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