New Recipes

Much of Wingstop’s success can be pinned on its great selection of unique wing flavors such as Korean, Louisiana Rub, Garlic Parmesan, and Hawaiian. But it’s the traditional buffalo-style hot wings that are one of the top two picks at the 1,124-unit chicken wing chain (the other one is Lemon Pepper).

The chain’s buffalo-style sauce is darker red than most buffalo wing sauces, which are typically made by combining Frank’s RedHot sauce with melted butter. Frank’s is more orange than red, so I set out to find an alternative Louisiana-style hot sauce that looked the part.

My market had several other Louisiana hot sauces, but the one whose color best matched Wingstop was called “The Original Louisiana Brand Hot Sauce.” This particular vinegar-and-pepper hot sauce has been around for over 90 years, and it has the right color and flavor to make a great knockoff of the wing sauce. You’ll just need to add a few more ingredients, including butter, and it’s ready for saucing your wings.

If you can’t find The Original Louisiana Hot Sauce, you can use another Louisiana-style sauce, such as Crystal, Bulliard’s, or even Frank’s, and although your wings won’t look quite the same as Wingstop’s, they’ll still taste similar.

Try my Wingstop Original Hot Wings recipe below, and find more of my copycat appetizer recipes here.

Menu Description: “Ricotta cheesecake with a shortbread cookie crust, topped with seasonal strawberry sauce.”

Soft ricotta cheese adds a comforting creaminess to this signature cheesecake, and for a tasty twist, the traditional graham cracker crust has been swapped out for a giant shortbread cookie. If you like cheesecake, you’ll definitely want to give this hack of the top dessert a try.

For my Olive Garden Sicilian Cheesecake recipe, I made the shortbread crust easy with only 5 ingredients. Just mix it, form it, bake it, and let it cool while you work on the filling. And if you pull all the cheese out of the fridge ahead of time to soften up, your cheesecake will be silkier and have fewer lumps. Do the same with the eggs.

It's also a good idea to start with quality whole milk ricotta that is smooth and creamy, without a grainy or lumpy texture. The best ones include Calabro, BelGioioso, Sorrento, and White Rose whole milk ricottas. Try to find one of those. And by baking it in a water bath as described here you’ll produce a delicious thick cheesecake, with a perfect creamy texture, that won’t crack as it cools.

Find more of my Olive Garden copycat recipes here.

Traditional Irish potato soup—a simple formula made with potatoes, onions, stock, and cream—gets an upgrade with cheddar cheese, carrots, green onions, and sour cream in Jason’s Deli's delicious take on the classic recipe. These improvements make a great soup that's still easy to make, but it also may be the best-tasting potato soup I’ve ever hacked.

The secret to this soup recipe is that it starts life as a cheddar cheese sauce, which may worry you if you’ve ever made cheese sauce that wound up “grainy." But that won’t happen here if you're sure to use mild or medium cheddar cheese. Older (sharper) cheddar contains less water and doesn’t melt as well as younger cheese, so the first important step is to choose your cheddar wisely.    

Also, shred your own cheese. Pre-shredded cheese won’t melt as well, since shredded cheese is usually drier and often dusted with cornstarch to keep the shreds from clumping. For my Jason's Deli Irish Potato Soup recipe below, I highly recommend that you shred your own cheese to get the best results. 

After an hour or so of simmering, you’ll have eight beautiful bowls of soup, all topped with cheddar cheese and crumbled bacon before serving, just like the real thing.  

Find more amazing copycat soup recipes here.

When Jimmy Dean debuted Pancakes and Sausage on a Stick in 2006, Jon Stewart held up a box on The Daily Show declaring it an example of how America continues “to push the envelope for what could technically be defined as food.” But the unusual—and apparently humorous—combination of salty breakfast sausage encased in sweet pancake batter­, all on a stick, might surprise you. This innovative product probably tastes better than you expect—as good as eating maple pancakes with a side of sausage, but simultaneously and with one hand. In fact, this quirky treat became popular that other companies joined the party, and now several brands have their own versions in the freezer aisle. 

As I worked on my Jimmy Dean Pancakes and Sausage on a Stick recipe I realized that there is no breakfast sausage you can buy that’s as big as the sausage used in the original. It's very long! So, for the best clone, I made the Jimmy Dean sausage from scratch using my Jimmy Dean Breakfast Sausage hack. That slightly tweaked recipe is included here along with everything you need to know to make dippable pancake batter than can be fried. 

Alternatively, if you’d like to save some time, you can use frozen pre-made sausage, rather than making the sausage from scratch. The sausage won't taste like Jimmy Dean's, but the recipe will still work. I've got details on that in the Tidbits below.

After frying each of these breakfast snacks on a stick for 5 minutes, you can serve them right away, or you can freeze them and then heat them up later in a microwave minute, just like the real ones.

Check out more cool recipes for famous breakfast items here.

Unlike most tortilla soup recipes, Qdoba doesn’t use chicken broth for the soup base, so this recipe, without the garnishes, is vegan. I tried using a vegetable broth base, but every brand I tried sent the recipe in the wrong direction. As a last resort, I tried the soup again with Knorr vegetable bouillon cubes, and…bingo. The bouillon added perfect flavor, and all was good.

For my Qdoba Tortilla Soup recipe, you’ll need to roast some peppers, but after that, the recipe is a straightforward chop-and-simmer, and you should have a very easy time with it.

This soup gets garnished with sour cream, shredded cheese, and fried tortilla strips, but you can upgrade your soup by adding chopped adobo chicken (from the TSR version of Qdoba Adobo Chicken), black beans, rice, pico de gallo, and minced cilantro. Now you’ve just cloned the chain’s Loaded Tortilla Soup, and you’re a better person for it.

Traditional Italian doughnuts are often made with soft choux dough dropped by a spoon into the oil, resulting in light and crispy puff pastries. Others—like what Olive Garden serves—are made with tighter dough for a finished product that is more substantial, like beignets. That's the pastry you'll be making here, and it's pretty darn easy, once you know the secret dough formula.

In Italy, Zeppoles (Olive Garden changed the spelling a bit) are often filled with fruit or jelly and always come dusted with granulated or powdered sugar. In this case, Olive Garden's Zeppolis are unfilled with dipping sauce on the side, and they're tossed in extra-fine granulated sugar (baker’s sugar).

At the restaurant, you get a plate of warm Zeppolis with your choice of raspberry sauce or chocolate sauce. But why choose? My Olive Garden Zeppolis recipe here makes 2 dozen pillowy pastries, which you can serve with both raspberry and chocolate dipping sauces, or with any sweet sauce you like. 

Cannoli lovers flip out when they taste this three-deck homemade vanilla cake, built with delicious layers of creamy ricotta cheese cannoli filling. Serve up a giant slice on a plate drizzled with chocolate sauce, and sprinkle it with chopped pistachios for the ultimate cannoli/cake mash-up.

The ricotta filling here comes from my original Carrabba’s Cannoli recipe. It's a recipe that could come in handy if you’re looking to make the optional garnish of a mini cannoli for the top of the cake. The only difference will be that you’re making small cannoli, so if you opt for this extra step, you’ll need to use mini cannoli tubes to make the shells, or buy pre-made mini cannoli shells.

The vanilla cake recipe here is my original creation, and it will make enough batter to fill 3 (9-inch) pans, which are best cooked at the same time. If you don’t have that many pans, use what you have and cook the cakes in stages, cooling the pan(s) between batches.

When shopping for ricotta, you want smooth whole milk ricotta. If your ricotta is too grainy, don't worry. You can smooth out the filling to make it more like the real thing by pureeing it in a food processor or blender until it's smooth.

Try my exclusive Carrabba's Cannoli Cake for Two recipe below, and find more of my Carrabba's copycat recipes here.

Fried rice is one of life’s simple pleasures, but add kimchi, edamame, mushrooms, tender short rib, and a wasabi-mayo drizzle, and you’ve just elevated a common dish to something truly special. That’s why P.F. Chang’s new Short Rib Fried Rice is so popular. And that’s why it needed to be cloned, ASAP.

As with my recipe for P.F. Chang’s Fire-Braised Short Ribs, you’ll make a tasty braising liquid with Chinese cooking wine, soy sauce, hoisin sauce, oyster sauce, brown sugar, green onions, and garlic, to pour over your short ribs before they slow-cook in your oven for 3 hours.

When you're ready to serve the dish, dice the cooled short ribs, then sear them and add them to the rice along with all the other ingredients in a hot pan or wok over high heat.

Plate the rice, drizzle wasabi-mayo sauce over the top, sprinkle on some fresh chopped green onions, and serve up a spot-on clone of the hit dish, and possibly the best fried rice you’ve ever crafted.

Try my P.F. Chang's Short Rib Fried Rice recipe below, and find more popular P.F. Chang's copycat recipes here. 

This is my go-to salsa at Chipotle, so it was only a matter of time before I tackled a hack for the famous secret recipe. And now that I can make it at home with just 7 ingredients and about 20 minutes of prep, this salsa replaces several grocery store brands I was previously loyal to.

The process for my Chipotle red chili Salsa recipe is simple: roast tomatillos, Fresno peppers, and garlic under your broiler for a few minutes, then purée everything in a blender with vinegar and seasoning. The trick is to not over-blend the mixture. Once the tomatillos are added, purée the mixture until no chunks of tomatillo are visible, but stop blending while you can still see tomatillo seeds in the sauce.

Add this great-tasting salsa to anything that needs a hit of hotness—tacos, burritos, salads, and bowls. Just know that it's a hack of Chipotle’s spiciest salsa, so be ready for the boom.

You could also use this great salsa on Chipotle's famous barbacoa, carnitas, carne asada, or pollo asado. Find all of those recipes and more here.

The demand for cooking oil began to slump in Taiwan in the 1970s, and Yang Bing Yi’s cooking oil shop, called Din Tai Fung, was struggling. To help support his family of five children, Yang converted one side of his store into a dumpling shop and sold steamed soup dumplings for take-out. When the dumpling business became far more lucrative than the cooking oil business, Yang stopped selling oil and converted his dumpling business into a full-service restaurant, and eventually a chain of dumpling restaurants.

The dumpling chain got a massive boost in 1993 when the New York Times named Din Tai Fung one of the top 10 restaurants in the world.  And now today, the chain has over 170 locations in 13 countries and serves a wide variety of Taiwanese food, but it’s the famous pork soup dumplings that bring the customers back.  

The Kurobuta Pork Xiao Long Bao, or pork soup dumplings, at Din Tai Fung are exceptional in a couple of ways. For one thing, the pork comes from Kurobuta black pigs, which are known as Berkshire pigs here in the U.S. The meat from these pigs is very tender and flavorful, and when you include all the fat from the shoulder in the grind, the filling here will practically melt in your mouth. For the best clone, you’ll need to track down a shoulder of Berkshire pork and get it ground up without trimming off any of the fat cap.

If you are familiar with the dumplings at Din Tai Fung, you know that they are beautiful. The dumplings are folded by masters who have trained for months, often making over a thousand dumplings until they are able to craft a perfect little pouch every time. The real Din Tai Fung dumplings have 18 pleats, pinched together with the thumb and forefinger of one hand as the other spins the pouch around. I’ve included instructions with step photos here in my Din Tai Fung pork soup dumplings recipe to help you, but perfect dumplings aren’t easy for beginners, so don’t worry if your xiao long bao don’t look as good as those made by the well-trained pros.

I tested different flours for the wrappers and found that extra fine “00” flour, often used for pizza and pasta, worked best here. The fine grind of the flour made folding the dumplings an easier task, and the wrappers were better at absorbing moisture from the steam. If you have trouble finding “00” flour, you can substitute with bleached all-purpose flour. And when you measure the flour, use grams for the best results.

I also found it easier to fold 22 dumplings with a Mai Tai. Here are some famous cocktail recipes to help you along.

Maggiano’s transforms a normally ho-hum finger food appetizer into a beautiful starter with thick breaded chunks of mozzarella topped with more melted mozzarella and a delicious top secret marinara sauce.

To make a dish at home that looks and tastes like the original, you'll just need to cut three slices off a 2-pound block of mozzarella. After breading the cheese using the technique here, let the mozzarella rest for a bit while you make the marinara so that the breading sticks better when the cheese chunks get fried.

My original Maggiano's Mozzarella Marinara recipe will produce three slices of crispy cheese, just like in the photo. And if you want a bigger serving, you’ll have enough breading and marinara to double up on the recipe for a total of six breaded cheese slices.

If you like Maggiano's, you'll also love my copycat recipe for Maggiano's Beef Tenderloin Medallions. 

IHOP upped its French toast game in 2022 with the introduction of a new recipe that suggests your French toast is only as good as the bread you start with, and IHOP’s new Thick ‘N Fluffy French Toast starts with thick specialty artisan bread, rather than the more commonly used Texas toast white bread.

For my IHOP Thick 'N Fluffy French Toast recipe, you can use any thick-sliced bread from your bakery, but there are two national brands that work well: Nature’s Own Perfectly Crafted Thick-Sliced White Bread and Sara Lee Artisano. Either of those will do, but of the two, Nature’s Own is shaped more like IHOP’s version.

Adding vanilla and a little cinnamon to the easy batter will set these waffles apart from most others, and in no time, you’ll have 6 beautiful slices of French toast for a total of 3 servings. Dust them with a little powdered sugar, add some butter and maple syrup on the side, and it’s like you just opened a mini IHOP in your house.

Click here for more amazing IHOP breakfast hacks.

When the holidays come around so do these delicious seasonal scones from America’s top coffeehouse chain. They're lightly browned, tender, and buttery, as any good scone should be, and they're packed with plump dried cranberries and just the right amount of orange essence to get your bells jingling.

The official product description claims there is orange zest in the scones, but I couldn’t see any bits of orange zest in the scones bought from Starbucks. Even more puzzling is that the ingredients list on Starbucks’ website doesn’t mention orange zest at all. Perhaps “natural flavors” include orange oil extracted from the orange zest, and no actual solid orange zest is used. Still, I like seeing the zest in the scones, so I’ve included just a bit of minced zest from one small orange here in my Starbucks Cranberry Orange Scone recipe along with a bit of orange extract to make the flavor pop.

After slicing your scones, let the dough sit while you preheat the oven. I found this resting step creates a more rewarding rise in your scones and gives them a slightly darker brown color on top.

Pair this with your favorite Starbucks cloned coffee creation. Find my recipes here.

It's rumored that the secret ingredient in the signature crust of a Gino’s East Deep Dish Pizza is cornmeal, but that suspicion is incorrect. The dough’s yellow color makes it looks like cornbread, and it has a softer quality than most doughs, but these qualities come from other not-so-secret ingredients that have nothing to do with corn.

When three friends—Sam Levine, Fred Bartoli, and George Loverde—opened their pizza joint just off the Miracle Mile in Chicago, Illinois in 1966, they hired talented pizza chef Alice Mae Redmond, who came up with a special dough recipe that included a "secret" conditioner. Today, Gino's ships boxes of frozen pizzas across the country and is required by law to list all the ingredients on the package. So, of course, I ordered a few of those pizzas and discovered that the "secret" dough additive is cream of tartar, and the dough's yellow tint comes from beta-carotene, a natural source of yellow. On those boxes, I also discovered zero cornmeal. 

For a great deep dish crust at home, you'll need to start your dough 1 to 2 days in advance. A slow, chilled rise will improve the quality and taste of your finished crust to more closely match the characteristics of the real thing. I include cream of tartar here, just like in the original dough, and simple yellow food coloring to add the proper tint.

My Gino's East Deep Dish Pizza recipe makes a plain cheese pizza, but if you want toppings (sausage, pepperoni, bacon, onions, mushrooms, peppers, etc.), arrange them on top of the cheese before applying the sauce.

Charles See had a vision. His mother's chocolates were so good, he knew deep down that a candy store featuring Mary See's sweet creations would be a huge success, and he was right. The first See's Candies opened in Los Angeles, California in 1921, over 100 years ago, and today there are more than 200 See's Candies stores in 21 states. 

Chocolate-covered candies are the chain's signature items, but See's is also known for the creamy rectangular lollipops that come in a variety of flavors, including caramel, vanilla, chocolate, and butterscotch. Around the holidays, sales spike for the red one: a cinnamon oil-flavored lollipop with a smooth mouthfeel. Like the other See's Lollypop recipes, this one includes butter, cream, and brown sugar, giving it a pleasant butter toffee quality.

The trick here was finding a way to make these into rectangular suckers like the real ones without access to a lollipop mold for that shape. Fortunately, I found an ice cube tray online with perfectly-sized molds and a flexible silicone base to aid in release. With a few little tweaks, I transformed the $4 ice cube tray into a mold that can be used over and over to make 14 rectangular lollipops that look and taste just like See's. I've included that cool little trick here in my See's Cinnamon Lollypop recipe, plus plenty of step photos so yours will always come out perfect.  

Try my version of See's Candies Butterscotch Lollypop here. 

When dippable tempura-battered chicken chunks made their debut at select McDonald’s restaurants in 1981, America couldn’t get enough…literally. Supply chain issues prevented the burger chain from meeting high demand in all markets for many months, and it wasn’t until two years after the McNuggets were first introduced that they were finally available at every McDonald’s in the country.

The famous finger food was invented by McDonald’s first executive chef, Rene Arend, who discovered that reconstituted chicken blended with flavor enhancers, enrobed with tempura batter, and deep-fried until golden brown, made a simple, portable snack. The chicken was formed into four “B” shapes designed for dipping—the bell, the bow-tie, the ball, and the boot—and served along with child-friendly dipping sauces such as ranch and barbecue, so the breakout finger food product became a huge winner with kids.

To make a home version that looks and tastes like McNuggets I dissected a real one and discovered that the chicken in the middle is coated twice: once with dry, seasoned breading, and then once more with wet batter before frying. The chicken in McNuggets is puréed not ground, and the best way to prepare it is with a food processor. “Ground” chicken in grocery stores is often puréed, then pushed through a die to look more appealing in the package, similar to how ground beef is presented. For my Chicken McNugget recipe below, it's best to use a home food processor, but if you don’t have one, ground chicken from your butcher will work.

If I had to identify a secret ingredient in this hack it would be Knorr chicken bouillon powder. It contains many of the same ingredients found in real Chicken McNuggets, so once you get that crucial flavoring component, you’re well on your way to an amazing knockoff of an iconic American food.

This recipe was our #5 most popular in 2022. Check out the other four most unlocked recipes for the year: Rao's Traditional Meatballs (#1), Chipotle Pollo Asado (#2), Wendy's Seasoned Potatoes (#3), Cheesecake Factory Spicy Cashew Chicken (#4).

“D” was chef David Di Gregorio’s nickname at the first Maggiano’s, which opened in Chicago, Illinois in 1991, and he’s the guy who developed the best-selling pasta dish on the menu. 

Maggiano’s Famous Rigatoni “D” is a genuinely great dish that anyone can copy if they use the exclusive top secret techniques revealed here. After many trials and several errors, I finally replicated the amazing creamy marsala sauce by reducing two full bottles of inexpensive marsala wine down to just one-half cup of intensely flavored liquid. The alcohol cooks out, the mushrooms contribute their savory umami goodness, and after about an hour-and-a-half you have the perfect flavoring solution for your cream sauce.     

The other mushrooms in the dish are served unsliced, so make sure they’re small enough to eat in one bite. Sometimes it’s tough to find 40 small mushrooms, so feel free to use your choice of white (button) or brown (cremini) mushrooms for this recipe. They are the same mushroom species with only minor differences (white mushrooms are a cultivated mutation of the brown ones), so either will work. But, if you have a choice, go with creminis since they tend to have a slightly deeper flavor.

Try my Maggiano's Rigatoni "D" recipe today, and complete the meal with my Maggiano's Vera's Lemon Cookies recipe here.

Bojangles’ signature Cajun rice is always a big seller at the 750-unit fried chicken chain, and a hack has been on my hit list for years now. When I recently found myself in Huntsville, Alabama, I stopped at Bojangles’ and filled up my travel cooler with tubs of dirty rice and buttermilk biscuits and smuggled them safely back to the underground lab in Vegas.

Dirty rice gets its dirty look from the chunks of pork sausage (made from the patties used on the breakfast biscuit sandwiches), and the ground green herbs found in the traditional, and top secret, Cajun seasoning blend. For my Bojangles' dirty rice recipe below, I started with the seasoning, and since I couldn’t see any large herb leaf pieces, I made sure to crush the dried parsley in the palm of my hand before adding it. I figured oregano and thyme would be in there, but they should be in ground form to contribute the proper green “dirtiness” to the rice.

Flavors in Cajun cooking are often created with what’s known as “the holy trinity,” a combination of onion, celery, and bell pepper. The celery salt in the Cajun seasoning brings the celery flavor to the dish. Adding green onion and red bell pepper to the rice completes the trinity. Be sure to finely mince the red bell pepper before sweating it in the butter with the green onion. And keep the heat medium/low when you cook the pepper and green onion to prevent the butter from burning.

As for the rice, I found converted to work best since it’s less starchy and tends not to be as sticky. Converted rice has been parboiled in its husk, so it’s also a healthier option than regular white rice, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. If you can’t find converted rice (Uncle Ben’s is a good one), you can also use long-grain white rice.

Check out more of my Bojangles copycat recipes here.

The dipping sauce mashup that KFC debuted in late 2022 combines a smooth and creamy ranch sauce with the sour heat of cayenne pepper sauce. You might expect that a homemade version is as simple as combining ranch dressing with Frank’s RedHot in a bowl, but that did not result in a good clone.

Creating my KFC Buffalo Ranch Sauce recipe from scratch was the way to go. It takes less than 10 minutes to combine these 12 ingredients in a bowl, and after 30 minutes in the fridge, you’ll have ¾ cup of the new sauce for dipping your tenders and nuggets, or as a spread on crispy chicken sandwiches.

The color of this sauce will not be as bright orange as the real one, which is colored with paprika and annatto extractives. If you want your sauce to be more orange like the original, add the optional red and yellow food coloring as specified in the recipe to brighten it up.

I've cloned a lot of other stuff from KFC. See if I hacked your favorites here.

On weekends, hungry patrons at The Cheesecake Factory are treated to a special menu of brunch selections where this thick-sliced, caramelized French toast is a stand-out. A plate comes with four battered bread slices, each browned on one side, then dusted with powdered sugar, and served with warm maple-butter syrup.

I obtained virtually no helpful prep tips from the servers in the restaurant, so I was left to deduce my copycat recipe from a simple inspection of the real thing once I got my take-out order home. I eventually settled on a batter that combines the same ingredients you'd find in crème brûlée: eggs, cream (in the half-and-half), sugar, and vanilla.

After lightly browning one battered side of each thick bread slice, the other side is battered and then sprinkled with a light coating of sugar. When the sugared bread is turned over onto the hot pan, the sugar cooks until browned, re-creating the taste experience of a traditional torched crème brûlée dessert.  

Now, using my exclusive Cheesecake Factory Bruléed French Toast recipe, you can have great brunch food any day of the week without having to wait for a table, and without shelling out nearly 20 bucks for a plate of battered bread.

Find your favorite cheesecake, appetizer, and entrée recipes from Cheesecake Factory here. 

Tweaking a classic recipe with a few special prep tricks leaked to me by a server was the key to developing this spot-on hack for the famous meatballs from the iconic 125-year-old Italian dining room. With just two locations in the U.S. (Los Angeles and New York), sinking your fork into a fresh meatball at the restaurant requires quite a trip for most people, but my Rao's Traditional Meatballs recipe, refined through multiple batches, will make you a meatball master in your own kitchen, producing ten 5½-ounce meatballs that look and taste like the real thing.

Fortunately, I could squeeze in a reservation at the Las Vegas Rao’s location a few weeks before it closed its doors forever at Caesar’s Palace in late November 2021. While there, I made sure to ask my server for any information about the recipe, and was informed about the secret two-step process described in this hack to create giant meatballs that are cooked through, but so moist that they practically crumble when cut with a fork.

Rao’s has shared a meatball recipe in the past, but don’t be fooled. That recipe produces decent meatballs, but they are not the same as what’s served in the restaurant. If you want to make meatballs that taste like the classic original, use my Rao's meatballs recipe below.

And when they're done, top the meatballs with your favorite marinara or use my hack here to re-create Rao’s famous sauce.

This recipe was our #1 most popular in 2022. Check out the other four most unlocked recipes for the year: Chipotle Pollo Asado (#2), Wendy's Seasoned Potatoes (#3), Cheesecake Factory Spicy Cashew Chicken (#4), McDonald's Chicken McNuggets (#5).

You might also like my #1 recipe of 2021, Panda Express Chow Mein.

The milk caramel lollipop that has been sticking to teeth for almost 100 years is an iconic American candy treat. Robert Welch invented the pop in 1925 and originally called it Papa Sucker, a name that lasted until 1932 when it changed to a popular expression of the time, Sugar Daddy. A chocolate-covered version of the pop called Sugar Mama was discontinued in the 1980s, but the caramel jellybeans called Sugar Babies are still found on candy shelves today.

Making a home version of a Sugar Daddy requires cooking caramel from a simple combination of condensed milk, sugar, corn syrup, butter, and vanilla, and bringing it up to a specific temperature to create the perfect hardness when the candy cools. If the temperature is too low, your caramel ends up too soft. If the caramel gets too hot it will scorch, darken, and become too brittle. You’ll want to hit a target temperature of exactly 250 degrees F. and to do that you’ll need a candy thermometer.

One cool part of my Sugar Daddy recipe is the custom technique revealed only here that transforms a pasta box into a perfect disposable lollipop mold. I’ll show you how to make 2 molds out of one spaghetti box for a total yield of 20 pops, and I’ve included plenty of step photos so yours will come out great.

Unlike the real Sugar Daddy, our clone doesn’t contain artificial flavoring, so you'll get richer, purer flavors from the same type of ingredients that were probably used in the original pop invented nearly a century ago before the recipe was tweaked with cheaper and more shelf-stable ingredients.

Find more famous candy recipes here. 

In the Fall of 2022, Chipotle debuted Garlic Guajillo Steak, a variation of the chain’s classic steak made with a new secret seasoning starring the fruity and slightly smokey flavor of dry guajillo peppers, and, surprisingly, prepared using a gourmet French slow-cooking technique.

After an outbreak of E. coli bacteria at Chipotle infected 53 people in nine states, the chain changed the way it cooks steak. Rather than cooking the beef entirely on a Plancha, or flat griddle, Chipotle now pre-cooks the steaks with the sous vide method wherein vacuum-packed seasoned beef is cooked slowly in swirling, heated water. This cooking technique not only eliminates any potentially harmful bacteria before the beef is grilled, but it will also speed up the seasoning process and help tenderize tougher cuts.

But you shouldn't worry if you don’t have a sous vide setup. My Chipotle Garlic Guajillo Steak recipe will also work by simply chilling the seasoned steak overnight in a zip-top bag and later cooking it off in a heavy pan or on a hot griddle. After slicing the cooked steak, toss it with some freshly squeezed lime juice and fresh cilantro, and use it as you see fit for tacos, burritos, bowls, and salads.

If you prefer chicken, head over to my clone recipe for Chipotle's Pollo Asado.

In 2021, Chili’s added a new burger to its menu lineup of Big Mouth Burgers, and this one comes with a big saucy secret.

Chili's Secret Sauce Burger is simple in construction with a soft brioche bun, a huge ½-pound patty, sliced lettuce, and American cheese. It’s also got sautéed onion piled on it, which sets this burger recipe apart from typical fast food fare, but it’s the secret sauce that makes this big burger rock.

The sauce used on this burger is the same sauce the chain initially created for Chili’s Big Mouth Chicken Sandwich—a formula that appears to be inspired by the popular chicken sandwich sauce made famous at Chick-fil-A. You can make my Chili's Secret Sauce recipe revealed here in just a couple of minutes with a simple combination of mayonnaise, ketchup, barbecue sauce, honey, and mustard, plus a little turmeric to add a golden tint.

As for the burger patties, get ground chuck that has a fat content of at least 20%, or grind your own. As the burgers cook, press down on them with a spatula to release the melting fat like they do in the restaurant. This will trigger the Maillard reaction that browns the meat and adds a flavorful crust to your burgers, so your homemade Chili's Secret Sauce Burgers will taste just as good as the original.

Find more of your favorite recipes for Chili's famous dishes here.