):
Oh my gosh, look at that.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
They look identical. But it was amazing. I called the
students over to see what they made of it. Do
you really think this is going to work? I actually do.
I do very optimistic because I just by looking at them,
they look completely like the exactly the same. We ran
a mini test where the kids tasted the fresh muffins
against tom misses, and I quickly learned that they did
(19:11):
not think as highly of Thomas's English muffins as I did.
Speaker 7 (19:15):
So, I don't like English muffins.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
Doesn't it taste like so? You just spat it out.
Speaker 9 (19:20):
I've never liked English muffins my whole life, because this
is what I've always been offered.
Speaker 7 (19:24):
It smells like box, like cardboards.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
Do you think if it gets stale there might be
a chance we pull this off? Other people can't tell.
Speaker 7 (19:32):
I think it'll be pulled off.
Speaker 9 (19:33):
Well.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
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 going to 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.
(20:00):
We 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 7 (20:11):
These have been sitting in a bag for like all week.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
So these are the same as the final recipe.
Speaker 7 (20:18):
These are the vinegar recipe.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
Look at that it looks like exactly like a Thomass.
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
(20:42):
finished right on schedule. We wheeled our samples out into
the packed student cafeteria.
Speaker 9 (20:48):
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 one.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
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
(21:22):
you experience a moment so absurd, so profoundly unrecognizable, that
you have an out 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. So in each of these cartons there's
(21:45):
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
h two, three forty eight and one twenty nine blinding
codes so people wouldn't be biased by ABC or one
two three. In each test, you either had two Thomases
(22:07):
and one Rachel's or two rachels in one Tom misses 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 8 (22:24):
Them excuse me.
Speaker 7 (22:25):
I think it was five thirty four.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
That's different. Three ninety nine is different.
Speaker 7 (22:29):
It's one o nine, pretty sure, it's one four.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
Two one two is stretty 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 destroy
It looked like our entire plan was going to fail.
We took on Bimbo Baker's legendary trade secret, and just
(22:55):
like in Biambo Bakeries versus Cris Botticella, we were losing
and the secret was winning. We'll be right back. I
want to leave the muff and test for a moment
to tell you about a rabbit hole. I fell down
while researching this episode. I was trying to articulate why
(23:17):
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 lequeur called chartreuse. 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.
(23:39):
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 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
(24:01):
Church on the Upper East Side just a few days
after Easter. What is known about the origin of that recipe?
Speaker 11 (24:07):
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
(24:30):
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 I
had to be kept secret so obviously, so people wouldn't
steal the forma and make their wrong.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
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
(25:09):
vivid or in green.
Speaker 11 (25:11):
There's a whole cabinet in Boaron of counterfeits, controfessor 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 1 (25:32):
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
(25:53):
hundred and thirty 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 them walk away. I'm curious what
(26:16):
if 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 11 (26:32):
Absolutely nothing nobody ever told me not to 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 it's still complicated
(26:54):
to make anyway. As I said from the beginning, I
could never could never really do it, nor have I
been kidnapped. People A lot of a lot of people
know that that I know the recipe, the.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
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 11 (27:22):
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 finding 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 (27:39):
Truth.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
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 11 (27:48):
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, and.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
A secret can you know and someone could.
Speaker 11 (28:07):
Yeah, and a secret is 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 1 (28:21):
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 mystery
(28:43):
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, wow,
(29:03):
oh really.
Speaker 11 (29:04):
Well, before it became the CIA, it was a Jesuit
and the vision.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
He used to live on the grounds of the institute.
Speaker 11 (29:13):
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
and the vision in sixty nine, and that's when the
CIA took it over. That's where I first tasted the
mystical life. You know that the life of union was gone,
and I didn't realize, Wow, this exists. We weren't taught
that in grammar school or even in high school.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
Did you catch 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
(29:53):
the difference between our muffin and Thomas's. The perfect result
would have been thirty three percent. But then we ran
one more test. The next is a paired preference test,
which will tell us which they like better. Our first
test told us if people knew the difference between our
muffin and the real thing. It didn't tell us if
(30:14):
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 we decided to use her sourdough recipe instead. Thomas's
was number one hundred and forty two and Rachel's was
five ninety eight.
Speaker 10 (30:34):
I like five hundred ninety eight, five ninety eight, five
ninety eight eight, five hundred ninety eight.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
Nearly eighty percent of people preferred Rachel's recipe.
Speaker 10 (30:43):
Five ninety eight has like like a slight salty taste,
like a more flavorabul.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
So no, we didn't perfectly reverse engineer the secret recipe
and process for a Thomas's English muffin. Rachel and 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
(31:21):
this story, I reached out to the defendant in the case,
Chris Boughticella, the baking executive Bembo 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.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
Quote from him.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
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 put this story to bed,
I finally heard from him. After a few letters and emails.
Chris and I spoke.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
On the phone.
Speaker 4 (31:51):
I'm Italian, you can obviously you know here from accent.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
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 8 (32:06):
Now, I love baking, you know, so the answer is
that to you, yeah, I still love baking.
Speaker 4 (32:11):
I just don't like what happened. And yeah, I love baking.
Speaker 1 (32:16):
Why do you love it?
Speaker 4 (32:17):
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. I love it.
Speaker 1 (32:34):
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 4 (32:53):
No, Ben, listen, it's a bullshit.
Speaker 8 (32:56):
A muffin is a muffin.
Speaker 4 (32:57):
It cannot be the freaking difficult to produce. A muffin
is a muffin.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
Youri and Chris say this a couple of months ago
would have saved me a lot of time.
Speaker 8 (33:06):
Every person that does the mixing of the product can
see it. So it's not a secured 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 format.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
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
(33:42):
got into that monastery and stole the full recipe for
ur Truce, 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 Bimbo's still pretending these are Samuel
Thomas's English muffins a century after his death. But these
(34:05):
Thomas's nooks and crannies now They're just a bit of marketing.
If that somehow became a legal standard. Anyways, the best
way to protect your nooks and crannies isn't the trade secret.
It's opening your muffins with a fork a knife just
ruins the whole thing.
Speaker 3 (34:27):
The secret recipe for Rachel Wyman's improved Toms'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, Well, if.
Speaker 9 (34:49):
They were kept at room temperature, it would be kind
of like this.
Speaker 7 (34:53):
It wouldn't have enough body.
Speaker 9 (34:56):
I guess it slows down the fermentation, so yeast.
Speaker 7 (35:00):
It's like a toddler. If it's warm and you give
it sugar.
Speaker 9 (35:05):
It's going to go crazy and then it's going to die.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
You you give your kids sugar, but you just keep
them very cold.
Speaker 9 (35:13):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, totally, and then and then they slow down, so.
Speaker 4 (35:19):
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 (35:27):
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 Kara.
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,
(35:51):
Greta Cone, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Amy Hagadorn, Kira Posey,
Morgan Ratner, and Jordan McMillan.
Speaker 1 (35:59):
Special thanks to Chelsea Burgess, Jonathan Frishtick, Susan Reed, William
Woyse Weaver, Corey Theodore at the Anti Conquest Baking Company,
Becky Cooper for introducing me to Shartruce, Julia Conrad, Robin
Dando and Jonathan A. Zeer Foss for helping us with
our triangle test methodology, and all the students at the
CIA Happy Graduation. I'm Ben Mattafaffrey.
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