The Formula

In our season finale, we team up with the Culinary Institute of America to reverse engineer the secret recipe for Thomas’s English Muffins. You can read our top secret muffin recipe here https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/the-formula. Get ad-free episodes to Revisionist History by subscribing to Pushkin+ on Apple Podcasts or Pushkin.fm. Pushkin+ subscribers can access ad-free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges, and bonus content for all Pushkin shows. Subscribe on Apple: apple.co/pushkin http://apple.co/pushkin Subscribe on Pushkin: pushkin.fm/plus https://www.pushkin.fm/join-pushkin See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:09Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein. When you're a business owner interested in expanding to new markets, there's a lot to consider and countless questions to answer before making the call. The most important one being, are you ready? That's where ChatGPT comes in. Give it a goal, add your files, and ask Chat to help you map out different scenarios for the future of your business. So when growth is on the table, you've got an expansion plan ready to implement. Get started today at ChatGPT.com.

• 0:37Malcolm Gladwell?

  This is a paid message from Apple Card. It's easy, I think, in the hubbub of our lives to lose track of our spending. We pay the bills and move on and don't understand the deeper patterns in our spending, the many different decisions we're making knowingly or unknowingly. You have to understand where your money is going in order to make better decisions about it. That's one reason Apple Card stands out to me. You can earn unlimited daily cash back on every purchase you make. I also appreciate the simplicity. Apple Card doesn't have annual, late, or over the limit fees. No fees ever. There's even an option to open a high-yield savings account through Apple Card. And while I haven't done it yet, if I do, my daily cash can grow automatically over

• 1:21Malcolm Gladwell?

  time without any extra effort. When you better understand your spending habits, it's easier to make your money work harder for you. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval, variable APRs for Apple Card range from 17.74% to 27.99% based on credit worthiness. Rates as of October 1, 2026. Existing customers can view their variable APR in the Wallet app or card.apple.com. Savings is available to Apple Card owners, subject to eligibility. Savings and Apple Card by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch, Member FDIC. Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 2:07Malcolm Gladwell?

  A while ago, my colleague Ben Dedaf-Hafrin 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.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  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 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."

• 3:13Malcolm 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'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.

• 3:57Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  I said, "Oh, you wanted the seven?" And he knows the recipe, and he nodded.

• 4:24Speaker 02

  And he was pretty mad at me. And he said, "You're coming after my livelihood."

• 4:31Malcolm 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.

• 4:44Malcolm Gladwell?

  I'm Malcolm Gladwell. 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.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  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 were the inventor of Thomas's English muffins once baked. It's in Chelsea, just a couple blocks from the offices of Pushkin Industries. Nineteen years ago, the owner of the first-floor apartment was taking out a radiator. He lifted up some of the floorboards and discovered a door. It was the remnants of Samuel Bath Thomas's oven. I was hoping somebody could show it to me."

• 6:15Speaker 02

  I rang the doorbell.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  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.

• 6:51Speaker 03

  So am I the muffin man or not? I guess is the question.

• 6:54Speaker 04

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

• 7:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, can we make this exact English muffin?

• 7:04Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 7:05Speaker 02

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

• 7:10Speaker 05

  It's fairly intriguing, but it's also something that's gonna be super time consuming.

• 7:14Speaker 04

  So I personally don't like Thomas's muffins.

• 7:18Speaker 03

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

• 7:26Speaker 04

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

• 7:34Speaker 05

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

• 7:40Speaker 02

  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'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.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  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 nonstarter. I needed a true believer. I needed a zealot. I needed a superstar.

• 8:48Speaker 06

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

• 8:54Speaker 02

  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.

• 9:04Speaker 06

  Let's say hello to our competitors.

• 9:06Speaker 02

  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.

• 9:26Speaker 07

  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.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  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.

• 9:52Speaker 06

  At least one of your donuts must include avocado.

• 9:59Speaker 02

  Rachel lands on avocado whipped cream on a treslechous 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.

• 10:17Speaker 07

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

• 10:32Speaker 02

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

• 10:37Speaker 06

  Rachel, you made two perfect doughs, but your sangria filling was a risk that didn't pay off.

• 10:47Speaker 06

  The winner of this doughnut showdown is Rachel. Congratulations. You've won the $10,000 prize. Great stuff.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  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.

• 11:24Speaker 05

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

• 11:37Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:38Speaker 05

  So reverse engineering, it was like my jam.

• 11:41Speaker 02

  Oh, my God. I'm so excited.

• 11:43Speaker 05

  Yeah. 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.

• 11:51Speaker 02

  Oh, you were a big time.

• 11:52Speaker 05

  I mean, I worked with them.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  This is the big time.

• 11:54Speaker 05

  Yeah. No, so I made the bread on the Cheesecake Factory table.

• 11:58Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 11:59Speaker 05

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

• 12:02Speaker 02

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

• 12:04Speaker 05

  It is a big space.

• 12:08Speaker 02

  Rachel checked in with the CIA, green light. She and I were going to reverse engineer Thomas's nooks and crannies. The trade secret of the muffin involves the process, recipe, and machines. But any major baking company knows how to make bread at scale. It's the principles behind the nooks and crannies that were the key thing. We began to have regular debriefing calls.

• 12:30Speaker 07

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

• 12:37Speaker 02

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

• 12:41Speaker 07

  And I have so many English muffins in the classroom.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  The first recipes were bust. No nooks or crannies.

• 12:49Speaker 07

  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 overproof it on purpose so it sits a little flatter on the griddle. Ours, ours got a lot of loft, so we kind of have to make them a little crappier.

• 13:17Speaker 02

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

• 13:22Speaker 07

  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, Plu Gra, like 84% butter, fat butter. It's like, super yellow. So I need to get, I think I'm just gonna 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.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  I'm very happy the students are keeping you honest.

• 13:56Speaker 07

  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.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  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.

• 14:40Speaker 02

  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.

• 14:58Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein. With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. When you're running a business and looking to expand, you need a clear view of the landscape before making any decisions. ChatGPT can help you prepare. Connect your Google Drive, point to relevant files and reports, and ask it to research competitors, industry forecasts, and market signals. It can turn the findings into a strategic deck in your team's template that you can review before presenting to your leadership team. Growing a business is ambitious, and ChatGPT can help you do it with confidence. Get started today at chatgpt.com.

• 15:36Malcolm Gladwell?

  This is a paid message from Apple Card. It's easy, I think, in the hubbub of our lives to lose track of our spending. We pay the bills and move on and don't understand the deeper patterns in our spending, the many different decisions we're making knowingly or unknowingly. You have to understand where your money is going in order to make better decisions about it. That's one reason Apple Card stands out to me. You can earn unlimited daily cash back on every purchase you make. I also appreciate the simplicity. Apple Card doesn't have annual, late, or over the limit fees. No fees ever. There's even an option to open a high-yield savings account through Apple Card. And while I haven't done it yet, if I do, my daily cash can grow automatically over

• 16:20Malcolm Gladwell?

  time without any extra effort. When you better understand your spending habits, it's easier to make your money work harder for you. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval. Variable APRs for Apple Card range from 17.74% to 27.99% based on credit worthiness. Rates as of October 1, 2026. Existing customers can view their variable APR in the Wallet app or card.apple.com. Savings is available to Apple Card owners, subject to eligibility. Savings and Apple Card by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch, Member FDIC. Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 17:05Speaker 02

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 17:20Malcolm Gladwell?

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened

• 17:24Speaker 02

  my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood. And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone. One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies. So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat, it's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow at the table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  Like all the great American culinary schools, the Culinary Institute of America is in a fight to the death with federal law enforcement.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  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.

• 18:51Speaker 02

  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, "Cibus Vitae Est." Food is life.

• 19:19Speaker 05

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

• 19:24Speaker 02

  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?

• 19:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, I feel like the egg definitely came first.

• 19:37Speaker 02

  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 when only at the highest rank do you get to wear the silliest hat. We entered the baking building.

• 20:08Speaker 05

  So in this class, they learn how to do sugar work, chocolate showpieces, and fondant. So that swan is totally made out of sugar.

• 20:15Speaker 02

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

• 20:18Speaker 05

  It gives it like a nice, like glossy look.

• 20:22Speaker 02

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

• 20:27Speaker 05

  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.

• 20:41Speaker 02

  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.

• 20:59Speaker 07

  My experiment was essentially testing a claim that adding baking soda to onions when caramelizing 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.

• 21:13Speaker 05

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

• 21:18Speaker 02

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

• 21:21Speaker 05

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

• 21:26Speaker 02

  Assigulant? Who says assigulant? Even the school's fight song was inscrutable.

• 21:33Speaker 05

  Okay, so it's mirepwa, mirepwa, rou, rou, rou. Dice it up, chop it up, put it in the stew.

• 21:39Speaker 02

  What does mirepwa mean?

• 21:41Speaker 05

  Mirepwa?

• 21:43Speaker 02

  She could not believe I didn't know the meaning of the word mirepwa. Do you know the meaning of the word mirepwa? 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.

• 22:14Speaker 07

  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.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  If anyone could pull this off, it was gonna 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 gonna taste both, see which was closer to Thomas's, and then put it up against the real thing in the blind taste test.

• 23:10Speaker 07

  We can open this one to the spurs.

• 23:13Speaker 07

  That's pretty amazing.

• 23:15Speaker 02

  That looks-

• 23:15Speaker 07

  Look at that.

• 23:16Speaker 02

  That looks really good.

• 23:17Speaker 07

  It's a little bit-

• 23:18Speaker 02

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

• 23:21Speaker 07

  Oh my gosh, look at that.

• 23:22Speaker 02

  They look identical.

• 23:23Speaker 07

  Wow.

• 23:25Speaker 02

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

• 23:30Speaker 05

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

• 23:38Speaker 02

  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.

• 23:47Speaker 07

  I guess that's why I don't like English muffins.

• 23:48Speaker 02

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

• 23:52Speaker 07

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

• 23:59Speaker 02

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

• 24:03Speaker 07

  I think it'll be pulled off well.

• 24:08Speaker 02

  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 gonna cut the muffins into sixteenths 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.

• 24:42Speaker 07

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

• 24:46Speaker 02

  So these are the same as the final recipe?

• 24:48Speaker 07

  These are the vinegar recipe. Look at that.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  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...

• 25:10Speaker 07

  The drama!

• 25:11Speaker 02

  There's two minutes until the test starts.

• 25:12Speaker 07

  Oh my god.

• 25:14Speaker 02

  We finished right on schedule. We wheeled our samples out into the packed student cafeteria.

• 25:19Speaker 07

  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 the test at all. That's not how I feel.

• 25:33Speaker 02

  It was time to pit our formula against the greatest culinary minds in America. Cue the fight song.

• 25:48Speaker 02

  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.

• 26:19Speaker 02

  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. Blind in codes, so people wouldn't be biased by A, B, C, or 1, 2, 3. In each test, you either had two Thomases and one Rachels, or two Rachels 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.

• 26:56Speaker 04

  Excuse me, I think it was 534.

• 26:58Speaker 02

  That's different. 399 is 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 Bimbo Bakery's legendary trade secret. And just like in Bimbo Bakery's Chris Potichella, we were losing, and the secret was winning.

• 27:35Speaker 02

  We'll be right back.

• 27:39Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein. With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. When you're running a business and looking to expand, you need a clear view of the landscape before making any decisions. ChatGPT can help you prepare. Connect your Google Drive, point to relevant files and reports, and ask it to research competitors, industry forecasts, and market signals. It can turn the findings into a strategic deck in your team's template that you can review before presenting to your leadership team. Growing a business is ambitious, and ChatGPT can help you do it with confidence. Get started today at chatgpt.com. Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee.

• 28:20Speaker 00

  This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel. People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic. In a big way that defined a lot of my childhood. And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you

• 28:46Speaker 02

  You're not alone. One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies. So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  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

• 29:59Speaker 02

  City. So I wrote to him. His name is Father Michael Holleran. 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?

• 30:13Speaker 06

  We don't, we, no one ever seems to have researched it. We never knew anything more about it, trying to trace it back further. I've never seen anything on that. But the main reason that it's different is that, that it is a secret and has been kept a secret all this time is because it was simply for the support of the monks. They were pure contemplatives. There was no sense 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 you 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.

• 30:51Speaker 02

  Originally, Chartreuse was a health elixir. People took it for all kinds of ailments: apoplexy, toothaches, palpitations, indigestion, fever.

• 31:00Speaker 02

  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.

• 31:18Speaker 00

  There's a whole cabinet in Bois-Rhône of counterfeits, contrefaçons, 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 set up a shop and make it.

• 31:38Speaker 02

  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.

• 32:20Speaker 02

  I'm curious, 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.

• 32:38Speaker 00

  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.

• 32:57Speaker 06

  The thing is that, you know, it's too complicated to make anyway. As I said from the beginning, I could never, could never really do it. Nor have I been kidnapped. And people, a lot of, a lot of people know that, that I know the recipe.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  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.

• 33:28Speaker 06

  It's a, it's a mysterious formula, but it's the service of an even greater mystery, which is the monastic life and people finding community together, you know, in silence and solitude to, to find union with God. So it's at the service of a real mystery that's even greater than the formula for chartreuse.

• 33:46Speaker 02

  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?

• 33:54Speaker 06

  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.

• 34:11Speaker 02

  And a secret can be known, someone could.

• 34:13Speaker 06

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

• 34:27Speaker 02

  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,

• 34:57Speaker 02

  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.

• 35:08Speaker 06

  Where I used to live.

• 35:10Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 35:10Speaker 06

  Well, it was before it became the CIA.

• 35:13Speaker 02

  It was a Jesuit Novitiate. He used to live on the grounds of the institute. You 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 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. Did you catch that? Where I first tasted the mystical life.

• 35:49Speaker 02

  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.

• 36:10Speaker 02

  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.

• 36:40Speaker 07

  I like 598. 598. 598. 598. 598.

• 36:46Speaker 02

  Nearly 80% of people preferred Rachel's recipe.

• 36:50Speaker 04

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

• 36:54Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 36:56Speaker 02

  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.

• 37:26Speaker 02

  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.

• 37:56Speaker 03

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

• 38:00Speaker 02

  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.

• 38:13Speaker 03

  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.

• 38:21Speaker 02

  Why do you love it?

• 38:23Speaker 03

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

• 38:39Speaker 02

  Chris told me he actually thinks Bimbo is a good company to work for. He just wound up in a bad situation. Towards the end of our conversation, I asked him how he felt about that secret recipe at the center of the case. I was expecting he'd be reverent about the nooks and crannies, like Father Michael with the formula for chartreuse.

• 38:58Speaker 03

  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.

• 39:06Speaker 02

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

• 39:11Speaker 03

  Every person that does the mixing of the product can see it. So it's not

• 39:18Speaker 03

  Secured formula that they keep secret, you know, in a vault somewhere. It's left on the floor. It's really not. Anybody knows the formula.

• 39:29Speaker 02

  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.

• 39:41Speaker 02

  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's English muffins a century after his death. But these Thomas's 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.

• 40:24Speaker 02

  It's opening your muffins with a fork. A knife just ruins the whole thing.

• 40:33Malcolm Gladwell?

  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 overproof and refrigerate the dough. Why? Just ask Rachel.

• 40:55Speaker 07

  Well, if they 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 going to go crazy and then it's going to die.

• 41:15Speaker 02

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

• 41:19Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Totally. And then, and then they slow down. So.

• 41:24Speaker 02

  It's raising all kinds of questions.

• 41:25Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 41:33Malcolm Gladwell?

  Revisionist History is produced by Ben Nataf Haferi 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 Brugger and Luke Lamond. At Pushkin, thanks to Karen Shakurji, Jake Flanagan, Greta Cohn, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Amy Hagadorn, Kira Posey, Morgan Ratner, and Jordan McMillan.

• 42:04Speaker 02

  Special thanks to Chelsea Burgess, Jonathan Frischthick, Susan Reed, William Woyes Weaver, Corey Theodore at the Anti-Conquest Baking Company, Becky Cooper for introducing me to chartreuse, Julia Conrad, Robyn 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 Nataf Haferi.

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• 43:13Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 43:58Malcolm Gladwell?

  That's whoop.com for your free month of Whoop. She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor prescribed Zolair, omalizumab. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens.

• 44:16Speaker 03

  Zolir 150mg is a prescription medication used to treat food allergy in people one year of age and older to reduce allergic reactions due to accidental exposure to one or more foods. While taking Zolir, you should continue to avoid all foods to which you are allergic. Don't use if you are allergic to Zolir. Zolir may cause a severe, life-threatening allergic reaction called anaphylaxis. Tell your doctor if you ever had anaphylaxis. Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or if you have swelling of your throat or tongue. Zolir should not be used for the emergency treatment of allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis. Zolir is for maintenance use to reduce allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, while avoiding food allergens. Serious side effects such as cancer, fever, muscle aches and rash, parasitic infection, or heart and circulation problems have been reported. Please see zolir.com for full prescribing information. Ask an allergist about Zolir.

• 44:59Speaker 03

  This is an advertisement for Zolir, paid for by Genentech and Novartis.