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
I didn't even know that this was a space.
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.
Rachel was all in. She even enlisted her students in the effort.
The first recipes were a bust. No nooks or crannies.
But making things crappier turned out to be a bit of a challenge for Rachel.
I'm very happy the students are keeping you honest.
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 motto. Sibus vitae est. Food is life.
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?
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.
Why is she using a steamer on her cake over there?
It was becoming clear to me that this is the greatest college in America.
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.
Acidulent? Who says acidulent? Even the school's fight song was inscrutable.
What does mirepoix mean?
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.
Showing 21–40 of 333 · page 2 of 17
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