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Includes eight (8) 79¢ recipes of your choice each month!

This 600-unit Mexican fast food chain celebrates the holidays each year with delicious little $2 corn husk-wrapped pork tamales made from a traditional recipe for authentic south-of-the-border taste. The only problem is when the holidays go away, so do these tasty tamales. And that's why we bust out this Top Secret Recipe.

Making authentic tamales is not difficult, but it does take time. The pork requires a braise for several hours to get it fork-tender, and the wrapped tamales will take around 2 hours to steam until they're done.

My Del Taco Tamales copycat recipe is inspired by traditional tamale recipes that include a braising sauce for the pork made from rehydrated guajillo peppers. To coax out more flavor, I chose to first toast the peppers before adding them to the liquid. And rather than using lard in the masa dough, I found a combination of vegetable shortening and butter to be a more flavorful alternative.

Steam all 24 tamales until they are fully cooked, and store those you can’t eat in your freezer for several weeks. Steam the frozen tamales for 20 to 30 minutes, and they’ll taste as good as fresh.

How about a cold margarita to wash down those tamales? Find your favorite famous drink recipes here.

The real Costco muffins taste great, but they may not be as wholesome as you’d like. The dough has been conditioned with gums to thicken it and ingredients to emulsify it, and to preserve their shelf-life, the muffins contain no butter. The flavors you taste—butter, almond, and vanilla—are artificial.

I attempted to stay true to the original ingredients in my first take on the famous muffins with this copycat recipe for Costco’s Blueberry Muffins. In that hack, I chose to avoid butter like the real muffins do, opting instead for margarine. And since the Costco muffins contain no buttermilk, I also stayed away from that ingredient, even though I love its magical properties in baking.

This time though, I’m taking a different approach by using more whole egg, real butter, and, yes, buttermilk to bring great flavor and a better crumb to our finished product. Without all the dough conditioners found in the original, these cloned muffins have a pleasant homemade charm, and the flavor is more appealing because it’s real.

Find more favorite famous bread recipes here. 

Anyone who loves Olive Garden is probably also a big fan of the bottomless basket of warm, garlicky breadsticks served before each meal at the huge Italian casual chain. My guess is that the breadsticks are proofed, and then sent to each restaurant where they are baked until golden brown, brushed with butter and sprinkled with garlic salt. Getting the bread just right for a great Olive Garden breadstick hack was tricky—I tried several different amounts of yeast in all-purpose flour, but then settled on bread flour to give these breadsticks the same chewy bite as the originals. The two-stage rising process is also a crucial step in this much requested Olive Garden breadstick copycat recipe.

Complete the bottomless experience with my Olive Garden Italian salad dressing recipe.

Source: Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 3 by Todd Wilbur.

I 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.

This popular chain wrangles a wide variety of dishes and cooking styles day after day with consistently high quality. From pasta to burgers to tacos, from salads to pancakes to beautiful cheesecakes for dessert, there is something for everyone at the Cheesecake Factory.

The diverse menu's Asia-inspired plates include Thai, Korean, and Chinese dishes, but one that consistently stands out is this excellent Mandarin-style spicy chicken entrée, served over your choice of white or brown rice.

The secret of the great flavor is the sauce, which has now been hacked for you in my Cheesecake Factory Spicy Cashew copycat recipe below. Plus, I’ll walk you through the process of creating perfect crispy chicken from scratch using juicy chicken tenderloins.

Alternatively, if you’d like to save time, you can bake up some pre-cooked breaded chicken tenders and focus all your efforts on making the amazing sauce. Tips on that chicken shortcut can be found below in the Tidbits.

This recipe was our #4 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), McDonald's Chicken McNuggets (#5).

Check out this list of our most popular recipes of all-time, or click here for more of my Cheesecake Factory copycat recipes.

After the early success of KFC’s Nashville Hot Chicken, R&D chefs explored other sauce variations that could be drizzled over the chain’s Extra Crispy Fried Chicken and breaded tenders and came up with this delicious sweet mustard basting sauce. 

For my KFC Georgia Gold Sauce copycat recipe, I mixed dry ingredients into the mustard, then drizzled the oil into the mustard blend while whisking to form an emulsion, locking everything together into a flavorful paste. The process produced an overly thick sauce since mustard is such a great emulsifier. In the end, I added a little water to thin it out so that it coats just right when the sauce is drizzled over fried chicken or strips. 

You can use my recipe for KFC Extra Crispy Tenders here or cook pre-breaded crispy frozen chicken pieces.

Find more of my KFC copycat recipes here.

One of Little Caesars’ most successful new products is these mini deep-dish pizzas, baked until browned and bubbly, brushed with buttery garlic spread, and sprinkled with herbs and cheese. They come with pepperoni and cheese or just cheese, and they’re so good that the moment I tried one, I knew that a home hack was in my immediate future. 

I wanted my Little Caesars Crazy Puffs copycat recipe to be better than any of the online mommy blog versions that rely on pre-made dough, so I made the dough from scratch using bread flour and cold-proofed it for 48 hours. This gave me a nicely fermented chewy dough that matched the dough from Little Caesars in texture and flavor.

After discovering that Little Caesars Crazy Sauce is the same recipe as their marinara pizza sauce, I redesigned the sauce hack from my 1995 cookbook, More Top Secret Recipes. And this time, I made the sauce without cooking it after a worker revealed that important secret to me. At Little Caesars, the pizza sauce gets cooked when it goes through the oven on the pizza. Meanwhile, in the back, some of that sauce is packaged into to-go cups and chilled until it's served to customers as Crazy Sauce for dipping. 

Using this original secret recipe, you can make 21 Crazy Puffs clones in 2 batches using a 12-cup muffin pan coated with butter-flavored oil spray. I've included instructions for both versions, pepperoni and cheese, because choices are nice.

Find more of my Little Caesar's copycat recipes here.

To ensure success for their new cookie store, cousins Sawyer Hemsley and Jason McGowan knew they had to start with a great cookie recipe. Batch after batch, the partners baked milk chocolate chip cookies and shared them with taste testers for helpful advice on improving the recipe until, finally, they had created the very best cookie. In 2017, the cousins opened their first Crumbl cookie store in Logan, Utah to sell their new milk chocolate chip cookies. Just 7 years and over 200 cookie recipes later, Crumbl had grown to over 900 stores throughout the U.S. and Canada, and the chain now sells over 1 million cookies a day. Each week, the rotating menu features 6 cookie flavors, but a few special cookies, like this classic Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chunk Cookie are almost always on the roster due to their popularity.

To create my Crumbl Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chunk Cookie copycat recipe, I started with the cookie chain’s list of ingredients. I designed a recipe using that information and then systematically tweaked the formula through more than 35 batches, making minor adjustments each time. Through that process, I discovered the best ratio of brown sugar to white sugar, and I found that baking the cookies at a higher temperature worked best for crispy edges and chewy middles. I also found that one egg isn’t enough, and two eggs are too much, so beating two eggs and measuring ¼ cup after the foam settled was the best method for consistent results.

Crumbl uses a large scoop to portion these cookies, but you can also use your hands to form the dough into mounds with rough tops. Be sure to bake the cookies on parchment paper. I found silicone baking mats too slippery, causing the cookies to spread from the bottom and split. Also, don’t wander too far from the oven. Your cookies are done when they’re light brown around the edges and still appear uncooked in the center, so keep at least one eye on them.

This was my #3 most popular recipe of 2024. Check out the other most popular recipes of the year: Old Spaghetti Factory Rich Meat Sauce (#1), Cracker Barrel Country Fried Steak (#2), Cheesecake Factory Steak Diane (#4), Portillo's Chocolate Cake (#5).

Check out this list of our most popular recipes of all-time.

Since 1969, The Portland, Oregon-based Old Spaghetti Factory has been filling bellies with a comfort food menu full of fabulous pasta choices, and this signature meat sauce has been the sauce of choice at the 43-unit chain for more than five decades.

To reverse-engineer the sauce for my Old Spaghetti Factory Rich Meat Sauce copycat recipe, I rinsed the original sauce in a wire mesh strainer to see what secrets could be revealed. Once the solids were visible, I noted the size and ratios of ground beef, onion, celery, and garlic, and I also noticed that there were no bits of tomato left behind. This meant the tomato was puréed, but rather than using canned tomato purée, I opted for richer tomato paste. Lemon juice helped match the zing of the original, and I rounded out the flavor with just a bit of sugar.

This recipe will make 3½ cups of meat sauce, which is enough for several huge plates of pasta. Use it on spaghetti as they do at the restaurant, or whatever pasta shape you prefer.

This was my #1 most popular recipe of 2024. Check out the other most popular recipes of the year:   Cracker Barrel Country Fried Steak (#2), 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.

Loose meat sandwiches originated in Iowa in 1926 when Maid-Rite began selling burgers made with ground beef that wasn’t shaped into patties. These sandwiches became a Midwest sensation and were often served with a spoon to scoop up the loose meat that would inevitably fall out. The dry and crumbly nature of a loose meat sandwich might explain why, in 1930, a chef named Joe, as legend has it, created a tomato-based sauce, possibly with ketchup, which he mixed into the ground beef. Joe’s new sandwich had more flavor than its drier cousin, and the loose meat now stayed in the bun.

Sloppy Joes became a popular choice on restaurant and diner menus for decades, with sandwiches selling for as little as 10 cents each. In 1969, Hunts made Sloppy Joes at home by introducing the first canned Sloppy Joe sauce. Combining the can of sauce with one pound of browned ground beef created enough Sloppy Joes to serve a family of four. It was simple, it was affordable, and both kids and adults loved it.

The authentic sauce in the can lists corn syrup as the second ingredient, but for my Manwich Sloppy Joe Sauce copycat recipe, I chose to avoid corn syrup and even ketchup. Instead, I built the sauce with ketchup ingredients, including tomato paste, sugar, vinegar, and spices. When the sauce is added to 1 pound of ground beef, as in the original version, you’ll have an excellent re-creation of the iconic dish.

Like the real thing, this version is easy and cheap, and you’ll probably find it tastes better because it includes fresher ingredients.

Find more of my copycat recipes for iconic sandwiches here.

One of IHOP’s creative new crêpes is this cinnamon bun/cheesecake mashup that’s probably more dessert than breakfast food, although no one at my house complained. Two delicate crêpes are filled with cheesecake mousse and drizzled with cinnamon bun filling and cream cheese icing, and it looks beautiful on the plate.

For my take on the IHOP Cinnamon Bun Crêpes recipe, I reworked the cinnamon topping which I previously hacked for IHOP’s Cinn-A-Stacks to hold its shape better when applied with a squirt bottle. And I’m including two easy new hacks for the cream cheese icing and cheesecake mousse.

Once your mousse and icings are done, use this original crêpes formula to make eight beautiful, delicate crêpes for four servings, topped with sliced strawberries and a dusting of powdered sugar.

Find more of my IHOP copycat recipes here.

You may never use traditional meatloaf toppings again once you taste how Outback Steakhouse kicks up its ground steak meatloaf entrée. Ketchup and barbecue sauce seem like mundane toppers after you taste these clones of the chain’s amazing Fresno chili jam and creamy peppercorn sauce—one sweet, the other savory—that take your meatloaf to the next level.

The Fresno chili jam presented the biggest hacking challenge of the two sauces. I had to work through several batches to find the perfect ratio of red bell peppers to Fresno chilies to tone the heat down to an edible level. Also, I was not expecting tomato juice. My first batches omitted that ingredient, but on a return visit to Outback, my server helped provide some valuable intel on the sauce's contents.

At the restaurant, this meatloaf is pre-baked and chilled. When an order comes in, a couple of slices are seared in a sauté pan or on a flat grill until browned and hot, then they’re topped with the two warmed sauces and served. You can use the same trick in my Outback Spicy Jammin' Meatloaf recipe below: make the meatloaf in advance of the meal, then just slice what you need and sear it before serving.

Find copycat recipes for more of your favorite Outback dishes here. 

Packed with tender chicken and vegetables, my El Pollo Loco Homemade Tortilla Soup recipe is just like the original, which happens to be one of the most wholesome tortilla soups I’ve ever hacked.

And the technique here is ultra-easy since you use chicken pulled from a supermarket rotisserie chicken, which is a good thing for a couple of reasons. You don’t have to cook the chicken, so you save time. And, since rotisserie chickens usually cost less than a whole uncooked chicken, you’re also saving money. One 2-pound rotisserie chicken will give you around 1 pound of white and dark chicken meat, which will be the perfect amount for this recipe. 

This is a quick and easy recipe. Chopping the celery, carrot, and peppers will take most of your time. Then, it’s just a matter of sauteing the vegetables until soft and adding the remaining ingredients. Once the soup is hot, serve it topped with crispy tortilla strips, cotija cheese, and cilantro, and pass out the spoons. 

Find more famous El Pollo Loco recipes here.

Vanilla custard and whipped cream make up the delicious “double cream” that tops this ultra-popular blueberry pie from the West Coast chain that is most famous for its homestyle pies. Finally, I got the chance to give this great dessert the hack it deserves—from what I've seen, no other "copycat" recipe even comes close.

For my Marie Callender’s Double Cream Blueberry Pie copycat recipe, it was important that the custard be creamy but not too runny, so in addition to cornstarch, I’ve included just enough gelatin in the mix to stabilize the filling, but not so much that it becomes rubbery. The blueberry filling, made with frozen blueberries, needs only cornstarch to thicken it because there is also apple in the filling which contributes pectin, a natural thickening gel. Just be sure to dice your apple very small before cooking it so that the pieces will soften and work well with the frozen blueberries.

There’s no need to make the crust from scratch when you can use an unbaked 9-inch pie shell in the frozen food aisle—preferably the one made by Marie Callender’s—but any brand will do.

Then, to finish your pie, the gelatin steps up again, stabilizing the whipped cream topping so that it holds its shape for as long as it takes to eat the whole pie. Which probably won't be long at all.

Try more of my Marie Callender's copycat recipes here.

I’m sure it’s frustrating to be standing in line at Panda Express and they run out of chow mein when it’s your turn. For me, though, that scenario is a blessing, and it’s how this dish was hacked. From the line, I watched a cook whip up a new batch of chow mein in the giant wok in the clearly visible kitchen and took plenty of mental notes. The dish was done in just a few minutes, and before I knew it, I was out the door with a hot serving of fresh chow mein and great intel to hack a perfect clone. 

Like the real Panda Express Chow Mein, the beauty of my re-creation lies in its simplicity. There are only seven ingredients, and the prep work is low-impact. I used dry chow mein noodles (also known as Chinese stir fry noodles), which are easy to find and inexpensive, along with dark soy sauce for its deep caramel color. If you don’t have a wok to prepare your faux Panda, a large skillet with sloped sides for tossing will work perfectly.

This recipe was our #1 most popular in 2021. Check out the other four most unlocked recipes for the year: Qdoba 3-Cheese Queso (#2), Panda Express Fried Rice (#3), Outback Baked Potato Soup (#4), Chipotle Carne Asada (#5).

Check out this list of our most popular recipes of all-time.

They may not be as unique as the German Pancakes, 49’er Flap Jacks, or the other specialty hotcakes at Original Pancake House, but the plain buttermilk pancakes here are among the best I’ve had. If a restaurant's pancake skills are best judged by how well they craft a stack of old-fashioned buttermilks, then this chain deserves a ribbon. 

The first step in creating the perfect clone of these delicious flapjacks is to use clarified butter on your skillet or flat grill to prevent the pancakes from sticking. This method enhances the flavor of your pancakes more than using oil, and it’s the technique used by the Original Pancakes House. Therefore, we’ll do the same in my Original Pancake House Buttermilk Pancakes copycat recipe below.

When you’ve got your clarified butter ready, the rest is a cinch. Mix the batter, measure 1/3-cup portions onto a hot pan or griddle greased with the butter, cook the pancakes until golden brown on both sides, then serve up a stack with whipped butter and warm maple syrup on the side.

Try my Original Pancake House Dutch baby and apple pancake recipes here.

At the 2018 Salvation Army National Doughnut Day World Doughnut Eating Contest, held every June 1^st, competitive eater Joey Chestnut consumed 257 Hostess powdered Donettes in six minutes to take home the top prize. There was a big smile on Joey's powdered-sugar-and-crumb-coated face that day as he raised a trophy to celebrate another glorious gastronomic feat.  

If you had to guess who makes the top-selling doughnuts in America, you’d probably say Dunkin’ Donuts or Krispy Kreme, but you’d be wrong. According to Hostess, Donettes are the country’s most popular doughnuts—you rarely find a supermarket, corner market, or convenience store without at least a few packages on the shelf. Hostess Donettes come in several flavors, including chocolate, crumb, and strawberry, but the one most people turn to, and the one I grew up on (they were called “Gems” back then), is coated with a thick layer of powdered sugar.    

Making the donuts at home is not hard, once you know the secrets. Use my Hostess Powdered Donettes copycat recipe below to make a stiff cake dough, punch out 2-inch rounds with a biscuit cutter, pierce the dough with a straw or chopstick to make a hole, then fry the doughnuts for 2 minutes until golden brown. After you roll them in powdered sugar, you'll have around 20 fresh, home-cloned miniature Donettes that will make you feel like a kid again.

And—just doing a little math here—it would take Joey Chestnut all of about 14 seconds to eat that entire plate of doughnuts you just made.

Find more of your favorite Hostess copycat recipes here including my original Hostess Twinkie recipe.

Menu 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.

If those cute little cookie peddlers aren't posted outside the market, it may be tough to get your hands on these thin mint cookies—the most popular cookies sold by the Girl Scouts every spring. One out of every four boxes of cookies sold by the girls is Thin Mints. 

My Girl Scout cookie thin mint copycat recipe uses an improved version of the chocolate wafers created for my Oreo cookie clone in the second TSR book, More Top Secret Recipes. That recipe creates 108 cookie wafers, so when you're done dipping, you'll have the equivalent of three boxes of the Girl Scout Cookies favorite. That's why you bought those extra cookie sheets, right? You could, of course, reduce this recipe by baking only one-third of the cookie dough for the wafers and then reducing the coating ingredients by one-third, giving you a total of 36 cookies. But that may not be enough to last you until next spring.

Click here for more of your favorite Girl Scout Cookies. 

Source: Even More Top Secret Recipes by Todd Wilbur.

Update 11/16/17: You can make an even better clone using a chocolate product that wasn't available when I created this recipe. Rather than using the semi-sweet chocolate chips combined with shortening and peppermint for coating the cookies, use Ghirardelli Dark Melting Wafers. You will need 2 10-ounce bags of the chips, mixed with 1/2 teaspoon of peppermint extract (and no shortening). Melt the chocolate the same way, and dip the cookies as instructed.

The Old El Paso brand originated in 1917 as The Mountain Pass Canning Company, but its name changed when the company was sold to a new owner in El Paso, Texas. Initially, the company specialized in canned tomatoes and pinto beans, but it expanded its product line over the years. In 1969, Old El Paso became the first American company to offer a national line of Mexican meals in supermarkets and the first to advertise Mexican cuisine. This growing market for Mexican food, established by Old El Paso, is why U.S. stores created a Mexican food section for the first time in 1970.

Many of us who grew up with "family taco night" are familiar with the packet of spices added to browned ground beef for a quick and easy taco filling. When the seasoned beef is added to crispy or soft taco shells with your favorite combination of cheese, lettuce, tomato, avocado, or whatever, any day can be Taco Tuesday.

My Old El Paso Taco Seasoning Mix copycat recipe includes all the spices you'll need for a perfect match to the real thing, along with just the right amount of cornstarch to thicken it up. Plus, it's a cinch to make. Once you've mixed these ingredients in a small bowl, add the blend to one pound of cooked ground beef with water, cook until thick, and fill your tacos just like you did with the original recipe back in the day. 

Now, how about a cold margarita?

A 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.

Chick-fil-A becomes the first fast food chain to feature pimento cheese—a traditional Southern spread made with cheddar cheese, mayonnaise, and pimentos—on a sandwich. The chain’s Honey Pepper Pimento Chicken Sandwich features a regular or spicy crispy chicken breast fillet­ stacked on sliced jalapeños, then drizzled with honey and topped with a healthy portion of their exclusive pimento cheese formula.

For the chicken fillet, I was able to use my previous Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich copycat recipe, but the chain’s excellent pimento cheese spread is a new creation that needed to be hacked from scratch. Rinsing the real spread through a strainer revealed some hidden secrets, including tiny bits of green pepper, which I copied by adding a small amount of minced jalapeño.

The chicken requires four hours to brine, and that’s a good time to make the pimento cheese so it can rest for a bit to improve its color and flavor. The recipe included here is for the original chicken fillet, but if you prefer the kicked-up spicy version of the sandwich, I’ve got the tweak for that variation down in the Tidbits.

Try my Chick-fil-A Honey Pepper Pimento Chicken Sandwich copycat recipe below, and find more of my Chick-fil-A copycat recipes here.

It's not clear when Original Pancake House changed its French crêpes recipe. Old menus say the crêpes are filled with strawberry preserves and served with tropical syrup, but the current version switches out the preserves for fresh sliced strawberries, and the dish now comes with homemade strawberry syrup on the side. I can't say which is better since I never had the former version, but the current variation is as great as you would expect from this beloved pancake chain, and it's a dish well worth a home clone. 

For my Original Pancake House French Crêpes copycat recipe, I started with the strawberry syrup, and with only three ingredients it took just a couple batches to perfect, then I cleared the deck for the more daunting task of cloning the fantastic crêpes.

But after a dozen or so attempts, I was still not happy with my crepes, so I headed back over to the Original Pancake House to hopefully obtain more intel. While polishing off a huge serving of three French crêpes, I chatted up the server for any information that might improve my batter and I got a great tip: add more cream. Back at the hack lab, I replaced the milk in my formula with half-and-half and was thrilled to have finally produced a great clone of the original dish.

And I discovered another secret: use clarified butter in the pan before pouring in the batter. That's how they do it in the restaurant according to my informant, and I've made sure to include that step in the recipe so yours will come out looking and tasting just like the real thing.

You might also like my recipe for the Original Pancake House German Pancake aka "Dutch Baby".

Re-creating this popular ice pop is more than mixing sugar and cocoa into skim milk and freezing it with a stick in the middle. In addition to the great chocolate taste, a Fudgsicle copycat recipe wouldn't be right if it didn't have the same creamy and not-at-all-icy–texture of the original.

So how do we hack that? We'll use a little gelatin in the mix plus some fat-free half-and-half, which contains carrageenan a natural thickener found in the real fudge bars that improves the texture and helps prevent the formation of ice crystals. 

For my Fudgsicle Fudge Bars copycat recipe, combine the ingredients below in a saucepan over medium heat until the sugar is dissolved, then pour the creamy mixture into an ice pop mold. When the pops are semisolid, add the sticks. A few hours later, you'll have seven or eight perfect fudge pops with the same great taste and mouthfeel as the famous original product.

Find more of my cool snack copycat recipes here.

Source: "Top Secret Recipes Step-by-Step" by Todd Wilbur.

The family recipes of Rao’s Italian restaurant have been enjoyed for over 125 years, but it’s only been since 1992 (starting with the marinara sauce) that the chain has been selling the ultra-popular bottled sauces under the Rao’s Homemade label, which is on track to become a billion-dollar company.

One of the many popular sauces now available from Rao’s Homemade is the Bolognese sauce, a blend of tomatoes, veggies, crumbled meatballs, and pancetta. Like my Rao’s Marinara Sauce clone recipe, this hack starts with canned San Marzano tomatoes with the famous red, white, and green San Marzano label. Those are true San Marzano tomatoes grown in the San Marzano region of Italy, and they are superior to other San Marzano-style canned tomatoes in my local grocery stores, many of which aren’t from Italy.

I would suspect that the meatballs crumbled into Rao’s Bolognese sauce are the famous Rao’s meatballs, which Rao’s sells in the restaurants and frozen food aisles, and which I hacked here. For my Rao’s Bolognese Sauce recipe, you’ll need ½ cup of crumbled meatballs using either this top secret recipe, or a bag of frozen Italian meatballs found in most stores. Obviously, my Rao’s meatball hack will give you the best ingredients for this recipe, but I found that the frozen meatballs still work great, as long as they’re good meatballs. This sauce will only be as good as the meatballs you choose.

The slow simmer marries the flavors, and after about an hour you’ll have a great Bolognese to spoon over tagliatelle, tortellini, gnocchi, or whatever you want.

Traditional Irish potato soup—a simple formula made with potatoes, onions, stock, and cream—gets an upgrade with the addition of cheddar cheese, carrots, green onions, and sour cream in Jason’s Deli's delicious take on the classic recipe. These improvements result in a soup that’s not only easy to build but may also be the best-tasting potato soup I’ve hacked so far.

The secret to this soup hack is that it starts as a cheddar cheese sauce, which may raise concerns if you’ve ever made cheese sauce that melted poorly and became grainy. 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, 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 roll up your sleeves and hunt down the cheese shredder.  

Once everything is in the pot, simmer the soup for 45 minutes or until the potatoes are tender. You’ll have enough for eight bowls of soup, each topped with cheddar cheese and crumbled bacon, just like the real thing.

Find more amazing copycat soup recipes here.

In April 2020, restaurant chains in the U.S. closed their dining rooms due to the Covid-19 epidemic and needed a way to stay connected with their customers. Chipotle’s solution was to have corporate chef Chad Brauze “reveal” the chain’s secret recipe for the guacamole on the corporate Instagram account, which was picked up by the news and then re-posted on the Today Show website.

Chains have shared versions of their secret recipes on news shows in the past, but I’m usually skeptical of the recipes since I’ve rarely found that any of those formulas are the actual restaurant versions. More often than not, one or more ingredients are eliminated or substituted so that your final product is close but not exact. And that's precisely what Chipotle did.

Chef Chad's Instagram cooking video from his home kitchen is a good guacamole recipe, but it’s not Chipotle’s guacamole recipe. The formula includes most of the ingredients you would need for a perfect hack—but it’s missing one: lemon juice. According to Chipotle’s website and cooks at the restaurant, Chipotle adds lemon juice in addition to lime juice to its famous guacamole.

With this information and a heaping sample of the authentic guac, I tweaked Chef Chad’s formula to make my Chipotle Guacamole copycat recipe more like the real one, which is made fresh several times a day at the restaurant. Even with the additional acid (lemon juice) in the mix to preserve the color, this guacamole is best if eaten within several hours of making it while it’s still bright green.

This recipe was our #3 most popular of 2023. Check out the other most popular unlocked recipes of the year: Church's Chicken Original and Spicy Fried Chicken (#1), IKEA Swedish Meatballs (#2), Subway Cookies (#4), IHOP Thick 'N Fluffy French Toast (#5).

Check out this list of our most popular recipes of all-time.

“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 excellent dish 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 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. For this recipe, find 40 small mushrooms that can be either white (button) or brown (cremini). They are the same mushroom species with only minor differences (white mushrooms are a cultivated mutation of the brown ones), so either will work. If you have a choice, go with creminis since they tend to have a slightly deeper flavor.

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

Menu Description: “Tender pieces of chicken. Snow peas, shiitake mushrooms, onions, and garlic in a Thai coconut-curry sauce with cashews and pineapple. Served with white rice.”

Sautéed white meat chicken comes swimming in the chain’s magical coconut-lime curry sauce, served alongside a bed of rice, with stir-fried vegetables, and topped with pineapple relish, cashews, and toasted coconut. The Cheesecake Factory captures great Thai flavors in this striking entrée from the restaurant chain’s specialty menu selection. Now, you can use my Cheesecake Factory Thai-Coconut Lime Chicken copycat recipe that I’ve sleuthed out down to every delicious detail to re-create the dish at home.

The star of the show is the mouthwatering coconut-lime curry sauce that brings together the traditional Thai combination of sweet, sour, salty, and spicy flavors. The sauce brings in sour from lime and tamarind, sweet from honey, salt from fish sauce, and spicy heat from red pepper flakes. And if the sauce is cooked minimally after the parsley is added, the leafy herb will stay bright green for a beautiful and tasty dish that perfectly mirrors the original Cheesecake Factory Thai Coconut-Lime Chicken.

Check out more of my copycat Cheesecake Factory recipes here.

Menu Description: “Chicken breast sautéed with fresh mushrooms in a rich Marsala wine sauce. Served over bow tie pasta.”            

Unlike the creamy Marsala sauce served at many restaurant chains (as with Olive Garden’s Stuffed Chicken Marsala), the sauce served at The Cheesecake Factory is rich and dark with an unctuous concentration of flavor seemingly created by a thorough reduction.

For my Cheesecake Factory Chicken Marsala and Mushrooms copycat recipe, you'll reduce lightly seasoned marsala wine and chicken broth to less than one-quarter of its original volume. Once reduced, your cloned sauce is strained to remove the herbs, then butter and lemon are added, along with a browning sauce such as Kitchen Bouquet to match the deep color of the original.

Browned mushrooms are added to the sauce, then it's all spooned over sautéed chicken cutlets arranged on a huge bed of farfalle pasta. Hope you're hungry, because this recipe makes two huge Cheesecake Factory-size servings. If it's too much for two of you, the dish can easily be portioned into three or four more modest servings.

Find more of your favorite dishes from Cheesecake Factory hacked here. 

Reviewers of Wendy’s tasty seasoned potatoes point out that the skin-on slices stay crispy even when cool. That tells us the breading is most likely made with a non-wheat flour blend, an assumption confirmed by the website ingredients list for the potatoes where nary a gram of wheat flour is included. Yep, these seasoned potatoes are gluten-free.

Wendy’s uses a blend of food starches plus rice flour for the breading on their version, but my tests confirmed that cornstarch is all you’ll need for a great clone of Wendy's seasoned potatoes. The secret process starts by coating the potato slices with the dry breading mix, which contains salt. The salt in the blend will draw water out of the potatoes, magically transforming the dry breading into a wet batter in about 20 minutes.

When all the breading is wet, the potatoes go into the oil for partial frying. After resting a bit, they get dropped in again until golden brown and crispy. And, thanks to the cornstarch, these potatoes will stay crispy, even when they’re completely cool. Pretty cool right? Give my Wendy's seasoned potatoes copycat recipe a try.

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

Check out this list of our most popular recipes of all-time.

Menu Description: “Four delicate crepes topped with sweet-tart lingonberries and lingonberry butter.”

Good crepes should be soft in the center, crispy around the edges, buttery, custardy, a bit sweet, and slightly salty, and there are many ways to achieve all this. But to make crepes like those served at IHOP, the formula must be specific.

Over two days, I crafted dozens of crepes, making minor adjustments to all seven ingredients, until I finally settled on the version here that best mirrors the look and taste of the delicious IHOP Swedish Crepes. You'll get ten tasty crepes using a 10-inch non-stick skillet, and the recipe is a no-brainer.

Top your crepes with my simple formula for lingonberry butter, made with bottled lingonberries and softened butter, and now your IHOP Swedish Crepe recipe hack is complete. If you like crepes, you’ll definitely love these.

I cloned a ton of items from IHOP. See if I hacked your favorite here.

I'm not sure why it took me so long to clone this dish, considering that it was my daughter's favorite thing to eat at P.F. Chang's when she was a kid. I recently tackled it and created a spot-on copy of the chain's signature sweet-and-sour honey sauce, and in the process found some new intel that improved on my earlier version of the chain's crispy chicken which I had already hacked for a different P.F. Chang's recipe. The dish came together beautifully on the plate, and it cleared the final taste test by earning an enthusiastic thumbs-up from my now-grown little girl.

Since P.F. Chang’s sells a version of this dish in the freezer aisle of my local grocery store, I was able to improve my chicken batter formula by extracting some good info from the ingredients listed on the product box. Based on this new information, I added more cornstarch to the batter along with corn flour and egg whites for a much better, crispier coating.

The sauce in my P.F. Chang's Crispy Honey Chicken copycat recipe is sweetened with honey and sugar, soured by wine and rice vinegar, and thickened with cornstarch and gelatin powder to create a flavorful finishing glaze that sticks to the crispy chicken like the real thing. In the restaurant, the chicken is served over a bed of fried maifun rice sticks so I’ve included prep notes for that in the Tidbits, but you may prefer to forego that step and serve the chicken over or alongside cooked white or brown rice.

Check out more of my P.F. Chang's clone recipes here.

When ranking Pad Thai served at U.S. chains, Pei Wei’s tasty take on the dish comes in at the top. The secret sauce is perfectly sweet, sour, salty, and lightly spicy, and the chicken is moist, tender, and filled with great flavor.

For my Pei Wei Pad Thai copycat recipe, you'll start by brining the chicken so it doesn't dry out as white meat tends to do. The secret marinade includes fish sauce, Thailand's MSG. Soaking the chicken in this salty sauce allows the natural aminos to contribute fantastic umami goodness, and cooking it with moist heat, as described in the steps below, will result in fork-tender, juicy chicken.

The noodles at Pei Wei are thin, so choose the thinnest rice noodles available on the shelf. Prepare them for stir-frying by soaking them in a bowl of hot water instead of boiling water on the stovetop, as suggested on the package. Once they are ready, rinse the noodles under cold water, and they will keep until you need them.

This hack will make two large meal-sized entrées—just like what you get at the restaurant—which can easily be divided into four more modest servings.

Check out my recipe for Pei Wei Better Orange Chicken here. 

When I first attempted to make this Five Guys Cajun Fries copycat recipe using large, unpeeled russet potatoes I had just picked up at the grocery store, the fries emerged from the oil looking miserably discolored and had an unpleasant, soggy texture. They were dark brown and soft, rather than light brown and crispy like the amazing fries from Five Guys. I made sure to properly prep the fries by soaking them in water to wash away excess starch, then par-frying them at a low temperature, allowing them to cool before frying them again at a higher temperature. However, my initial results were a failure, and then I got distracted.

Over the next two weeks, I got busy with other recipes and neglected my unused potatoes. When I went back to the potatoes, I noticed they had become much softer and looked like they were about to sprout. Not wanting to let them go to waste, I cut the potatoes and fried them, and I was shocked to see how different they looked from my earlier batch. Rather than soggy and limp, these fries came out golden brown and crispy from tip to tip. Do old potatoes make better fries?

I remembered that Five Guys stacks bags of potatoes used for the fries in the dining area of the restaurant, and I wondered if I could see dates on those bags. I dashed back over to the restaurant, and sure enough, the potatoes were dated. The bags at one end of the stack were just one day old, while the bags closest to the kitchen were eight days old. I later discovered that Five Guys uses specific Idaho potatoes because they are denser than other russets. I couldn't get those special potatoes, but I found that I could still make crispy, more flavorful fries like Five Guys if I simply let ordinary russet potatoes sit out for a week or so before slicing and frying them.

Just like the restaurant, the potatoes in my Five Guys Cajun Fries copycat recipe are fried twice and then sprinkled with Cajun seasoning as soon as they come out of the oil. At Five Guys, they salt the fries first and then add Cajun seasoning, but I’ve included all the salt you’ll need in the secret seasoning mix below to eliminate that extra salting step.

Now how about a famous hamburger knock-off to go with those fries? Find your favorite hamburger copycat recipes here.

Crafting Olive Garden’s signature Lasagna Classico recipe presented the perfect opportunity to create a beautiful multi-layered lasagna hack recipe that utilizes an entire box of lasagna noodles and fills the baking pan all the way to the top. This Top Secret Recipe produces a lasagna that tips the scales at nearly 10 pounds and can feed hungry mouths for days, with every delicious layer directly copied from the carefully dissected Olive Garden original.

I found a few credible bits of intel in a video featuring an Olive Garden chef demonstrating what he claims is the real formula for this lasagna on a midday news show. However, the recipe was abbreviated for TV, and the chef omitted numerous crucial details. One ingredient he notably left out of the recipe is the secret layer of Cheddar cheese situated near the middle of the stack. I wasn’t expecting to find Cheddar in lasagna, but when I carefully separated the layers from several servings of the original dish, there was the golden melted cheesy goodness in every slice.

This clone recipe will yield enough for eight generous portions, but if you cut slightly smaller slices, it can satisfy twelve lasagna-craving appetites. If you like lasagna, you're going to love this version.

This recipe was our #2 most popular in 2020. Check out the other four most unlocked recipes for the year: Rao's Homemade Marinara Sauce (#1), King's Hawaiian Original Hawaiian Sweet Rolls (#3), Pei Wei Better Orange Chicken (#4), Chipotle Mexican Grill Carnitas (#5).

Check out this list of our most popular recipes of all-time.

I've always known IKEA as a giant global furniture chain, but before researching these tasty little balls of meat, I wasn't aware that IKEA is also one of the world's largest food retailers. And at the very top of the list of the most popular menu items at the stores' cafeteria-style IKEA Restaurant & Bistro, are the Swedish Meatballs, which are consumed at a rate of 150 million each year. 

The chain's secret Swedish meatballs are moist and delicious and come smothered in a cream sauce, with a side of lingonberry jam. But there's no need to work your way through the giant rat maze of furniture that is the ingenious layout of each store to get to the cafeteria when you can now duplicate them at home with my IKEA Swedish Meatball copycat recipe below, and very little effort.

The secret is to use ground beef that is 20 percent fat and a food processor to puree all of the ingredients. If you don't have a food processor, a blender works, too. Form the balls with a 1 1/4-inch dough scoop or teaspoon measure, and keep your hands thoroughly moistened to prevent the meat mixture from sticking.

After you make the meatballs, you'll probably want to make the secret cream sauce that goes over the top, and that recipe is here, too. 

Try my IKEA Swedish Meatballs copycat recipe below. It was my #2 most popular of 2023. Check out the other most popular unlocked recipes of the year: Church's Chicken Original and Spicy Fried Chicken (#1), Chipotle Guacamole (#3), Subway Cookies (#4), IHOP Thick 'N Fluffy French Toast (#5).

Check out this list of our most popular recipes of all-time.

I never thought dinner rolls were something I could get excited about until I got my hand into the breadbasket at Texas Roadhouse. The rolls are fresh out of the oven and they hit the table when you do, so there’s no waiting to tear into a magnificently gooey sweet roll topped with soft cinnamon butter. The first bite you take will make you think of a fresh cinnamon roll, and then you can’t stop eating it. And when the first roll’s gone, you are powerless to resist grabbing for just one more. But it’s never just one more. It’s two or three more, plus a few extra to take home for tomorrow.

Discovering the secret to making rolls at home that taste as good as Texas Roadhouse Rolls involved making numerous batches of dough, each one sweeter than the last (sweetened with sugar, not honey—I checked), until a very sticky batch, proofed for 2 hours, produced exactly what I was looking for. You can make the dough with a stand mixer or a handheld one, the only difference being that you must knead the dough by hand without a stand mixer. When working with the dough add a little bit of flour at a time to keep it from sticking, and just know that the dough will be less sticky and more workable after the first rise.

Roll the dough out and measure it as specified here, and after a final proofing and a quick bake—plus a generous brushing of butter on the tops—you will produce dinner rolls that look and taste just like the best rolls I’ve had at any famous American dinner chain.

This recipe was our #1 most popular in 2019. Check out the other four most unlocked recipes for the year: KFC Extra Crispy Fried Chicken (#2), Olive Garden Braised Beef Bolognese (#3), Pizzeria Uno Chicago Deep Dish Pizza (#4), Bush's Country Style Baked Beans (#5).

Check out this list of our most popular recipes of all-time.

Since Panera Bread makes all its ingredients known, it's not hard to find out that there’s no chicken broth in the original recipe, yet every copycat recipe I located online calls for chicken broth, as well as other ingredients clearly not found in Panera's version. Unlike those other recipes, I use the same or similar ingredients to those listed on the company’s website in my Panera Bread Potato Soup copycat recipe, so you can make the closest replica at home.

One of the ingredients in the soup, according to the posted list, is yeast extract. This tasty ingredient adds an MSG-like savoriness to Panera’s soup, and we can duplicate it by using nutritional yeast—often called "nooch"—now found in many stores, including Whole Foods. A little bit of nooch will provide the umami deliciousness that replaces chicken broth or bouillon.

Panera keeps its soup gluten-free by thickening it with a combination of rice flour and cornstarch, rather than wheat flour. I’ve included those ingredients as well so that your clone is similarly gluten-free. Use the steps below and in about an hour you’ll have 8 servings of a soup that is a culinary doppelganger to Panera Bread's Baked Potato soup, and at a mere fraction of the cost.

Find recipes for more of your favorite Panera Bread dishes here.

Three things make Costco Blueberry Muffins special: they’re huge, they’re moist, and berries are bursting out of the top of each one. Now your home muffins can be just as special using a similar recipe and freshly unlocked tricks from our favorite big-box store.

Obviously, you get huge muffins by using a huge muffin pan, so you’ll need a jumbo or “Texas-size” muffin pan if you want your muffins the same size as the originals. You can certainly make standard muffins with this batter in a standard-size muffin pan, but in this case, bigger is definitely better.

To get muffins that are moist like Kirkland's, you’ll need oil. I noticed many muffin recipes use butter, but I found it made the muffins taste more like butter cake or pound cake than true muffins. Looking at the ingredients listed on the package of Kirkland muffins, you won’t find any butter in there. Just oil. For my Costco Blueberry Muffin copycat recipe, some of that oil comes from margarine (for a mild butter flavor and thicker batter), and the rest is vegetable oil.

As for the blueberries, if you add them straight into the batter the juice frozen on the outside of the berries will streak your batter blue, so be sure to rinse the berries before you add them. And to make your muffins look as irresistible as those at Costco, we’ll use another one of their tasty tricks: press 4 blueberries into the batter in each cup just before the pan goes into the oven so that every baked muffin is sure to have several tantalizing berries popping out of the top.

Find more favorite famous bread recipes here. 

The problem with adding sauce to fried food is that the wet sauce makes the crunchy fried food not so crunchy. Panda Express manages to keep the crispy beef in Beijing Beef crispy even though it may be sitting for over 20 minutes in the sauce on its way to a hungry you. My early attempts at hacking my favorite dish at the massive Chinese food chain all resulted in gummy, soggy beef pieces that were more like flat dumplings than the delicious, crunchy strips of joy they were meant to be.

Then finally, on one batch, I decided to fry the coated beef for much longer than I intuitively felt it should be cooked, resulting in dark browning on the cornstarch coating and an even darker piece of meat beneath it. I anticipated a beef jerky experience, but when I took a bite, I found it to be delicious! It wasn’t tough and chewy as I expected it to be. And when this seemingly overcooked beef was stirred into the sauce, it stayed crispy until served, just like the real thing. Now, with the soggy beef problem solved, we’ve finally got a great Panda Express Beijing Beef copycat recipe.

Try more of my Panda Express copycat recipes here.

After years of fielding requests to clone the delicious signature soup from this 100-unit chain, I was finally able to secure a couple carry-out samples from Max & Erma's at the Cleveland airport while I was there on a biz trip. Wrapped in a bundle of napkins and tucked into a carry-on bag, my samples arrived home in Vegas still warm and ready for analysis. 

For my Max & Erma's Tortilla Soup recipe, you'll need some white and dark fillets of chicken and a half pound hunk of cheese to shred. It's all that Cheddar cheese that makes this tortilla soup so good. And you'll definitely want to shred your own, since the pre-shredded stuff—while also more expensive—just doesn't melt as well in the chicken broth as cheese that's been shredded just before it goes into the pot. 

Update 2/8/17: This recipe may work better if you first make a sauce with the cheese before adding it to the soup. After step #2, combine 2 tablespoons of butter with 2 tablespoons of flour in a medium saucepan. Whisk in 1 cup of milk until thickened, about 3 minutes. Remove it from the heat and stir in the cheese until it's melted. Keep the cheese sauce warm over low heat until you need it. Reduce the cornstarch to 1 tablespoon and dissolve it into the chicken broth in a large saucepan. Add the chicken, sautéed vegetables, and remaining ingredients for the soup (except the cheese sauce) and bring the mixture to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer 10 minutes. Stir in the cheese sauce and simmer the soup for another 10 minutes while you bounce to step #4.

Find more of your favorite famous soup recipes here.

Source: Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 3 by Todd Wilbur.

The first Auntie Anne's pretzel store opened in 1988 in the heart of pretzel country—a Pennsylvanian Amish farmers' market. Over 500 stores later, Auntie Anne's is one of the most requested secret clone recipes around, especially on the internet. 

Many of the copycat Auntie Anne's soft pretzel recipes passed around the Web require bread flour, and some use honey as a sweetener. But by studying the Auntie Anne's home pretzel-making kit in my secret underground laboratory, I've created a better Auntie Anne's copycat recipe with a superior way to re-create the delicious mall treats at home. For the best quality dough, you just need all-purpose flour. And powdered sugar works great to perfectly sweeten the dough. Now you just have to decide if you want to make the more traditional salted pretzels, or the sweet cinnamon sugar-coated kind. Decisions, decisions.

Find more of my copycat recipes for famous muffins, bagels, and rolls here. 

Source: Even More Top Secret Recipes by Todd Wilbur.

This chain’s most popular chicken dish owes its appeal to two delicious sauces and the great way they work together. The dark red ancho chili sauce wakes the chicken with big, bold lime and chili flavors, and the salsa ranch drizzled over the top contributes a delicious, cooling layer of creaminess. If you like tequila lime chicken and fiesta chicken entrees from other restaurants, you'll really love this recipe.

For my Red Robin Ensenada Chicken copycat recipe, you have the option of cooking the brined chicken on an outdoor barbecue grill, on a flat grill, or in a sauté pan. It’s unclear which cooking method Red Robin uses for the chicken since the photo of the dish in the menu clearly shows grill marks as if cooked on a grate, while my take-home sample of the dish showed signs of being cooked on a flat surface. In the end, either way works.

The standout secret ingredient in this recipe is the A-1 sauce used in the ancho chili sauce, which contributes perfect fruity sweet-and-sour notes. That may sound like a strange addition, but it’s not unusual for Worcestershire sauce to be called for in ancho sauce, and A-1 is similar in many ways to Worcestershire.

The recipe makes 1 1/3 cups each of the ancho sauce and salsa ranch, so after you make these servings, you’ll still have plenty of the goodness left over for more chicken later or for other dishes.

Find more of your favorite Red Robin copycat recipes here.

After a recent search for the best Cuban sandwich from a national chain, I found the winner at Cheesecake Factory. It had all the elements you want from a good Cuban: roasted pork, ham, Swiss cheese, pickles, and mustard, all on a toasted roll. After just one bite, I knew I needed to clone it, and my fate was sealed.

For any good Cuban sandwich, the star of the show is the roasted pork, so I started there. After marinating, searing, baking, and braising several pork loins, I was sure I had found the best way to flavor and cook it. The trick to keeping the typically lean pork from drying out and becoming tough was to brine, sear, wrap, and bake it until it hit 145 degrees in the middle.

Starting with good bread is also important, so you’ll want to track down some Cuban sandwich rolls. If you can’t find Cuban rolls, you can also use French or Italian rolls. Just be sure they’re on the soft side and not too crusty. A panini press is preferred for this recipe, but if you don’t have one, you can use a heavy pan as a weight to press down on the sandwich as it browns on one side, then flip the sandwich over to brown the other side.

Try my Cheesecake Factory Cuban Sandwich copycat recipe below, and click here for more of my copycat recipes for Cheesecake Factory's famous cheesecakes, appetizers, entrées, soups and more!

Many new food product ideas emerge from corporate test kitchens, but Starbucks’ Pink Drink was born on social media. That’s where customers learned to request coconut milk in their orders of the chain’s strawberry-acai refreshers drink, and when they gave it a good shake, it turned pink. That was in 2016. When high demand persisted for the “secret menu” item, Starbucks added the Pink Drink to its permanent menu one year later, in 2017.

You'll have no trouble creating my Starbucks Pink Drink copycat recipe as long as you procure a bottle of the strawberry acai-flavored Dr. Smoothie Refreshers. This lightly caffeinated concentrated drink mix can be found online in 46-ounce bottles and will be enough to make 11 (16-ounce) Pink Drink clones. You’ll also need coconut milk that isn’t too thick or chunky (Goya brand is good) and freeze-dried strawberries.

Finish the drink by shaking everything together in a shaker with ice, then pour the pink goodness into a 16-ounce glass and consume with glee.

Find more of my Starbucks copycat recipes here. 

Fudge can be finicky. It's created by combining hot candy syrup with chocolate, which can result in a grainy mess if the chocolate seizes and gets clumpy. This undesirable situation can be avoided by closely monitoring the temperature, but even then your chocolate could still lock up, and your fudge will be ruined. I couldn't let that happen in my recipe re-creation of the famous fudge from the 100-year-old West Coast candy chain. 

For my See's Chocolate Walnut Fudge copycat recipe, I made over 56 pounds of fudge on my quest to develop a recipe that works every time, even if the chocolate seizes. And in most of my batches, it usually did. So I came up with a secret trick: reserve a little cream for later, then after the hot candy syrup is mixed with the chocolate and the chocolate begins to seize, send the cream to the rescue and the fudge will become smooth, as if by magic. 

Stir in some walnuts, then pour the fudge into a wax paper-lined pan, and when it cools, you'll have over 3 1/2 pounds of thick fudge that tastes just like the real thing. That's more than $110 of fudge if you buy it at the candy store!

Fans of the cinnamon lollipop will love my See's Cinnamon Lollypop recipe here.