Cracker Barrel
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 Cracker Barrel here. New recipes added every week.
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- Cracker Barrel
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Cracker Barrel Buttermilk Pie
Read moreHaving never lived in the southern U.S., my experience with this dessert was about as minimal as it gets. The first buttermilk pie I tasted was at Cracker Barrel, and I was immediately hooked on the sweetened vanilla custard, which has its distinct, but not overwhelming, tang from buttermilk and lemon juice, topped off with a garnish of strawberries and whipped cream. It’s a versatile dessert that is as well-suited for summertime get-togethers as for winter holiday meals, where it has become a longtime Southern tradition.
I’ve now tasted over a dozen variations of this decades-old favorite—all but one of them coming out of my home oven—on a quest to discover the best way to make Cracker Barrel’s popular dessert. And I finally cracked it.
The beauty of this recipe is its simplicity: you’ll need just a handful of common ingredients, a whisk, and an unbaked pie shell. You can make a pie shell using your favorite recipe or just buy a frozen, unbaked crust at the supermarket to save time. Mine was Marie Callender’s branded, and it was delicious.
Whisk together the filling in stages as described here, pour it into your pie shell, and bake it starting on the lowest rack so that the bottom of the pie gets browned. If you have a convection oven, this is a good time to use it so you’re sure to get even browning on top. After about an hour your pie will be done, and when it cools, dessert is served.
Find more of my Cracker Barrel copycat recipes here.
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Cracker Barrel Meatloaf
Read moreThe Southern-themed chain famous for its gift shops filled with made-in-America products and delicious homestyle food is also known to have a particularly good meatloaf. This dish ranks high in popularity, right up there with the Chicken ‘n Dumplins and the Hash Brown Casserole, so a good Cracker Barrel Meatloaf copycat recipe is long overdue.
Making meatloaf is easy. What’s hard is making it taste like the meatloaf at Cracker Barrel which is tender and juicy, and flavored with onion, green pepper, and tomato. I sought to turn out a moist and tender loaf of meat, and one that’s not dry and tough, but my first attempts were much too dense. I wasn’t happy about that, but my dog was thrilled.
After playing around with the eggs-to-breadcrumbs-to-milk ratios and being careful to use gentle hands when combining everything and pressing it into the loaf pan, the final batch was a winner and I get to pass it along to you.
It's best to use a meatloaf pan here which has an insert that lets the fat drip to the bottom, away from the meat. A regular loaf pan will still work, but you’ll want to pour off the fat in the pan before slicing.
Satisfy your Cracker Barrel cravings with more of my copycat recipes here.
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Cracker Barrel Fried Apples
Read moreThis sweet side dish is so popular, Cracker Barrel sells jars of it in the gift shop. But no need to buy it when my easy Cracker Barrel Fried Apples copycat recipe will provide a hot, fresh batch any time you want. This prep is simple because you don’t need to peel the apples. Just slice and cook them with the peels on until the apples are tender just like the original, then eat them straight up or as a tasty topping on ice cream.
Try more of my Cracker Barrel recipes here.
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Cracker Barrel Baked Apple Dumplin
Read moreOne of the best choices you will make in life is having this dish for dessert when you’re at Cracker Barrel. They call it a “dumplin” but it’s just a little streusel-covered apple pie, served up hot in its own small baking dish with two scoops of vanilla bean ice cream on top, and drizzled with warm apple/caramel sauce—it's good stuff. Take a bite and you may notice the apples inside taste like Cracker Barrel’s Fried Apples side dish, so we'll use my previous hack for that part to bring it all together.
My Cracker Barrel Baked Apple Dumplin recipe makes two small pies that serve up to four. Check out more of my cool copycat recipes from Cracker Barrel here.
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Cracker Barrel Biscuit Beignets
Read moreThe delicious beignets Cracker Barrel creates with the chain's famous buttermilk biscuit formula are unlike traditional beignets in that they start with such a tangy dough. But once you add all the sweet stuff—cinnamon-sugar, powdered sugar, and butter-nut sauce—the saltiness is offset, resulting in a perfect harmony of great flavor.
The dough here is a tweaked version of my hack for Cracker Barrel's Buttermilk Biscuits, but unlike that dough where we strive for flakiness in the finished product, this dough won't call for a light stirring hand. Instead, you should give this dough a decent beating in the mixing bowl to tighten it up so that it resists oil absorption when deep-fried.
Along with all the steps and step photos for a great copycat of Cracker Barrel biscuit beignets, I’m also including my new hack for a delicious butter-nut dipping sauce that tastes just like what the chain serves, except this one is made with real butter.
Find more of your favorite Cracker Barrel dishes here.
TRANSLATE with xEnglishTRANSLATE withEnable collaborative features and customize widget: Bing Webmaster Portal -
Cracker Barrel Buttermilk Biscuits
Read moreA great buttermilk biscuit isn’t hard to make. This is good news if you're serving hundreds each day as they do at this popular Southern kitchen chain. But a simple recipe such as this one is also a blessing when you need to whip up a modest batch at home for your hungry gang of biscuit fanatics, and it's an added bonus if they taste as good as the famous biscuits from Cracker Barrel.
The secret to tender, flakey biscuits like you get at the restaurant chain is using a lower-gluten self-rising flour such as White Lily; a staple for Southern biscuit recipes. A bit of shortening in the mix will help tenderize the finished product, as will a light mixing hand. Overmixing the dough may toughen your biscuits, so mix the dough gently and only as much as you have to.
If you don’t use White Lily flour and go with a heavier self-rising flour such as Gold Medal, take note that you may have to add a couple of tablespoons more buttermilk to the dough to loosen it up. Good biscuit dough should be soft, but not sticky.
After making these Cracker Barrel biscuits from scratch, try home versions of Cracker Barrel hash brown casserole, buttermilk pie, meatloaf, and more.
TRANSLATE with xEnglishTRANSLATE withEnable collaborative features and customize widget: Bing Webmaster Portal -
Cracker Barrel Country Fried Steak
Read moreIt finally happened. I recently created a new clone recipe for Cracker Barrel's Country Fried Steak only to realize much later that I had already cloned it eight years before in my book, Top Secret Recipes Step-by-Step. But I'm okay with the unplanned re-do because the final result was a more accurate re-creation, with several improvements to my first hack from many moons ago.
Most chicken-fried steak recipes, including my previous Cracker Barrel Country Fried Steak copycat recipe, call for cube steak—round steak that’s been scored in a butcher’s tenderizer—which isn’t always as tender as you may like. Connective tissue that remains intact will make some bites too chewy, yet if the steak is over-tenderized it will fall apart when cooked.
To ensure that every bite is perfectly tender, I avoid cube steak and start with lean ground beef, as with recipes for Salisbury steak or Hamburg steak. Forming the ground beef into steaks and then freezing them so they hold together makes the breading and cooking process easy, and when served, every bite of the finished product is guaranteed to be fork-tender.
Of course, this iconic clone recipe wouldn’t be complete without a spot-on hack for the famous sawmill gravy that gets spooned over the top. I’m including a fresh hack for the gravy that improves on my original recipe, and it's super easy to make with just six ingredients.
This was my #2 most popular recipe of 2024. Check out the other most popular recipes of the year: Old Spaghetti Factory Rich Meat Sauce (#1), Crumbl Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chunk Cookie (#3), Cheesecake Factory Steak Diane (#4), Portillo's Chocolate Cake (#5).
Check out this list of our most popular recipes of all-time.
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Cracker Barrel Corn Muffins
Read moreI find clues for cracking restaurant recipes in many places, but other than having the actual recipe, knowing the list of ingredients is quite a big score. That's why I’m thrilled whenever a restaurant chain sells its famous products in packages, as Cracker Barrel does with a box of mix that helps you reproduce the chain’s popular corn muffins at home.
The ingredients are listed in descending order by weight, which not only helped me identify important ingredients, such as white corn meal, but also gave me a rough idea of how much to use for the ultimate Cracker Barrel Corn Muffins copycat recipe. The preparation instructions provided more clues, such as revealing that the chain adds melted margarine and a little bacon grease to the batter.
Several batches later, using information from the box and lessons learned from my trial-and-error, I created a great clone of the famous muffins that I think you'll really like.
After making these Cracker Barrel Corn Muffins from scratch, try home versions of Cracker Barrel hash brown casserole, buttermilk pie, meatloaf, and more.
-
Cracker Barrel Buttermilk Pancakes
Read moreA great buttermilk pancake recipe will produce fluffy, tangy, and slightly sweet pancakes—the same qualities as the popular pancakes served at Cracker Barrel restaurants nationwide. But Cracker Barrel’s flapjacks have a secret ingredient that sets the chain’s morning stack apart from other restaurants. And this Top Secret Recipe will reveal it.
To create my Cracker Barrel Buttermilk Pancakes copycat recipe, I first purchased a box of the chain’s pancake mix at the restaurant’s store to examine the list of ingredients on the package. In the list were the ingredients you'd expect, like wheat flour, sugar, salt, and leavening. But there was also a surprise: yellow corn flour. When added to the mix in the right ratio, the yellow corn flour contributed great cornbread-like flavor and gave the pancakes a unique crumbly texture that many seem to love.
Does this special ingredient produce buttermilk pancakes which are superior to a more traditional recipe? It's easy to find out. Once you have corn flour and just a handful of other common ingredients, it takes just minutes to produce enough pancakes for you and everyone else to get a taste and decide if these are indeed the best buttermilk pancakes in the biz.
Try more of my Cracker Barrel copycat recipes here.
-
Cracker Barrel French Toast
Read moreNext time you make French Toast, try using sourdough bread. Cracker Barrel does this, and their French toast is fantastic. So, I went right ahead and cloned it for you.
My Cracker Barrel French Toast copycat recipe is super easy to make, but if you want yours to look like the real thing, you’ll want to track down a loaf of sourdough bread with relatively small slices. Bigger loaves will still work great, but the yield may be less than 12 slices.
Dust your finished French toast with powdered sugar and serve it up with soft butter and warm maple syrup on the side.
Find more of my Cracker Barrel copycat recipes here.
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Cracker Barrel Hash Brown Casserole
Read moreMenu Description: "Made from scratch in our kitchens using fresh Grade A Fancy Russet potatoes, fresh chopped onion, natural Colby cheese and spices. Baked fresh all day long."
In the late sixties, Dan Evins was a Shell Oil "jobber" looking for a new way to market gasoline. He wanted to create a special place that would arouse curiosity, and would pull travelers off the highways. In 1969 he opened the first Cracker Barrel just off Interstate 40 in Lebanon, Tennessee, offering gas, country-style food, and a selection of antiques for sale. Today there are over 529 stores in 41 states, with each restaurant still designed as a country rest stop and gift store. In fact, those stores which carry an average of 4,500 different items apiece have made Cracker Barrel the largest retailer of American-made finished crafts in the United States.
Those who know Cracker Barrel love the restaurant for its delicious home-style breakfasts and this casserole, made with hash brown-sliced potatoes, Colby cheese, milk, beef broth, and spices. My Cracker Barrel Hash Brown Casserole copycat recipe is designed for a skillet that is also safe to put in the oven (so no plastic handles). If you don't have one of those, you can easily transfer the casserole to a baking dish after it is done cooking on the stove.Love Cracker Barrel? Check out my other clone recipes here.
Source Top Secret Restaurant Recipes by Todd Wilbur. -
Cracker Barrel Eggs-in-the-Basket
Read moreMenu Description:"Two slices of sourdough bread grilled with an egg in the middle, served with thick-sliced bacon or smoked sausage patties and fried apples or hash brown casserole."
Breakfast is a popular meal at Cracker Barrel restaurants. Just to prove it, the restaurant has some amazing statistics printed on the back of their breakfast menus: "Each Spring 607,142 Sugar Maple Trees must be tapped to produce enough pure maple syrup for our guests;" "It takes 5,615,000,000 (THAT'S BILLION!) coffee beans each year to satisfy our guests' need for coffee. Each tree produces only 1 pound of coffee per year, that's 1,560,000 trees."
This recipe is a classic egg-in-the-hole recipe that I used to make all the time as a kid. I thought my family invented it.Find more fun ideas for breakfast here.
Source: Top Secret Restaurant Recipes by Todd Wilbur. -
Cracker Barrel Chicken and Dumplings
Read moreMenu Description: "We use only the 'best of the breast' chicken tenderloin in our recipe. Our dumplins are made from scratch, then hand-rolled and cut into strips before simmering to perfection in chicken stock."
By 1977 there were 13 Cracker Barrel stores located in Georgia and Tennessee, with all of them based on founder Dan Evins' original concept of a restaurant and store built around gasoline pumps. But with the oil embargo and energy crisis of the mid-seventies, Cracker Barrel started building stores that did not offer gas. Eventually, all of the original 13 stores were converted so you can no longer "filler-up" while you fill yourself up.
An old-time favorite at Cracker Barrel is the Chicken & Dumplins found on the lunch and dinner menu. The nice thing about this home version of the popular classic dish is that it creates its own tasty gravy. As the "dumplins" dissolve, the flour thickens the stock into a creamy sauce.Try my Cracker Barrel Chicken & Dumplins copycat recipe below, and find more Cracker Barrel copycat recipes here.
Source: Top Secret Restaurant Recipes by Todd Wilbur. -
Cracker Barrel Coleslaw
Read moreSimilar to cloning the coleslaw at KFC, the secret technique for duplicating Cracker Barrel's delicious coleslaw starts with slicing the cabbage into very small pieces. A mandoline works great for this, or use whatever slicing contraption you have. Slice the heads of green and red cabbage on the thinnest setting, and then chop those strips into small bits. The carrot can be shredded using a cheese grater. Mix it all up and then let the coleslaw chill out for several hours so the mixture can get its flavor on and ends up tasting just like Cracker Barrel's famous dish. An overnight chill is even sweeter.
Try more of my Cracker Barrel recipes here.
Source: Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 3 by Todd Wilbur. -
Cracker Barrel Macaroni n Cheese
Read moreNo mix that comes in a box tastes as good as macaroni and cheese that's made from scratch. It seems crazy that these boxed mixes are so popular when making really good mac 'n cheese the old-fashioned way is so easy. The 562-unit Cracker Barrel Country Store restaurant chain serves up an awesome version that's offered as a side dish with any meal. We'll whip up this cool clone in a 10-inch skillet and then brown it just a bit on top under the broiler before presenting it to the crew.
Source: Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 3 by Todd Wilbur. -
Cracker Barrel Double Chocolate Fudge Coca-Cola Cake
Read moreMenu Description: "A Cracker Barrel tradition. Our rich, chocolate cake made with real Coca-Cola is baked right in our own kitchen. It's served with premium vanilla bean ice cream and makes for a warm treat on a cool day."
Cracker Barrel's signature dessert is moist and chocolaty, with just a hint of Coke flavor. Coca-Cola is added to the batter for our clone, and we'll double up on the chocolate by using melted semi-sweet chocolate chips and cocoa powder. A little more Coke goes into the creamy chocolate icing that's also made by melting chocolate chips. Be sure to slide on down to the "Tidbits" at the bottom of the recipe for a great way to easily get the cake out of your baking pan in one piece. Make sure you have some milk on hand before you take a bite of out of this decadent Cracker Barrel Double Chocolate Fudge Coca-Cola Cake recipe!
Source: Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 3 by Todd Wilbur.
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Cracker Barrel French Toast
Read moreNext time you make French Toast, try using sourdough bread. Cracker Barrel does this, and their French toast is fantastic. So, I went right ahead and cloned it for you.
My Cracker Barrel French Toast copycat recipe is super easy to make, but if you want yours to look like the real thing, you’ll want to track down a loaf of sourdough bread with relatively small slices. Bigger loaves will still work great, but the yield may be less than 12 slices.
Dust your finished French toast with powdered sugar and serve it up with soft butter and warm maple syrup on the side.
Find more of my Cracker Barrel copycat recipes here.
-
Cracker Barrel Buttermilk Pancakes
Read moreA great buttermilk pancake recipe will produce fluffy, tangy, and slightly sweet pancakes—the same qualities as the popular pancakes served at Cracker Barrel restaurants nationwide. But Cracker Barrel’s flapjacks have a secret ingredient that sets the chain’s morning stack apart from other restaurants. And this Top Secret Recipe will reveal it.
To create my Cracker Barrel Buttermilk Pancakes copycat recipe, I first purchased a box of the chain’s pancake mix at the restaurant’s store to examine the list of ingredients on the package. In the list were the ingredients you'd expect, like wheat flour, sugar, salt, and leavening. But there was also a surprise: yellow corn flour. When added to the mix in the right ratio, the yellow corn flour contributed great cornbread-like flavor and gave the pancakes a unique crumbly texture that many seem to love.
Does this special ingredient produce buttermilk pancakes which are superior to a more traditional recipe? It's easy to find out. Once you have corn flour and just a handful of other common ingredients, it takes just minutes to produce enough pancakes for you and everyone else to get a taste and decide if these are indeed the best buttermilk pancakes in the biz.
Try more of my Cracker Barrel copycat recipes here.
-
Cracker Barrel Corn Muffins
Read moreI find clues for cracking restaurant recipes in many places, but other than having the actual recipe, knowing the list of ingredients is quite a big score. That's why I’m thrilled whenever a restaurant chain sells its famous products in packages, as Cracker Barrel does with a box of mix that helps you reproduce the chain’s popular corn muffins at home.
The ingredients are listed in descending order by weight, which not only helped me identify important ingredients, such as white corn meal, but also gave me a rough idea of how much to use for the ultimate Cracker Barrel Corn Muffins copycat recipe. The preparation instructions provided more clues, such as revealing that the chain adds melted margarine and a little bacon grease to the batter.
Several batches later, using information from the box and lessons learned from my trial-and-error, I created a great clone of the famous muffins that I think you'll really like.
After making these Cracker Barrel Corn Muffins from scratch, try home versions of Cracker Barrel hash brown casserole, buttermilk pie, meatloaf, and more.
-
Cracker Barrel Country Fried Steak
Read moreIt finally happened. I recently created a new clone recipe for Cracker Barrel's Country Fried Steak only to realize much later that I had already cloned it eight years before in my book, Top Secret Recipes Step-by-Step. But I'm okay with the unplanned re-do because the final result was a more accurate re-creation, with several improvements to my first hack from many moons ago.
Most chicken-fried steak recipes, including my previous Cracker Barrel Country Fried Steak copycat recipe, call for cube steak—round steak that’s been scored in a butcher’s tenderizer—which isn’t always as tender as you may like. Connective tissue that remains intact will make some bites too chewy, yet if the steak is over-tenderized it will fall apart when cooked.
To ensure that every bite is perfectly tender, I avoid cube steak and start with lean ground beef, as with recipes for Salisbury steak or Hamburg steak. Forming the ground beef into steaks and then freezing them so they hold together makes the breading and cooking process easy, and when served, every bite of the finished product is guaranteed to be fork-tender.
Of course, this iconic clone recipe wouldn’t be complete without a spot-on hack for the famous sawmill gravy that gets spooned over the top. I’m including a fresh hack for the gravy that improves on my original recipe, and it's super easy to make with just six ingredients.
This was my #2 most popular recipe of 2024. Check out the other most popular recipes of the year: Old Spaghetti Factory Rich Meat Sauce (#1), Crumbl Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chunk Cookie (#3), Cheesecake Factory Steak Diane (#4), Portillo's Chocolate Cake (#5).
Check out this list of our most popular recipes of all-time.
-
Cracker Barrel Buttermilk Biscuits
Read moreA great buttermilk biscuit isn’t hard to make. This is good news if you're serving hundreds each day as they do at this popular Southern kitchen chain. But a simple recipe such as this one is also a blessing when you need to whip up a modest batch at home for your hungry gang of biscuit fanatics, and it's an added bonus if they taste as good as the famous biscuits from Cracker Barrel.
The secret to tender, flakey biscuits like you get at the restaurant chain is using a lower-gluten self-rising flour such as White Lily; a staple for Southern biscuit recipes. A bit of shortening in the mix will help tenderize the finished product, as will a light mixing hand. Overmixing the dough may toughen your biscuits, so mix the dough gently and only as much as you have to.
If you don’t use White Lily flour and go with a heavier self-rising flour such as Gold Medal, take note that you may have to add a couple of tablespoons more buttermilk to the dough to loosen it up. Good biscuit dough should be soft, but not sticky.
After making these Cracker Barrel biscuits from scratch, try home versions of Cracker Barrel hash brown casserole, buttermilk pie, meatloaf, and more.
TRANSLATE with xEnglishTRANSLATE withEnable collaborative features and customize widget: Bing Webmaster Portal -
Cracker Barrel Biscuit Beignets
Read moreThe delicious beignets Cracker Barrel creates with the chain's famous buttermilk biscuit formula are unlike traditional beignets in that they start with such a tangy dough. But once you add all the sweet stuff—cinnamon-sugar, powdered sugar, and butter-nut sauce—the saltiness is offset, resulting in a perfect harmony of great flavor.
The dough here is a tweaked version of my hack for Cracker Barrel's Buttermilk Biscuits, but unlike that dough where we strive for flakiness in the finished product, this dough won't call for a light stirring hand. Instead, you should give this dough a decent beating in the mixing bowl to tighten it up so that it resists oil absorption when deep-fried.
Along with all the steps and step photos for a great copycat of Cracker Barrel biscuit beignets, I’m also including my new hack for a delicious butter-nut dipping sauce that tastes just like what the chain serves, except this one is made with real butter.
Find more of your favorite Cracker Barrel dishes here.
TRANSLATE with xEnglishTRANSLATE withEnable collaborative features and customize widget: Bing Webmaster Portal -
Cracker Barrel Baked Apple Dumplin
Read moreOne of the best choices you will make in life is having this dish for dessert when you’re at Cracker Barrel. They call it a “dumplin” but it’s just a little streusel-covered apple pie, served up hot in its own small baking dish with two scoops of vanilla bean ice cream on top, and drizzled with warm apple/caramel sauce—it's good stuff. Take a bite and you may notice the apples inside taste like Cracker Barrel’s Fried Apples side dish, so we'll use my previous hack for that part to bring it all together.
My Cracker Barrel Baked Apple Dumplin recipe makes two small pies that serve up to four. Check out more of my cool copycat recipes from Cracker Barrel here.
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Cracker Barrel Fried Apples
Read moreThis sweet side dish is so popular, Cracker Barrel sells jars of it in the gift shop. But no need to buy it when my easy Cracker Barrel Fried Apples copycat recipe will provide a hot, fresh batch any time you want. This prep is simple because you don’t need to peel the apples. Just slice and cook them with the peels on until the apples are tender just like the original, then eat them straight up or as a tasty topping on ice cream.
Try more of my Cracker Barrel recipes here.
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Cracker Barrel Buttermilk Pie
Read moreHaving never lived in the southern U.S., my experience with this dessert was about as minimal as it gets. The first buttermilk pie I tasted was at Cracker Barrel, and I was immediately hooked on the sweetened vanilla custard, which has its distinct, but not overwhelming, tang from buttermilk and lemon juice, topped off with a garnish of strawberries and whipped cream. It’s a versatile dessert that is as well-suited for summertime get-togethers as for winter holiday meals, where it has become a longtime Southern tradition.
I’ve now tasted over a dozen variations of this decades-old favorite—all but one of them coming out of my home oven—on a quest to discover the best way to make Cracker Barrel’s popular dessert. And I finally cracked it.
The beauty of this recipe is its simplicity: you’ll need just a handful of common ingredients, a whisk, and an unbaked pie shell. You can make a pie shell using your favorite recipe or just buy a frozen, unbaked crust at the supermarket to save time. Mine was Marie Callender’s branded, and it was delicious.
Whisk together the filling in stages as described here, pour it into your pie shell, and bake it starting on the lowest rack so that the bottom of the pie gets browned. If you have a convection oven, this is a good time to use it so you’re sure to get even browning on top. After about an hour your pie will be done, and when it cools, dessert is served.
Find more of my Cracker Barrel copycat recipes here.
-
Cracker Barrel Meatloaf
Read moreThe Southern-themed chain famous for its gift shops filled with made-in-America products and delicious homestyle food is also known to have a particularly good meatloaf. This dish ranks high in popularity, right up there with the Chicken ‘n Dumplins and the Hash Brown Casserole, so a good Cracker Barrel Meatloaf copycat recipe is long overdue.
Making meatloaf is easy. What’s hard is making it taste like the meatloaf at Cracker Barrel which is tender and juicy, and flavored with onion, green pepper, and tomato. I sought to turn out a moist and tender loaf of meat, and one that’s not dry and tough, but my first attempts were much too dense. I wasn’t happy about that, but my dog was thrilled.
After playing around with the eggs-to-breadcrumbs-to-milk ratios and being careful to use gentle hands when combining everything and pressing it into the loaf pan, the final batch was a winner and I get to pass it along to you.
It's best to use a meatloaf pan here which has an insert that lets the fat drip to the bottom, away from the meat. A regular loaf pan will still work, but you’ll want to pour off the fat in the pan before slicing.
Satisfy your Cracker Barrel cravings with more of my copycat recipes here.
-
Cracker Barrel Macaroni n Cheese
Read moreNo mix that comes in a box tastes as good as macaroni and cheese that's made from scratch. It seems crazy that these boxed mixes are so popular when making really good mac 'n cheese the old-fashioned way is so easy. The 562-unit Cracker Barrel Country Store restaurant chain serves up an awesome version that's offered as a side dish with any meal. We'll whip up this cool clone in a 10-inch skillet and then brown it just a bit on top under the broiler before presenting it to the crew.
Source: Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 3 by Todd Wilbur. -
Cracker Barrel Double Chocolate Fudge Coca-Cola Cake
Read moreMenu Description: "A Cracker Barrel tradition. Our rich, chocolate cake made with real Coca-Cola is baked right in our own kitchen. It's served with premium vanilla bean ice cream and makes for a warm treat on a cool day."
Cracker Barrel's signature dessert is moist and chocolaty, with just a hint of Coke flavor. Coca-Cola is added to the batter for our clone, and we'll double up on the chocolate by using melted semi-sweet chocolate chips and cocoa powder. A little more Coke goes into the creamy chocolate icing that's also made by melting chocolate chips. Be sure to slide on down to the "Tidbits" at the bottom of the recipe for a great way to easily get the cake out of your baking pan in one piece. Make sure you have some milk on hand before you take a bite of out of this decadent Cracker Barrel Double Chocolate Fudge Coca-Cola Cake recipe!
Source: Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 3 by Todd Wilbur. -
Cracker Barrel Coleslaw
Read moreSimilar to cloning the coleslaw at KFC, the secret technique for duplicating Cracker Barrel's delicious coleslaw starts with slicing the cabbage into very small pieces. A mandoline works great for this, or use whatever slicing contraption you have. Slice the heads of green and red cabbage on the thinnest setting, and then chop those strips into small bits. The carrot can be shredded using a cheese grater. Mix it all up and then let the coleslaw chill out for several hours so the mixture can get its flavor on and ends up tasting just like Cracker Barrel's famous dish. An overnight chill is even sweeter.
Try more of my Cracker Barrel recipes here.
Source: Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 3 by Todd Wilbur. -
Cracker Barrel Chicken and Dumplings
Read moreMenu Description: "We use only the 'best of the breast' chicken tenderloin in our recipe. Our dumplins are made from scratch, then hand-rolled and cut into strips before simmering to perfection in chicken stock."
By 1977 there were 13 Cracker Barrel stores located in Georgia and Tennessee, with all of them based on founder Dan Evins' original concept of a restaurant and store built around gasoline pumps. But with the oil embargo and energy crisis of the mid-seventies, Cracker Barrel started building stores that did not offer gas. Eventually, all of the original 13 stores were converted so you can no longer "filler-up" while you fill yourself up.
An old-time favorite at Cracker Barrel is the Chicken & Dumplins found on the lunch and dinner menu. The nice thing about this home version of the popular classic dish is that it creates its own tasty gravy. As the "dumplins" dissolve, the flour thickens the stock into a creamy sauce.Try my Cracker Barrel Chicken & Dumplins copycat recipe below, and find more Cracker Barrel copycat recipes here.
Source: Top Secret Restaurant Recipes by Todd Wilbur. -
Cracker Barrel Eggs-in-the-Basket
Read moreMenu Description:"Two slices of sourdough bread grilled with an egg in the middle, served with thick-sliced bacon or smoked sausage patties and fried apples or hash brown casserole."
Breakfast is a popular meal at Cracker Barrel restaurants. Just to prove it, the restaurant has some amazing statistics printed on the back of their breakfast menus: "Each Spring 607,142 Sugar Maple Trees must be tapped to produce enough pure maple syrup for our guests;" "It takes 5,615,000,000 (THAT'S BILLION!) coffee beans each year to satisfy our guests' need for coffee. Each tree produces only 1 pound of coffee per year, that's 1,560,000 trees."
This recipe is a classic egg-in-the-hole recipe that I used to make all the time as a kid. I thought my family invented it.Find more fun ideas for breakfast here.
Source: Top Secret Restaurant Recipes by Todd Wilbur.

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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