The Formula

Summary

Revisionist History: Episode "The Formula" – Detailed Summary

Introduction to the Secret Recipe Release Date: May 29, 2025

In this compelling episode of Revisionist History, host Malcolm Gladwell delves into the enigmatic world of trade secrets, focusing on one of the most famous in the baking industry: the recipe for Thomas English Muffins produced by Bimbo Bakeries. The story begins with Malcolm's colleague, Ben Nadav Haffrey, sparking an investigation into the complexities and myths surrounding this nearly half-billion-dollar product.

Ben Nadav Haffrey’s Quest to Reverse Engineer [00:51] Malcolm Gladwell introduces the premise:

“One of the most famous trade secrets of all time is the recipe for Thomas English Muffins... how hard can it be to make a muffin?”

Ben's initial interest leads him to attempt reverse engineering the secret recipe. His dedication becomes evident when he records a mysterious voice memo detailing a dream about a Bimbo Bakeries affiliate probing his knowledge of the muffin recipe:

“...if you tell me that, it'll tell me if you're even close to knowing how we do this.”
– Chris Botticella [01:17]

Rachel Wyman Enters the Story [04:14] Rachel Wyman, a head baker at the Montclair Bread Company and an educator at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA), becomes the pivotal figure in Ben's quest. Despite numerous obstacles, including corporate non-responsiveness and high costs, Rachel steps forward as the "superstar" needed to tackle the reverse engineering process.

Collaboration at the CIA [10:08] Rachel Wyman collaborates with Ben, leveraging her expertise and enlisting CIA students to decode the elusive recipe. Their initial attempts, however, fall short, lacking the signature nooks and crannies that define Thomas English Muffins:

“The first recipes were a bust. No nooks or crannies.”
– Rachel Wyman [11:21]

Challenges in Reverse Engineering [12:00] The team confronts several challenges:

• Ingredient Quality: Ensuring the correct flour protein content and avoiding overly buttery flavors.
• Process Adjustments: Increasing dough hydration and overproofing to achieve the desired texture.
• Equipment and Techniques: Aligning griddle preparation methods with Bimbo’s standards.

Rachel meticulously adjusts the recipes, highlighting the intricacies of baking that go beyond mere ingredient lists:

“Baking, like mirepoix, is all about ratios and process.”
– Rachel Wyman [18:17]

Taste Tests and Initial Failures [19:01] Their first blind taste tests reveal that CIA culinary students can distinguish between their muffins and the commercial ones, with about 61% correctly identifying the differences:

“...we were losing and the secret was winning.”
– Rachel Wyman [22:44]

This setback pushes Rachel and Ben to refine their approach further, emphasizing the importance of replicating not just taste but also texture and appearance.

A Digression into Chartreuse’s Secret [23:21] The narrative takes an intriguing detour as Rachel explores the secret recipe of Chartreuse, a complex liqueur with a 400-year-old monastic origin. Unlike the corporate-controlled muffin recipe, Chartreuse’s secret is intertwined with spiritual and communal values:

“A secret can be known. Someone could.”
– Hannah Dawkins [28:19]

This comparison underscores the difference between secrets used for corporate control versus those preserved for deeper, communal purposes.

Final Attempts and Outcomes [30:45] In a last-ditch effort, Rachel employs a paired preference test, revealing that nearly 80% of participants prefer their version of the muffin over the original Thomas recipe:

“Nearly 80% of people preferred Rachel's recipe.”
– Rachel Wyman [30:52]

This significant improvement indicates that while the exact replication of the trade secret was unattainable, enhancing the recipe's flavor and texture led to a more favorable outcome.

Interview with Chris Botticella [32:03] Chris Botticella, the former Bimbo Bakeries executive involved in the legal battle over the muffin recipe, provides his perspective:

“It's not bullshit. A muffin is a muffin. It cannot be that freaking difficult to produce.”
– Chris Botticella [33:13]

Chris's pragmatic view challenges the notion of a guarded corporate secret, suggesting that the mystique surrounding the recipe may be more marketing than reality.

Conclusion: The Myth of Trade Secrets [34:39] Malcolm Gladwell wraps up the episode by reflecting on the journey:

“We took on Bimbo Bakery's legendary trade secret. ... the nooks and crannies are just a bit of marketing, a myth that somehow became a legal standard.”
– Rachel Wyman [33:05]

The episode concludes by revealing that Rachel Wyman's version of the English muffin not only matched the visual appeal of Thomas's muffins but also surpassed them in taste, challenging the legitimacy and necessity of such stringent trade secrets in the culinary world.

Key Takeaways:

• Trade Secrets vs. Quality: The episode highlights how trade secrets can sometimes overshadow the actual quality and craftsmanship involved in product creation.
• Collaboration and Innovation: Rachel Wyman's collaboration with culinary students demonstrates the value of teamwork and innovation in overcoming seemingly insurmountable challenges.
• Myth vs. Reality: The mystique around secret recipes often serves more as a marketing tool than a legitimate protective measure.

Notable Quotes:

• "You're coming after my livelihood, Ben."
  – Ben Nadav Haffrey [03:14]

• "Our muffins went from a flat surface on the interior to these big, uneven lunar craters."
  – Rachel Wyman [16:02]

• "It's all about ratios and process."
  – Rachel Wyman [18:17]

Final Thoughts: This episode of Revisionist History masterfully intertwines the pursuit of a secret recipe with broader themes of corporate secrecy, community, and the essence of culinary art. Through engaging storytelling and insightful analysis, Malcolm Gladwell invites listeners to reconsider how and why certain traditions and secrets are preserved within industries.

Credits: Produced by Ben Nadav Haffrey with Lucy Sullivan and Nina Bird Lawrence. Edited by Julia Barton. Special thanks to Chelsea Burgess, Jonathan Frischtick, Susan Reed, and all contributors who made this episode possible.

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For those intrigued by the saga of Thomas English Muffins and curious about the intricacies of culinary trade secrets, this episode offers a fascinating exploration that challenges conventional perceptions and celebrates the relentless pursuit of excellence.

Transcript

[Ben Nadav Haffrey]

Foreign this is an iHeart podcast.

[Chase Business]

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[Malcolm Gladwell]

A while ago, my colleague Bendadhaf Haffrey and I gathered to eat English muffins at the Pushkin office. Ben had the idea to do a story about the famous secret recipe for Thomas's English muffins. It sounded like a fun romp. Go for it, I said. Have a good time. Enjoy yourself. And then, a couple months down the road, Ben recorded the following voice memo.

[Chris Botticella]

It's 5:16am 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.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

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 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 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 English Muffins recipe.

[Chris Botticella]

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 don't. You're coming after my livelihood.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

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 Glebel. 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.

[Rachel Wyman]

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 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, Bimbo Bakeries had gotten here first. This was a recurring problem. I tried to hire some culinary researchers to help reverse engineer the trademark Nooks and Crannies recipe. But Bimbo was a client. After all, they are one of the largest baking conglomerates in the world. I rang a bunch of doorbells and 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.

[Hannah Dawkins]

So am I the Muffin man or not?

[Rachel Wyman]

I guess is the question.

[Ben Nadav Haffrey]

My question for you is, is this, like, you're trying to, like, create their exact product? Yeah.

[Rachel Wyman]

Can we make this exact English muffin?

[Ben Nadav Haffrey]

Okay.

[Rachel Wyman]

The vibe I was getting was mild interest level laced with a healthy dose of are you okay?

[Ben Nadav Haffrey]

It's fairly intriguing, but it's also something that can be super time consuming. So I personally don't like Thomas English Muffins.

[Rachel Wyman]

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

[Ben Nadav Haffrey]

Soy lecithin soy, rye, soybean oil, sorbic acid, those kind of things that are gonna 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.

[Rachel Wyman]

Lots of good information on what makes a muffin an English muffin, but little enthusiasm for my quest to make one exactly like Thomas' 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's English muffins were manufactured. And this, it seemed to me, had given them all too much power. My plan was to test a reverse engineered muffin against Thomas's to see if anyone could tell the difference. If not, that would end the mystical power of their secret. But I lacked the necessary skills to do this alone. One baker asked me for several thousand dollars to do the job. That's not crazy, seeing as the secret recipe brings in almost half a billion a year for bimbo. But for a complicated set of reasons involving journalistic ethics and poverty, it was a non starter. I needed a true believer. I needed a zealot. I needed a superstar.

[Donut Showdown Host]

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

[Rachel Wyman]

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.

[Donut Showdown Host]

Let's say hello to our competitors.

[Rachel Wyman]

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.

[Chris Botticella]

Overlord.

[Rachel Wyman]

And Rachel Wyman, head baker at the Montclair Bread Company.

[Ben Nadav Haffrey]

I've been baking since I was old enough to hold a pastry bag. I literally wrote my name with a pastry bag before pencil.

[Rachel Wyman]

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.

[Donut Showdown Host]

At least one of your donuts must include avocado.

[Rachel Wyman]

Rachel lands on avocado. Whipped cream on a tres leches donut with the sangria filling. The Food scientist is going with a nacho flavored donut. To my mind, these both sound disgusting. But in the midst of it all, Rachel is having a Beautiful Mind moment with her flour.

[Ben Nadav Haffrey]

The flour that I'm used to using is about 11%, 12% protein, and my options were a 9% protein or 13% protein, so. So we had to blend the flowers together. The last thing that I want is to send the judges chewy donuts.

[Rachel Wyman]

It turns out that Rachel is a dough genius. But was it enough?

[Donut Showdown Host]

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. You've won the $10,000 prize.

[Ben Nadav Haffrey]

Great stuff.

[Rachel Wyman]

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.

[Ben Nadav Haffrey]

So what? I was going to tell you a couple things because I neglected to send you the anything about me. I used to do recipe development for a company that created products for grocery stores all over the country.

[Rachel Wyman]

Oh, yeah.

[Ben Nadav Haffrey]

So reverse engineering. It was like my jam.

[Chris Botticella]

Oh, my God.

[Rachel Wyman]

I'm so excited.

[Ben Nadav Haffrey]

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.

[Rachel Wyman]

The big.

[Ben Nadav Haffrey]

Yeah. No. So I made the bread on the Cheesecake Factory table.

[Rachel Wyman]

Oh, my God.

[Ben Nadav Haffrey]

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

[Rachel Wyman]

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

[Ben Nadav Haffrey]

I'm like, it is a big space.

[Rachel Wyman]

Rachel checked in with the CIA. Green light. 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.

[Ben Nadav Haffrey]

I'm driving home from school, so, yeah, it's going really well.

[Rachel Wyman]

Rachel was all in. She even enlisted her students in the effort.

[Ben Nadav Haffrey]

And I have so many English muffins in the classroom.

[Rachel Wyman]

The first recipes were a bust. No nooks or crannies.

[Ben Nadav Haffrey]

The inside of the Thomases almost reminds me of, like, a dense pancake, you know, like a batter that's almost poured. So we decided that we need to add more hydration to Our dough, we're gonna overproof 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.

[Rachel Wyman]

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

[Ben Nadav Haffrey]

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. Also, I've been buttering the griddle, but, like, also, we're using, you know, Plugra, like, 84% butterfly butter. It's, like, super yellow, 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.

[Rachel Wyman]

I'm very happy students are keeping you honest.

[Ben Nadav Haffrey]

I know they are. They really are. I mean, the. The flavor yesterday was amazing, but not like Thomas' they were like, chef, you just need to make it taste worse.

[Rachel Wyman]

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. 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 cybes. Vitae est food is life.

[CIA Student]

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

[Rachel Wyman]

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?

[CIA Student]

Yeah, I feel like the egg definitely came first.

[Rachel Wyman]

We were walking through a library, one floor of which is all recipe books, organized according to a system I had never before encountered. But 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 when only at the highest rank do you get to wear the silliest hat. We entered the baking building.

[CIA Student]

So in this class, they learned how.

[Ben Nadav Haffrey]

To do sugar work.

[CIA Student]

Chocolate showpieces and fondant. So that swan is totally made out of sugar.

[Rachel Wyman]

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

[CIA Student]

It gives it, like, a nice, like, glossy look.

[Rachel Wyman]

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

[CIA Student]

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.

[Rachel Wyman]

The plan was to use CIA students as guinea pigs in our muffin test. Could they tell the difference between the reverse engineered muffin and the real Thomases? Except as Hannah toured me around campus, I was slowly realizing that this particular audience of testers might be a little too smart.

[Hannah Dawkins]

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

[Ben Nadav Haffrey]

I wanted to look at how refrigerating cookie dough before baking is going to.

[Rachel Wyman]

Affect the final outcome differences between ricotta made with vinegar, citric acid, and lemon juice. So didn't even know that you could make that you made ricotta with any of those things.

[Chase Business]

Yeah.

[Rachel Wyman]

So you make ricotta with an acidulant. So that's an acid. Acidulant. Who says acidulant? Even the school's fight song was inscrutable.

[CIA Student]

Okay, so it's mirepoix. Mirepoix.

[Rachel Wyman]

Roux. Roux, roux.

[CIA Student]

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

[Chris Botticella]

What does mirepoix mean?

[CIA Student]

Mirepoix.

[Rachel Wyman]

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, 2 parts onion, 1 part carrot, 1 part celery, and 4 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 Bakeshop 9. Rachel was communing with the muffin dough.

[Ben Nadav Haffrey]

Like, every time you stretch gluten, it freaks out a little bit, and you have to let it rest so that it will relax enough to do the next thing. I took the dough out of the refrigerator, and I have flattened it into a pan so it's the right thickness for our muffins.

[Rachel Wyman]

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' and then put it up against the real thing in the blind taste test.

[Ben Nadav Haffrey]

We can open this one to the spur. That's pretty amazing. Look at that.

[Rachel Wyman]

That looks really good.

[Ben Nadav Haffrey]

It's a little bit.

[Rachel Wyman]

I don't see a difference. I don't see a difference.

[Ben Nadav Haffrey]

Oh, my gosh. Look at that.

[Rachel Wyman]

They look identical. It was amazing. I called the students over to see what they made of it. You really think this is gonna work?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I actually do. I do. Very optimistic, because just by looking at them, they look completely like exactly the same.

[Rachel Wyman]

We ran a mini test where the kids tasted the fresh muffins against Thomas' And I quickly learned that they did not think as highly of Thomas's English muffins as I did.

[Ben Nadav Haffrey]

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

[Rachel Wyman]

Doesn't it taste like you just spat it out?

[Ben Nadav Haffrey]

I've never liked English muffins my whole life because this is what I've always been offered. It smells like box, like cardboard.

[Rachel Wyman]

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

[Ben Nadav Haffrey]

I think it'll be pulled off. Well.

[Rachel Wyman]

The key was to Let our muffins get stale so they match Thomas's. Rachel had made a batch the day before, which she'd left out in the open for this purpose. For the test, we were going to cut the muffins into sixteenths and put them in egg cartons. That would give us enough samples for about a hundred tests. But as we cut up Rachel's muffins from the day before, it was clear that they were a little too crusty. We'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.

[Ben Nadav Haffrey]

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

[Rachel Wyman]

So these are the same as the final recipe.

[Ben Nadav Haffrey]

These are the vinegar recipe. Look at that.

[Rachel Wyman]

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

[Ben Nadav Haffrey]

You know, it's like when you. When your kids play sports and you're, like, super nervous for them. Even though it has no bearing on how I feel.

[Rachel Wyman]

It was time to pit our formula against the greatest culinary minds in America. Cue the fight song. Hello, everybody. My goodness. At some point in your life, I hope 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 1, 2, 3. In each test, you either had two Thomases and one Rachel's or two Rachel's and one Thomases. 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.

[Ben Nadav Haffrey]

Excuse me. I think it was 534.

[Rachel Wyman]

That's different. 399 is different.

[Ben Nadav Haffrey]

It's 109. Pretty sure it's 142.

[Rachel Wyman]

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 Bimbo Bakery's legendary trade secret. And just like in Bimbo Bakeries versus Chris Botticella, we were losing and the secret was winning.

[Chris Botticella]

We'll be.

[Rachel Wyman]

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, but 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 Holloran. 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?

[Hannah Dawkins]

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 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.

[Rachel Wyman]

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.

[Hannah Dawkins]

There's a whole cabinet in Boiron of counterfeits, contre facons, of people who tried to steal it. But there have been efforts to use the name or use something that duplicated the formula in some way, which, of course is impossible because it's so complex, very complex. You can't just, you know, set up a shop and make it.

[Rachel Wyman]

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?

[Hannah Dawkins]

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, because I 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, could never really do it, nor have I been kidnapped. A lot of people know that I know the recipe.

[Rachel Wyman]

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.

[Hannah Dawkins]

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 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.

[Rachel Wyman]

Is there in your mind a hierarchy between a secret and a mystery? And how would you. How would you illustrate the difference if there is one.

[Hannah Dawkins]

Well, mystery, I think. I haven't thought of it, but I think the mystery is a broader concept. You speak about the mystery of God, the mystery of life. Not just like a mystery that you would read. A detective mystery. Mystery is not something that's. That you don't know, but something that's unknowable in rational terms.

[Rachel Wyman]

And a secret can be known. Someone could.

[Hannah Dawkins]

Yeah. And a secret is just. Can be something trivial. But a mystery in its original sense, it's just something that's very deep and wonderful. It can never be conceptualized, but has to be lived.

[Rachel Wyman]

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, used to live. Oh, really?

[Hannah Dawkins]

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

[Rachel Wyman]

He used to live on the grounds of the institute. You used to live there?

[Hannah Dawkins]

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 the Jesuit novitiate in 69. And that's when the CIA took it over. That's where I first tasted the mystical 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.

[Rachel Wyman]

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. The 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.

[CIA Student]

I like 5985-9859-8598-5908.

[Rachel Wyman]

Nearly 80% of people preferred Rachel's recipe.

[Ben Nadav Haffrey]

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

[Rachel Wyman]

Thank you. So, no, we didn't perfectly reverse engineer the secret recipe and process for a Thomas 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 bimbo 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.

[Chris Botticella]

I'm Italian. You can obviously, you know, hear from accent.

[Rachel Wyman]

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.

[Chris Botticella]

I love baking, you know. So the answer to you is, yeah, I still love baking. I just don't like what happened. And yeah, I love baking.

[Rachel Wyman]

Why do you love it?

[Chris Botticella]

Well, because, you know, I think I'm. 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.

[Rachel Wyman]

Chris told me he actually thinks Bimbo is a good company to work for. He. 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.

[Chris Botticella]

No, Ben, listen, it's not bullshit. A muffin is a muffin. It cannot be that freaking difficult to produce. A muffin is a muffin.

[Rachel Wyman]

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

[Chris Botticella]

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 bowl somewhere. It's left on the floor.

[Rachel Wyman]

It's really not. Nobody knows the formula, Bimbo. Bakeries hadn't replied to repeated requests for comment by the time we recorded this episode. But by now I could believe this secret recipe was all nonsense. The best secrets bring us together. They bind us like a monastic order. They don't trap us. I suspect that even if someone 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 Bimbo's 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.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

The secret recipe for Rachel Wyman's improved Thomas English muffins can be found in our show notes. We've put the vinegar version in there too. If you want the authentic Thomas flavor, leave them in a bag for a week so they get stale. The key thing is to overproof and refrigerate the dough. Why just ask Rachel?

[Ben Nadav Haffrey]

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.

[Rachel Wyman]

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

[Ben Nadav Haffrey]

Yeah, yeah, exactly, totally. And then they slow down, raising all kinds of questions.

[Rachel Wyman]

Rachel.

[Ben Nadav Haffrey]

Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Revisionist History is produced by Ben Nadaff Haffrey 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 of By Echo Mountain. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Production support from Sarah Bruger and Luke Lamond at Pushkin. Thanks to Karen Shakurji, Jake Flanagan, Greta Cohn, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Amy Hagedorn, Kira Posey, Morgan Ratner and Jordan MacMillan.

[Rachel Wyman]

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 Nadifafry.

[Ben Nadav Haffrey]

This is an I Heart podcast.