THE MOST TRUSTED COPYCAT RECIPES
THE MOST TRUSTED COPYCAT RECIPES

Carrabba's

You lucky devil. You just found recipes for all your favorite famous foods! Bestselling author and TV Host Todd Wilbur shows you how to easily duplicate the taste of iconic dishes and treats at home for less money than eating out. Todd’s recipes are easy to follow and fun to make! Find your favorite copycat recipes from Carrabba's here. New recipes added every week.

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    Carrabba's Cannoli Cake for Two

    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.

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    Carrabba's Traditional Cannoli

    Menu Description: “Two crisp pastry shells stuffed with sweet ricotta and chocolate chip filling, topped with pistachios and powdered sugar.”           

    For great traditional cannoli, one need not look any further than a nearby Carrabba’s Italian Grill. These cannoli are exactly what you want cannoli to be: a crunchy shell that isn’t soggy or too thick, packed with sweetened ricotta cheese filling that’s smooth and not grainy. And with that classic crunchy/creamy combination comes a hint of cinnamon lingering in the background to complete the traditional taste of a legit cannoli.

    To make my Carrabba's cannoli recipe, you’ll need 8 cannoli tubes to form the shells. After wrapping circles of dough around these 5-inch long metal tubes, they get deep-fried for a few minutes, resulting in shells that are perfectly golden brown.

    As for the filling, it needs to be smooth if you want a good clone, so try to find ricotta cheese that isn’t too grainy. We’ll first strain the cheese overnight so that most of the liquid runs off for a thicker filling, but if your cheese is still grainy, run the filling through a food processor until the cheese is smooth before folding in the whipped cream. Now that’s good cannoli.

    Click here for more of your favorite copycat recipes from Carrabba's.

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    Carrabba's Calamari and Ricardo Sauce

    Searching for a great fried calamari recipe from a large chain to hack, I finally landed on Carrabba’s popular appetizer, with two dipping sauces, including the chain's top secret Ricardo Sauce.

    I like this preparation because it's super simple, with a two-stage breading process that calls for just egg whites to moisten the calamari before it gets dropped into the seasoned flour. The egg whites will give the breading a light texture and prevent your calamari from browning as it would with any milk or egg yolk in the mix. Browning is just fine for other fried calamari dishes, but a hack for Carrabba’s version needs to produce crispy calamari with a tender crunch and light golden color.

    A good Carrabba’s Calamari recipe will also need to include both dipping sauces, so hacks for the chain’s marinara sauce and famous Ricardo Sauce recipes are here. Ricardo Sauce is a creamy lemon butter sauce with added red bell peppers, pepperoncini, and crushed red peppers, and this exclusive TSR formula will give you the absolute best results of any recipe that exists in the known universe.

    I've hacked a ton of dishes from Carrabba's. Check to see if I hacked your favorites here.

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  • Score: 4.85 (votes: 26)
    Carrabba's Spicy Sausage Lentil Soup

    It's not served every day at Carrabba's Italian Grill, but when this amazing soup is on the menu, consider yourself lucky and snag a bowl. It's chock-full of lentils and other good bits of vegetables and herbs, plus there are big chunks of spicy Italian sausage in every bite. Best of all, you can use my Carrabba's spicy sausage and lentil soup recipe below to easily make it at home. Most of the work here is just chopping stuff up, including a small ham steak, which you can find where the bacon is sold in your market. If you can't find a ham steak, you can slice up some deli ham. Get everything in a pot and let it simmer. In 1 hour, you'll have enough hot, chunky soup for at least a dozen cup-size servings. 

    You might also like my Carrabba's chicken Marsala recipe.

    Source: Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 3 by Todd Wilbur.

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  • Score: 4.80 (votes: 5)
    Carrabba's Bread Dipping Blend

    When you sit down for Italian-style grub at one of the more than 168 nationwide Carrabba's restaurants, you're first served a small plate with a little pile of herbs and spices in the middle to which the waiter adds olive oil. Now you're set up to dip your sliced bread in the freshly flavored oil. 

    For my Carrabba's Bread Dipping Blend copycat recipe, you'll need a coffee bean grinder or a small food processor to finely chop the ingredients, but you've got one of those right?

    You might also like my recipe for Carrabba's Spicy Sausage Lentil Soup

    Source: Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 2 by Todd Wilbur.

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  • Score: 5.00 (votes: 2)
    Carrabba's Chicken Bryan

    Menu Description: "Grilled Chicken breast topped with goat cheese, sundried tomatoes, and a basil lemon butter sauce."

    Carrabba's number one chicken dish is simple to clone once you duplicate the delicious basil lemon butter sauce. Preheat your grill to high and pound the chicken breasts with a mallet so that they'll cook evenly. Use the sun-dried tomatoes that come in a bag rather than those that come bottled in oil. To rehydrate them, simmer the sun-dried tomatoes in a small pan of water for about 4 minutes, then slice them. The goat cheese used at the chain is called Caprino cheese, which is a very smooth and creamy goat cheese. If you can't find Caprino, use any available goat cheese from your market, and you'll still have a tasty clone.

    Try my Carrabba's Chicken Bryan copycat recipe below, and complete the experience with my copycat recipes for their bread dipping blend, sausage lentil soup, and creamy Italian dressing

    Source: Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 3 by Todd Wilbur.

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  • Score: 5.00 (votes: 3)
    Carrabba's House Salad Dressing (Creamy Parmesan)

    When Johnny Carrabba and his uncle Damian Mandola opened the first Carrabba's restaurant in 1986, they used a collection of their own traditional family recipes to craft a terrific Italian menu. You'll even find the names of friends and family in several of those dishes including Pollo Rosa Maria, Chicken Bryan, Scampi Damian and Insalata Johnny Rocco.

    Now you can easily re-create the taste of the delicious creamy Parmesan dressing that's tossed into the salad and served before each Carrabba's entrée. And you need only six ingredients. For the grated Parmesan cheese, go ahead and use the stuff made by Kraft that comes in the green shaker canisters. And if you don't have any buttermilk, you can substitute regular milk. Since it's so thick, this dressing is best when tossed into your salad before serving it, just like the real thing.

    Source: Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 2 by Todd Wilbur.

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  • Score: 5.00 (votes: 14)
    Carrabba's Chicken Marsala

    Menu Description: "Fire-roasted chicken breast topped with mushrooms, prosciutto and our Florio Marsala wine sauce."

    To create my Carrabba's Chicken Marsala recipe, I ordered the dish to go, with the sauce on the side, so that I could separately analyze each component. After some trial and error in the underground lab, I found that re-creating the secret sauce from scratch is easy enough with a couple small cans of sliced mushrooms, a bit of prosciutto, some Marsala wine, shallots, garlic and a few other good things. 

    Cooking the chicken requires a very hot grill. The restaurant chain grills chicken breasts over a blazing real wood fire, so crank your grill up high enough to get the flames nipping at your cluckers (not a euphemism). If your grill has a lid, keep it open, so you can watch for nasty flare-ups.

    Click here for more of your favorite dishes from Carrabba's.

    Source: Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 2 by Todd Wilbur.

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I'm Todd Wilbur, Chronic Food Hacker

For over 30 years I've been deconstructing America's most iconic brand-name foods to make the best original copycat recipes for you to use at home. Welcome to my lab.

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