Ben-Nadav Hafri
speaker
333 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Ben-Nadav Hafri’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
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 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.
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.
And here it is. The Muffin House. Yes. 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.
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' 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 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.
Yeah, can we make this exact English muffin?
The vibe I was getting was mild interest laced with a healthy dose of, are you okay?
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' 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.
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.
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 am the overlord of pastry.
and Rachel Wyman, head baker at the Montclair Bread Company.
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.
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 flower.
It turns out that Rachel is a dough genius. But was it enough?
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' 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.
Oh, my God.
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