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