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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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 City. So I wrote to him.
His name is Father Michael Halloran. 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?
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.
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 share the recipe or how it was conveyed to you that you should not spread this.
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.
Is there in your mind a hierarchy between a secret and a mystery? And how would you illustrate the difference, if there is one?
And a secret can be known.
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.
He used to live on the grounds of the Institute. You used to live there?
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'. 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.
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 secrets.
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.
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 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.
Showing 61–80 of 333 · page 4 of 17
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