¶ Intro / Opening
Pushkin. A while ago, my colleague Bend A daff Haffrey 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.
It's five sixteen am. I just had a dream where I was in an Airbnb with someone who was affiliated with benbo Bakers, who knew I was trying to reverse engineer the muffin recipe. He's this bald guy who with a mustache, I want to say. He was wearing a card again. We were playing pool in this area, 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.
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
¶ The English Muffin Quest Begins
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 Bakri's GROUPO Bimbo, say this secret was allegedly known to only seven employees of 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. Soon, the corporate world could look a lot more mystical and secretive. And all this had been 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.
I said, are you one of the seven? And it was the recipe and he nodded ah. And he was pretty mad at me, and he said, you're me after my livelihood.
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. I'm Malcolm Gleavell. 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 Junior, 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.
And here it is.
The Muffin House three three seven was twentieth Street, built as a foundry circle eighteen fifty. Samuel Beth Thomas converted the ovens for his English muffin bakery in the early twentieth 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 of 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. 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
Cranni's recipe, but Bimbo was a client. After all, they are one of the largest baking conglomerates in the world.
¶ Searching for the Secret Recipe
I rang a bunch of doorbells and no one answered. I sent a lot of emails that went unreturned, but a few grave 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, So am I the muffin man or not? I guess it's a question.
My question for you is is this like your trying to create their exact products?
Can we make this exact English?
Okay?
The vibe I was getting was mild interest, laced with a healthy dose of are you okay?
It's fairly intriguing, but it's also something that can be super time consuming, So I personally don't like Thomas English muffins.
You know, it looks like just a normal English muffin recipe with you know, industrialized ingredient.
Sorry lesson than soy rye, soybean oil, sort big acid, those kind of things that are going to give it that gumminess to it.
The nificent creates come from holes in the dough, and holes in the dough come from higher hydation. 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've 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. 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 Bambo, 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.
On this Donut Showdown, three superstar bakers elevate the humble donut to new culinary heights.
This is a clip from a twenty fourteen episode of the short lived Cooking Channel show Donut Showdown. If you've never seen Donut Showdown, congratulations.
Let's say hello to our competitors.
Three contestants compete in a variety of donut baking challenges for a ten thousand dollars 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.
I've been baking since I was old enough to hold a pastry bag. I literally wrote my name with a pastry bag before pencils.
Rachel Wyman has a baker's warmth about her angular red hair, a little like Knuckles and Sonic the Hedgehog. She's a total badass. She's got a tattoo on her arm that says flower water, yeast, salt. Of course she makes it
¶ Finding a Baking Superstar
to the final showdown. It's Rachel versus the Overlord of pastry.
At least one of your donuts must include avocado.
Rachel lands on avocado whipped cream on a treslacious donut with the Sangreea filling. The food Scientist is going with a notcho 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.
The flower that I'm used to using is about eleven percent twelve percent protein, and my options were a nine percent protein or thirteen percent protein, So we had to lend the flowers together. The last thing that I want is to send the judges chewy donuts.
It turns out that Rachel is a doe genius. But was it enough?
Rachel, you made two perfect does, but your sangreea filling was a risk that didn't pay off. The winner of this donut showdown is Rachel. Congratulations, one of ten thousand dollars Russ Rachel.
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.
So what I was going to tell you a couple 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, so reverse engineering. It was like my jam, Oh, I'm saying, yeah, this is exactly what would happen. They would bring me a sample of something they wanted, and this was Wegman's and Target and Whole.
Foods, and I worked with that.
Yeah.
No, so I made the bread on the cheese cake factory table.
Oh my god.
So I lived in this space that you're doing this story on.
I didn't even know that this was a space. I mean it is a big space. 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.
¶ Teaming Up and Experimenting
I I'm driving home from school, so uh yeah, it's going really well.
Rachel was all in. She even enlisted her students in the effort, and I have.
So many English muffins in the classroom.
The first recipes were a bust. No nooks or crannies.
The inside of the Thomases almost reminds me of like a dense pancake, like a batter that's almost poured. So we decided that we need to add more hydration to our dough. We're gonna overproof it on purpose, so it sits a little flatter on the griddle. Our our's got a lot of loft, so we kind of have to make them a little crappier.
But making things crappier turned out to be a bit of a challenge for Rachel.
Like, the difficulty is that the Thomas's muffin is gray and ours is uh not, So I think I can just get a lower quality flower and work with that. And also I've been buttering the griddle, but like also we're using you know, plue gras, like eighty four percent butter fat butter. It's like super yellow. I mean, 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.
Students are keeping you honest.
I know they are, they really are. I mean the flavor yesterday was amazing, but not like Thomas, And they're like, chef, you just need to make it taste worse.
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 classes 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 seventy five 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 its 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 cybus vite est Food is Life.
There's a reoccurring themale around the campus too, of like what came first, the chicken or the egg.
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, Yeah.
I feel like the egg definitely came first.
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.
So in this class they learned how to do sugar work, chocolate show pieces, and fondant, So that swan is totally made out of sugar.
Why is she using a steamer on her cake over there?
It gives it like a nice, like glossy look.
It was becoming clear to me that this is the greatest college in America.
This is contemporary Cakes, Chocolates, Advanced baking principles, Late of Dessert's class. Like, there's the freshman what at fifteen at other schools, I would say, being at the culinary, it's more like a freshman fifty.
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 handon toward me around campus? I was slowly realizing that this particular audience of testers might be a little too smart.
Vitamond was essentially testing a claim that adding baking soda to onions when catamalizing them can reduce the cook diime in half.
I wanted to look at how refrigerating cookie dough before baking is going to affect the final alcohol differences between ricotta made with vinegar, citric acid, and lemon juice.
¶ Inside the Culinary Institute of America
So do you even know that you could make that?
You made ricotta with any of Yeah, so you make ricotta with an acigilant.
So that's an acid A sigilant who says is vigilant. Even the school's fight song was inscrutable.
Okay, So it's mirror pla, mere pae dice about chop it up, put it in the stew, mer Pa.
She could not believe I didn't know the meaning of the word mirror pla. Do you know the meaning of the word mir pa? Well, as I learned, it is a ratio for soup bass 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 Bakeshop nine. Rachel was communing with the muffin dough.
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.
If anyone could pull this off, it was going to 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 mir POAs, is all about ratios and process. Rachel was making a second batch with sour though, which was her own spin.
We were going to taste both see which was closer to Thomas's, and then put it up against the real thing in the blind taste test.
I can open this one to this perfect that's pretty amazing.
Look at that. That looks really good.
It's a little bit.
I don't see a difference. I don't see a difference.
Oh my gosh, look at that.
They look identical. But it was amazing. I called the students over see what they made of it. Do you really think this is gonna work?
I actually do.
I do very optimistic because I just by looking at them, they look completely like exactly the same. 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.
So, I don't like English muffins.
Doesn't it taste like so you just spat it out.
I've never liked English muffins my whole life, because this is what I've always been offered. It smells like box, like cardboards.
You think if it gets stale, there might be a chance we pull this off that people can't tell.
I think it'll be pulled off. Well.
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 one hundred tests. But as we cut up Rachel's muffins from the day before, it was clear that they were a little too crusty. We
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.
These have been sitting in a bag.
For like all week, so these are the same as the final recipe.
These are the vinegar recipe.
Look at that, 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 there's two minutes until the test starts. We finished right on schedule. We wheeled our samples out into the packed student cafeteria.
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 ones.
It was time to pit our formula against the greatest culinary minds in America. Cue the fight song. Hello everybody, My goodness. At some point in your life, I hope you experience a moment so absurd, so profoundly unrecognizable, that you haven't 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. Two of them the same, are the same, one of them is different. Using tastes, I want you to tell me which number is different. I had marked each muffin section with numbers like three oh two, three forty eight, and one twenty nine, blinding codes so people wouldn't be biased by ABC or one two three. In each test, you either had two Thomases and one Rachel's or two Rachels and one Thomas's. Exactly. 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 see, I think it was four.
That's different, ninety nine is different, it's one, nine, pretty sure, it's one. Pretty quickly it became clear that we were on track for over sixty percent of people correctly guessing which muffin was not like the others. This was not working. We're getting smoke so far, we're invasively destroying it. Looked like our entire plan was going to fail. We took on Bimbo Bakeri's legendary trade secret, and just like in Bimbo Bakeries versus Cris Botaicella, we were losing and the
secret was winning. We'll be right back. 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 cur called chartreuse.
Chartreuse has been made by a French monastic order, the Carthusians, based on a mysterious recipe that was gifted to them in sixteen oh five. 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
¶ The Blind Muffin Taste Test
name is father Michael Hollerin. I visited him at the parish offices of Saint Monica's Church on the Upper East Side, just a few days after Easter. What is known about the origin of that recipe.
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 that 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 had to be kept secret so obviously so people wouldn't steal the formula and make their own.
Originally, Chartruse was a health flixer. 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.
There's a whole cabinet in own of counterfeits, controfess 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, you know, set up a shop and make it.
Father Michael told me he was the first American Carthusian ever. In the nineteen eighties, he lived in France at the Grand Chartruse Monastery in the Unforgiving Mountains of the French Wilderness. The Carthusians are 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 one hundred and thirty 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.
Absolutely nothing nobody ever told me not to no where, 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, you know, because you know it was dedicated to them and to the to the order. The other 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.
The formula for chartruse 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 them not to join another order, because the secret was a bond between them, not a tool for control.
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 in community together, you know, in silence and solitude to find union with God. So it's at the service of a real mystery. It's even greater than the formula for sure.
Truth 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.
Well, a 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,
¶ Secrets, Mysteries, and Chartreuse
something that's unknowable in rational terms.
And a secret can you know and someone could, yeah.
And the secret is it just can be something trivial. But a mystery in its original sense, it's just something that's very deep and wonderful. It can never be conceptualized, but has to be lived.
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 one hundred and thirty ingredients. But that Thomas's English muffins have all the mystification of a monastic order and none of the mystery. It debates his 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 and he said, well, I.
Used to live, oh really well before it became the CIA. It was a jesuit the Vision.
He used to live on the grounds of the institute, used to live there.
Yeah, we closed it. We were the last class there. We closed it in nineteen sixty nine. I lived there for two years, and we closed it as a jesuit theavision in sixty nine, and that's when the CIA took it over. That's where I first tasted the mystical life, you know, the life of union was gone, and I didn't realize, Wow, this exists. We weren't tart that in grammar school or even in high school. 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 sixty one percent of people could tell the difference between our muffin and Thomas's. The perfect result would have been thirty three percent. But then we ran one more test.
The next is a paired preference test, which will tell us which they all liked 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' was number one hundred and forty two and Rachel's was five ninety eight.
I like five hundred ninety eight, five ninety eight, five ninety eight, five hundred and ninety eight.
Nearly eighty percent of people preferred Rachel's recipe.
Five ninety eight has like like a like salty taste, like it's more flavorable.
So no, we didn't perfectly reverse engineer the secret recipe and process for a Thomas's English muffin. Rachel In the students at the CIA spent a couple of 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. When I started working on this story, I reached out to the defendant in the case, Chris Boticella, the baking executive Beambo 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.
I'm Italian, you can obviously you know you from accent.
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, I love baking, you know. So the answer is that to you is yeah, I still love baking. I just don't like what happened. And yeah, I love baking. Why do you love it well? Because you know, I think 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.
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 sure, Truce.
No, Ben, Listen, it's a bullshit. A muffin is a muffin. It cannot be the freaking difficult to produce. A muffin is a muffin.
Hear and Chris say this a couple of months ago would have saved me a lot of time.
Every person that does the mixing of the product can see it. So it's not a secured formula formula that they keep secret. You know, in a bold somewhere. It's it's left on the floor. It's really nobody knows the formula.
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. 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 ar Truths, 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 Bembo'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. It's opening your muffins with a fork a knife just ruins the whole thing.
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.
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 gonna go crazy and then it's gonna die.
You you give your kids sugar, but you just keep them very cold.
Yeah, yeah, exactly totally and then and then they slow down, so exactly. Yeah.
Revision's History is produced by Ben Dafhaffrey with Lucy Sullivan and Nina Bird Lawrence. This episode was edited by Julia Barton, fact checking by Kate Ferby, original scoring by Luis Kerra. Mixing and mastering on this episode by Echo Mountain. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Production support from Sarah Buguer and Luke LeMond at Pushkin. Thanks to Karen Schakerji Jake Flanagan, Greta Cone, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Amy Hagadorn, Kira Posey, Morgan Ratner, and Jordan McMillan.
Special thanks to Chelsea Burgas, Jonathan Frishtick, Susan Reed, William Woyse Weaver, Corey Theodore at the Anti Conquest Baking Company, Becky Cooper for introducing me to Shartrus, Julia Conrad, Robin Dando and Jonathan A. Zerfoss for helping us with our triangle test methodology, and all the students at the CIA. Happy graduation. I'm Ben Mattafaffrey.