The Formula

Pushkin.

This is an iHeart podcast.

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It's been in continuous operation for something like 150 years, which means it predates automobiles, radios, and the zipper.

I had the mangalitza loin chop and the potatoes confi.

Yum.

You need to go there.

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Let's just say it starts with a Q, then a C,

and then an H.

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A while ago, my colleague Ben Dadaf Hafrey 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 the following voice memo.

It's 5.16 a.m.

I just had a dream where I was in an Airbnb with someone who was affiliated with Bimbo Bakeries, 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 like a cardigan.

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.

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 nearly half a billion dollar product.

The owner of Thomas's, Bimbo Bakeries, Grupo 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 corporate world could look a lot more mystical and secretive.

And all this led Ben, 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.

I said, are you one of the seven who knows the recipe?

And he nodded.

And he was pretty mad at me.

And he said,

you're coming after my livelihood.

You're coming after my livelihood?

Ben!

But it's too late to turn back.

He's in too deep.

He's told me he might even have to go to the CIA.

I'm Malcolm Glubel.

You're listening to Revisionist History, my show about things overlooked and misunderstood.

This season, we've taken on a great many foes.

The haters of Paw Patrol, the absurd claims of RFK Jr., 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 despite our nightmares.

We must reverse engineer the English muffin.

And here it is.

The Muffin House.

337 West 20th Street.

Built as a foundry circa 1850, Samuel Bath Thomas converted the ovens for his English muffin bakery in the early 20th 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 of Pushkin Industries.

19 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.

No answer.

Clearly, Beambo 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 crannies recipe, but Beambo was a client.

After all, they are one of the largest baking conglomerates in the world.

I rang a bunch of doorbells that no one answered.

I sent a lot of emails that went unreturned.

But a few brave bakers were willing to talk to me at least about the nooks and crannies in general.

For their own protection, we're not identifying them by name.

So, am I the muffin man or not?

I guess is the question.

My question for you is: is this like they're trying to like create their exact product?

Yes, can we make this exact English muffin?

Okay.

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 can be super time-consuming.

So I personally don't like Thomas English muffins.

You know, it looks like just a normal English muffin recipe with, you know, industrialized ingredients.

Soy lecithin, soy, rye, soybean oil, sorbic acid, those kind of things that are going to give it that gumminess to it.

The nooks and crannies come from holes in the dough, and holes in the dough come from higher hydration.

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 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' 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, 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 Beambo, but for a complicated set of reasons involving journalistic ethics and poverty, it was a non-starter.

I needed a true believer.

I needed a zealot.

I needed a superstar.

On this Donut Showdown, three superstar bakers elevate the humble donut to new culinary heights.

This is a clip from a 2014 episode of the short-lived cooking channel show, Donut Showdown.

If you've never seen Donut Showdown, congratulations.

Let's say hello to our competitors.

Three contestants compete in a variety of donut baking challenges for a $10,000 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.

I've been baking since I was old enough to hold a pastry bag.

I literally wrote my name with a pastry bag before a pencil.

Rachel Wyman has a baker's warmth about her.

Angular red hair, a little like knuckles in Sonic the Hedgehog.

She's a total badass.

She's got a tattoo on her arm that says flour, water, yeast, salt.

Of course, she makes it to the final showdown.

It's Rachel versus the Overlord of Pastry.

At least one of your donuts must include

avocado.

Rachel lands on avocado whipped cream on a treslichous donut with the sangria filling.

The food scientist is going with a nacho flavored doughnut.

To my mind, these both sound disgusting.

But in the midst of it all, Rachel is having a beautiful mind moment with her flour.

The flour that I'm used to using is about 11%, 12% protein, and my options were a 9% protein or a 13% protein.

So we had to blend the flowers together.

The last thing that I want is to send the judges chewy donuts.

It turns out that Rachel is a dough genius, but was it enough?

Rachel, you made two perfect doughs,

but your sangria filling was a risk that didn't pay off.

The winner of this donut showdown is

Rachel.

Congratulations.

And you won the $10,000 prize.

Great seller.

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, the most prestigious culinary school in the country.

The CIA.

So, what I was going to tell you, a couple of 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.

Oh, yeah.

So, reverse engineering, it was like my jam.

Oh, my God.

I'm so excited.

This is exactly what would happen.

They would bring me a sample of something they wanted.

And this was Wegmans and Target and Whole Foods.

I know you name it.

I work with that.

Yeah.

No, so I made the bread on the cheesecake factory table.

Oh, my God.

So I lived in this space that you're doing this story on.

I didn't even know that this was a space.

It is a big space.

Rachel checked in with the CIA, Greenlight.

She and I were going to reverse engineer Thomas' 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 the principles behind the nooks and crannies that were the key thing.

We began to have regular debriefing calls.

I'm driving home from school, so

yeah, it's going really well.

Rachel was all in.

She even enlisted her students in the effort.

And I have so many English muffins in the classroom.

The first recipes were a bust.

No nooks or crannies.

The inside of the Thomas's 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 going to over-proof it on purpose.

So it sits a little flatter on the griddle.

Ours got a lot of loft, so we kind of have to make them a little crappier.

But making things crappier turned out to be a bit of a challenge for Rachel.

Like the difficulty is that the Thomas's muffin is gray and ours is

not.

So I think I can just get a lower quality flour and work with that.

And also, I've been buttering the griddle, but like also we're using, you know, plue gras, like 84% butter, fat butter.

It's like super yellow.

I mean, so I need to get, I think I'm just going to oil it.

And then the students even pointed out there's no butter in the ingredient deck.

So they're not using butter on any surface.

So I'll just use the same oil.

Very apt students are keeping you honest.

I know they are.

They really are.

I mean, the flavor yesterday was amazing, but not like Thomas's.

They're like, Chef, you just need to make it taste worse.

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, perfect nooks and crannies.

Other than the color, I couldn't tell a difference between the class's nooks and crannies and Thomas's.

It was time for me to come up to the CIA at Hyde Park to meet her in person, finalize the recipe, and then put it to a blind taste test to see if she'd actually pulled it off.

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You're in the garage.

Hands covered in grease.

Just finished tuning up your engine with a part you found on eBay, and you realize, you know what?

I could also use some new brakes.

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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 75 years of existence, the president of the Culinary Institute of America would have said, you 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.

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 and the school's motto, Cybus Vite Est.

Food is life.

There's a recurring theme around the campus too of like what came first, the chicken or the egg.

I'm getting a tour from baking business student Hannah Dawkins.

She was graduating in a semester and was filling me in on campus lore.

Do you have a strong position?

Yeah, I feel like the egg definitely came first.

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.

You know you've chosen a great profession, but only at the highest rank do you get to wear the silliest hat.

We entered the baking building.

So in this class, they learn how to do sugar work, chocolate show pieces, and fondant.

So that swan is totally made out of sugar.

Wait, why is she using a steamer on her cake over there?

It gives it like a nice, like glossy look.

It was becoming clear to me that this is the greatest college in America.

This is

contemporary cakes, chocolates, advanced baking principles, plated desserts class.

Like there's the freshman, what at 15 at other schools I would say being at the culinary it's more like a freshman 50.

The plan was to use CIA students as guinea pigs in our muffin test.

Could they tell the difference between the reverse engineered muffin and the real Thomas's?

Except, as Hannah toured me around campus, I was slowly realizing that this particular audience of testers might be a little too smart.

My experiment was essentially testing a claim that adding baking soda to onions when catamalizing them can reduce the cook time in half.

I wanted to look at how refrigerating cookie dough before baking is going to affect the final outcome.

Differences between ricotta made with vinegar, citric acid, and lemon juice.

I don't even know that you could make, that you made ricotta with any of those things.

Yeah, so you make ricotta with an acidulant, so that's an acid.

Acidillant?

Who says acidulant?

Even the school's fight song was inscrutable.

Okay, so it's mirepoix, mire pois, rue, rou, rue.

Dice it up, chop it up, put it in the stew.

What does mirepoix mean?

Mirepoix?

She could not believe I didn't know the meaning of the word mirepoix.

Do you know the meaning of the word mirepoix?

Well, as I learned, it is a ratio for soup base.

Two parts onion, one part carrot, one part celery, and four parts esoteric.

You're welcome.

And here I was thinking these food geniuses could be fooled by my taste test.

I headed over to Rachel's classroom, Bake Shop 9.

Rachel was communing with the muffin dough.

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 the next thing.

I took the dough out of the refrigerator and I have

flattened it into a pan so it's the right thickness for our muffins.

If anyone could pull this off, it was going to be Rachel.

We were making English muffins from two recipes she'd created.

One, using the ingredients listed on the Thomas's package, including vinegar.

Now, having that list is helpful, but the ingredients only tell you so much.

Baking, like mirepoix, is all about ratios and process.

Rachel was making a second batch with sourdough, 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.

We can open this one to this perfect.

That's pretty amazing.

Look at that.

That looks really good.

It's a little bit...

I don't see a difference.

I don't see a difference.

Oh my gosh.

Look at that.

They look identical.

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

just by looking at them, they look completely like exactly the same.

We ran a mini test where the kids tasted the fresh muffins against Thomas's.

And I quickly learned that they did not think as highly of Thomas's English muffins as I did.

That's why I don't like English muffins.

Doesn't it taste like something?

You just spat it out.

I've never liked English muffins my whole life because this is what I've always been offered.

It smells like box, like cardboard.

You think if it gets stale, there might be a chance we pull this off, but people can't tell.

I think it'll be pulled off well.

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 16ths and put them in egg cartons.

That would give us enough samples for about 100 tests.

But as we cut up Rachel's muffins from the day before, it was clear that they were a little too crusty.

We'd 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.

These have been sitting in a bag for like all week.

So these are the same as the final recipe.

These are the vinegar recipe.

Look at that.

It looks like exactly like a Thomas's.

It looked exactly like a Thomas's, and to me, it tasted exactly like a Thomas's.

We began furiously slicing them up.

This kind of last-minute, dramatic switch of the plan is exactly...

There's two minutes until the test starts.

Oh, my God.

We finished right on schedule.

We wheeled our samples out into the packed student cafeteria.

You know, it's like when your kids play sports

and you're like super nervous for them, even though it has no bearing on them.

It's kind of how I feel.

It was time to pit our formula against the greatest culinary mines in America.

Cue the fight song.

Hello, everybody.

My goodness.

At some point in your life, I hope 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 a slice of English muffin.

Two of them the same are the same, one of them is different.

Using taste, I want you to tell me which number is different.

I had marked each muffin section with numbers like 302, 348, and 129.

Blinding codes, so people wouldn't be biased by ABC or 123.

In each test, you either had two Thomas's and one Rachel's, or two Rachels and one Thomas's.

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 them.

Excuse me.

I think it was 534.

That's different.

399 was different.

It's 109.

Pretty sure it's 142.

142 is what's different.

Pretty quickly it became clear that we were on track for over 60% of people correctly guessing which muffin was not like the others.

This was not working.

We're getting smoked so far.

We're getting absolutely destroyed.

It looked like our entire plan was going to fail.

We took on Beambo Bakery's legendary trade secret.

And just like in Beambo Bakeries vs.

Chris Botticella, we were losing.

And the secret was winning.

We'll be right back.

In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal.

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They're now the best network, according to the experts at OoCla Speed Test.

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With a network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity even in times of high demand.

With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite-to-mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid.

That's your business, Supercharged.

Learn more at supermobile.com.

Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the US where you can see the sky.

Best network based on analysis by OOCLA of Speed Test Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

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You're in the garage.

Hands covered in grease.

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You can find anything there.

It's unreal.

Wipers, headlights, even cold air intakes.

It's all there.

And you've got eBay guaranteed fit.

You order a part, and if it doesn't fit, send it back.

Simple as that.

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It doesn't matter if it's just maintenance or a major mod.

You got it, especially when things are guaranteed to fit.

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Guaranteed to fit every time.

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I want to leave the Muffin Test for a moment to tell you about a rabbit hole I fell down while researching this episode.

I was trying to articulate why the idea that the nooks and crannies were a trade secret bothered me so much.

So I began studying other trade secrets and secret recipes.

One of the most famous is for a liqueur called Chartreuse.

Chartreuse has been made by a French monastic order, the Carthusians, based on a mysterious recipe that was gifted to them in 1605.

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 St.

Monica's Church on the Upper East Side just a few days after Easter.

What is known about the origin of that recipe?

No,

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

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 of we want to become rich with this.

We want to make a name for ourselves.

No, all we want to do is support ourselves.

So we don't have to worry about, you know, outside support.

We can support ourselves.

And it had to be kept secret, so obviously, so people wouldn't steal the formula and make their own.

Originally, chartreuse was a health elixir.

People took it for all kinds of ailments, apoplexy, toothaches, palpitations, indigestion, fever.

Eventually, the monks dropped the elixir claim and it just became a liqueur.

But it still has this weird power.

When I drink it, I tend to have strange dreams.

It has a spicy, sweet complexity, and its color is this vivid, alluring green.

There's a whole cabinet in Boiron of counterfeits, contre faisons, of people who tried to steal it.

But there have been efforts to, you know, 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.

Father Michael told me he was the first American Carthusian ever.

In the 1980s, he lived in France at the Grand Chartreuse Monastery in the unforgiving mountains of the French wilderness.

The Carthusians are a 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 130 herbs that are treated in a number of different ways.

The recipe is kept on sheets and sheets of old paper that now Father Michael had access to.

But eventually when he left the Carthusian Order and came back to the United States with that recipe in his mind, the monks

just let him walk away.

I'm curious what, if 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 shared the recipe or how it was conveyed to you that you should not spread this.

Absolutely nothing.

Nobody ever told me not to.

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.

Yeah.

You know, because it was dedicated to them and to the order.

The other thing is that

it's too complicated to make anyway, as I said from the beginning.

You could never, could never really do it.

Nor have I been kidnapped.

A lot of people know that I know the recipe.

The formula for chartreuse 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 him not to join another order.

Because the secret was a bond between them.

not a tool for control.

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 that's even greater than the formula for Chartreuse.

Is there in your mind a hierarchy between a secret and a mystery?

And

how would you illustrate the difference, if there is one?

Well, a mystery, I think.

I hadn'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

you don't know, but something that's unknowable

in rational terms.

And a secret can be known.

Someone could know.

Yeah, and a secret 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.

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 130 ingredients, but that Thomas's English muffins have all the mystification of a monastic order and none of the mystery.

It debases mystery and puts it in the service of corporate control.

Maybe that all sounds like a stretch to you, but it turned out Father Michael was closer to my story than even I had realized.

I told him about our reverse engineering project at the Culinary Institute of America.

And he said...

Well, he used to live.

Oh, really?

Well, before it became the CIA, it was a Jesuit noviciate.

He used to live on the grounds of the Institute.

Used to live there?

Yeah, we closed it.

We were the last class there.

We closed it in 1969.

I lived there for two years.

And we closed it as a Jesuit noviciate in 69, and that's when the CIA took it over.

That's where I first tasted the mystical life, life, you know, the life of union with God and I didn't realize, wow, this exists.

We weren't taught that in grammar school or even in high school.

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 61% of people could tell the difference between our muffin and Thomas's.

A perfect result would have been 33%.

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 only told us if people knew the difference between our muffin and the real thing.

It didn't tell us if the difference was good or bad.

But now we were running a test called Paired Preference.

We used up all those old vinegar-based muffins Rachel found in her bag.

So we decided to use her sourdough recipe instead.

Thomas's was number 142,

and Rachel's was 598.

I like 598.

598.

598.

598.

598.

Nearly 80% of people preferred Rachel's recipe.

598 has like a slight salty taste, like it's more flavorful.

Thank you.

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 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 this story, I reached out to the defendant in the case, Chris Botticella, the baking executive Beambo accused of trying to take the secret muffin recipe to a competitor.

In all the many pieces I'd read on the case, I'd never seen a quote from him.

For a long time, I couldn't reach him.

Then, a few weeks after I got back from the CIA, just as I was about to put this story to bed, I finally heard from him.

After a few letters and emails, Chris and I spoke on the phone.

I'm Italian.

You can obviously, you know, you're from Max and

he 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 now.

I love baking, you know.

So the answer is that to you is, yeah, I still love baking.

I just don't like what happened.

And yeah, I love baking.

Why do you love it?

Well, because you know,

I think

I am one of the best bakers around.

And

in your vein,

it's not only the blood, but it's flour.

I love it.

Chris told me he actually thinks Beambo 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 chartreuse.

No, Ben, listen.

It's all bullshit.

A muffin is a muffin.

It cannot be that freaking difficult to produce.

A muffin is a muffin.

Hearing Chris say this a couple months ago would have saved me a lot of time.

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 vault somewhere.

It's left on the floor.

It's really not.

Nobody knows the formula.

Beambo Bakeries hadn't replied to repeated requests 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 got into that monastery and stole the full recipe for Chartreuse,

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 Beambo is still pretending these are Samuel Thomas' English muffins a century after his death.

But these Thomas' nooks and crannies, now they're just a bit of marketing.

A myth that somehow became a legal standard.

Anyways, the best way to protect your nooks and crannies isn't a trade secret.

It's opening your muffins with a fork.

A knife just ruins the whole thing.

The secret recipe for Rachel Wyman's improved Thomas's English muffins can be found in our show notes.

We've put the vinegar version in there too.

If you want the authentic Thomas's flavor, leave them in a bag for a week so they get stale.

The key thing is to over-proof and refrigerate the dough.

Why?

Just ask Rachel.

Well, if it were kept at room temperature, it would be kind of like this.

It wouldn't have enough body, I guess.

It slows down the fermentation.

So, yeast, it's like

a toddler.

If it's warm and you give it sugar, it's gonna go crazy and then it's gonna die.

So, you give your kids sugar, but you just keep them very cold.

Yeah, yeah, exactly, totally.

And then, and then they slow down.

So,

all kinds of questions.

Yeah.

Revisionist History is produced by Ben Nadaf Haffery with Lucy Sullivan and Nina Bird Lawrence.

This episode was edited by Julia Barton.

Fact-checking by Kate Furby.

Original scoring by Luis Guerra.

Mixing and mastering on this episode by Echo Mountain.

Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.

Production support from Sarah Bruguer and Luke Lamond.

At Pushkin, thanks to Karen Shikurji, Jake Flanagan, Greta Cohn, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Amy Hagedorn, Kira Posey, Morgan Ratner, and Jordan McMillan.

Special thanks to Chelsea Burgess, Jonathan Frischtick, Susan Reed, William Woise Weaver, Corey Theodore at the Anti-Conquest Baking Company, Becky Cooper for introducing me to Chartreuse, Julia Conrad, Robin Dando, and Jonathan A.

Zierfoss for helping us with our triangle test methodology, and all the students at the CIA.

Happy graduation.

I'm Ben Natifafri.

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