Revisionist History · Pushkin Industries

The Formula

May 29, 2025·36 min·3 clips

Culinary students at the CIA can easily distinguish the reverse-engineered muffin from Thomas's original, threatening the entire investigation.

The episode centers on a years-long quest by Revisionist History producer Ben Nadav-Hafri to reverse-engineer the trade-secret recipe behind the nooks and crannies of Thomas' English muffins. The story begins with Bimbo Bakeries, the Mexico-based baking conglomerate that owns Thomas', suing a departing executive named Chris Botticella and claiming the recipe was known to only seven employees — a case that had broader legal consequences for corporate trade-secret enforcement across America. Ben recruits Rachel Wyman, a former recipe developer for Wegmans, Target, and Whole Foods who now teaches baking at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in Hyde Park, New York. Rachel and her students spend weeks iterating on dough formulas, learning they must deliberately use lower-quality flour, skip the butter, increase hydration, and allow the dough to overproof and refrigerate overnight to get the signature flat, cratered interior. After multiple failed batches, Rachel produces a muffin whose nooks and crannies are visually identical to Thomas'. A blind triangle test conducted in the CIA cafeteria fails — 61% of students can tell the difference — but in the follow-up paired preference test, nearly 80% prefer Rachel's sourdough version. The episode digresses into a rich philosophical meditation through a visit with Father Michael Halloran, the first American Carthusian monk, who had access to the closely guarded chartreuse recipe and walked away from the monastery without anyone demanding he sign an NDA. Father Michael distinguishes a secret (something knowable, often trivial) from a mystery (something deeper and ultimately unknowable), framing the corporate mystification of a flour-and-water muffin as a corruption of the latter concept. Chris Botticella, the baking executive at the center of the original lawsuit, is reached after months of attempts and delivers the deflating verdict: the recipe is nonsense, it's visible on the factory floor, and a muffin is just a muffin. The episode is layered, funny, and genuinely philosophical, weaving food science, corporate law, monastic history, and epistemology into a single story. It appeals to listeners interested in food, intellectual property, corporate culture, and the nature of secrets and meaning.

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