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The creator of Jif Peanut Butter, Smashburger, and Pizza Hut’s Stuffed Crust Pizza came up with the idea to cook bits of maple syrup into griddle cake buns for a new sweet-and-savory breakfast sandwich from the world’s #1 fast food chain. Tom Ryan, a food mad scientist with a doctorate in flavor and fragrance chemistry, invented McGriddles in 2003 for McDonald’s popular breakfast menu, and the sandwich is still selling like hotcakes today.

To make four knockoff McGriddles at home, you’ll first need to create eight perfectly round griddle cakes infused with sweet maple bits. Other recipes I found that instruct you to make hard candy from maple syrup for this hack fail to mention that the shattered shards of hard candy do not fully melt when the griddle cakes are cooked, resulting in a distinct crunch not found in the real McDonald’s product. Additionally, breaking the hard maple candy into small, uniform bits is both challenging and messy. My solution was to create a flavorful maple gummy puck that could be diced into tiny cubes and sprinkled into the batter as it cooks. The soft gummy melts perfectly in the pancake buns, making it look like the real thing, and it’s easy.

Just be sure to use maple flavoring rather than maple extract for the maple gummy. Maple flavoring has a more intense flavor than the extract, and the dark brown caramel coloring will make your maple bits look like pancake syrup. You’ll also need one or two 3½-inch rings to make griddle cakes that are the perfect size for your clones.

My McDonald's McGriddles copycat recipe duplicates the bacon and egg version of the sandwich, but you can replace the bacon with a patty made from breakfast sausage for the sausage and egg version, or just go with egg and cheese.

Get more of my McDonald's copycat recipes here.

Although the drink is 99 percent sugar water, that other 1 percent is the key to the drink's unique taste. The tangy citrus flavors, from lime juice, citrus oils, and citric acid (today the citric acid has been replaced with phosphoric acid), was used by pharmacist John Pemberton to overcome the inherent unpleasant bitterness of cocaine and caffeine. Even after removing the cocaine from the drink, it was still necessary to conceal the ghastly flavor of kola nut and coca leaf extract from the taste buds with the sweet, tangy syrup.

To make an accurate clone of Coca-Cola at home, I started with the medicinal ingredient, probably just as John did. But rather than harvesting kola nuts, we have the luxury of access to caffeine pills found in any grocery store or pharmacy. One such brand is Vivarin, but it is yellow in color with a thick coating and it tastes much too bitter. NoDoz, however, is white and less bitter, with a thinner coating. Each NoDoz tablet contains 200 milligrams of caffeine, and a 12-ounce serving Coke has 46 milligrams in it. So, if we use 8 NoDoz tablets that have been crushed into powder with a mortar and pestle (or in a bowl using the back of a spoon) we get 44 milligrams of caffeine in a 12-ounce serving, or 36 milligrams in each of the 10-ounce servings we make with my Coke recipe.

Finding and adding the caffeine is the easy part. You'll probably have more trouble obtaining Coke's crucial flavoring ingredient: cassia oil. I was hoping to leave such a hard-to-get ingredient out of my Coca-Cola recipe, but I found it impossible. The unique flavor of the Coke absolutely requires the inclusion of this Vietnamese cinnamon oil (usually sold for aromatherapy), but only a very small amount. You'll find the cassia oil in a health food store (I used the brand Oshadhi), along with the lemon oil and orange oil. The yield of this recipe had to be cranked up to 44 10-ounce servings since these oils are so strong—just one drop is all you'll need. Find them in bottles that allow you to measure exactly one drop if you can. If the oils don't come in such a bottle, buy eyedroppers at a drug store. Before you leave the health food store, don't forget the citric acid.

My recipe, because of the old-fashioned technique of adding the syrup to soda water, creates a clone of Coke as it would taste coming out of a fountain machine. That Coke is usually not as fizzy as the bottled stuff. But if you add some ice to a glass of bottled Coke, and them some of this cloned version, the bubbles will settle down, and you'll discover how close the two are. You can keep the syrup in a sealed container in the fridge until you are ready to mix each drink with soda water.

Because subtle differences in flavor can affect the finished product, be sure to measure your ingredients very carefully. Use the flat top edge of a butter knife to scrape away the excess sugar and citric acid from the top of the measuring cup and teaspoon, and don't estimate on any of the liquid ingredients.

Create more of your favorite drinks at home with more recipes here.

Source: Top Secret Recipes: Sodas, Smoothies, Spirits & Shakes by Todd Wilbur.

When I saw the results of a recent Mashed.com poll indicating that most people chose the chain’s spinach and artichoke dip as their favorite appetizer from the Applebee’s menu, I suddenly realized I hadn’t yet cracked the recipe and immediately got to work.

I've hacked several spinach and artichoke dips over the years, but no other dip features so many different types of Italian cheese. Thankfully, many grocery stores have bags of pre-blended shredded Italian cheese that work great for my Applebee's Spinach & Artichoke Dip copycat recipe. With that cheese blend, plus additional Asiago and Parmesan, we can produce a spot-on replica of Applebee's ultra-popular dip without too much shopping.

And there’s no need to defrost the frozen spinach ahead of time—that will be taken care of when it steams in your microwave. Add the cooked spinach to the cheese and other ingredients in a saucepan, along with the trimmed artichoke hearts. When it’s hot, sprinkle on some more Parm, brown it under your broiler, and bust out the chips.

Check out my recipe for Applebee's Chicken Wonton Tacos and more here. 

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 with an 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 hard, 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.

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.

A 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.

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.

A traditional “molten” cake or “lava” cake is baked at a high temperature for a short time so that the outside of the cake is fully cooked, but the batter at the center stays unset and gooey. Domino’s lava cakes tweak the formula with pure fudge topping hidden in the middle rather than cake batter. The little dessert is delicious, with a crunchy exterior and two forms of chocolate in every bite. However, the construction presents some challenges, such as how to bake soft fudge into the center of a small cake without any visible holes and without the fudge combining with the cake batter and being fully absorbed into the baked cake.

Since no holes or seams were detected on the real crunch cakes, I concluded that the filling needed to be loaded into the cakes before baking. I thought about freezing the fudge in disk shapes and then concealing those in the middle of a muffin cup of cake batter, but the fudge doesn’t freeze solid in a home freezer. Instead, it gets really cold and really sticky, and it's a messy nightmare to work with.

Returning to the drawing board, I found the clue I needed on Domino's website. The list of ingredients for the lava cakes includes “cake crumbs” and “cookie crumbs” along with butter, eggs, sugar, flour, vanilla, and cocoa. This suggests that crumbs of pre-baked cake and cookies could be combined with the other ingredients to make firmer cake “dough” rather than a runny cake batter. The soft fudge could then be spooned onto the bottom of the uncooked mini cakes, topped with more dough, and baked.

I baked some cakes using my new technique and was happy to see that it worked. There is no detectable seam, and the fudge inside gets warm and gooey and oozes out when you eat it, just like the real thing. Serve these up with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on the side, and watch the fun when everyone takes a bite and warm fudge oozes out.

My Domino's Chocolate Lava Crunch Cake copycat recipe makes 12 cakes, and I'm adding a bunch of step photos so yours will come out perfect. You can chill any leftovers for serving later with the reheating instructions I'm including at the end.

Find more of your favorite Domino's copycat recipes here.

Sherwood Johnson survived a case of malaria while serving in World War II, which left him with some residual nerve damage and a new nickname: Shakey. Despite his affliction, Shakey Johnson could still bang out toe-tapping Dixieland jazz on the piano night after night in the pizza parlor he opened in Sacramento in 1954, where live jazz accompanied the thin-crust pizza and cold pitchers of beer.

Shakey’s became the first franchised pizza restaurant in the U.S., and by 1974, the chain had 500 stores nationwide. The top dish is clearly the made-to-order pizza, but the chain’s trademarked crispy battered potato slices are a close runner-up and a perfect, tasty subject to hack.

Recipes claiming that pancake mix is the secret seasoning ingredient in Mojo Potatoes fail to recognize that pancake mix contains sugar, yet there is no noticeable sweetness in the breading. I also concluded that dry breading wouldn't work, as my tests showed that the paprika failed to bloom and contribute the same color as it does when the mixture is wet.

For my Shakey's Mojo Potatoes recipe, I eventually settled on a wet batter made with seasoned salt, flour, cornstarch, and paprika to match the flavor, crispiness, and red/orange tint of the real thing from America’s first pizza chain. Use this original technique and these handy step photos to make extra crispy potatoes the Shakey's way.

These potatoes make a great appetizer or side dish to any meal. Find some famous entrée 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.

This chain’s not-spicy original chicken sandwich, which debuted in 1964, was the first chicken sandwich introduced to America by a fast food chain, and it put Chick-fil-A on the map. By diversifying the menu with new products like this kicked-up version of the famous sandwich, the chain grew over the years to become the #1 chicken restaurant in the nation.

The secrets to a good clone of the sandwich lie in the brine and the breading for the chicken. For years, I heard rumors that pickle juice is used in the brine, but I wasn’t able to verify that until recently when I spoke to someone with solid intel on the recipe. Tests confirmed the information was good since my finished sandwiches with the pickle juice were noticeably better. But the recipe still wasn’t perfect until the flavor-enhancing magic of MSG was introduced, so be sure to include in your recipe that if you want the best clone.

My slicing trick here will make three sandwich-size cutlets from each chicken breast, which are then marinated for 4 hours in the brine. It’s worth the wait. Your patience will be rewarded with one of the best Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich hacks to ever come out of a home kitchen.

Now, check out my version of Chick-fil-A Mac and Cheese!

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.

Amid the chicken sandwich wars of 2019-2021, Carl’s Jr. (Hardee’s) debuted a simple chicken and waffle sandwich that is remarkably good. Crispy chicken breast is doused with maple butter sauce and sandwiched between two Belgian waffle buns for a sweet-and-savory handful of fab.     

To clone the sandwich at home, the chicken gets brined for great flavor and juiciness like the real thing, and then it’s cooked until perfectly golden brown and crispy. The maple butter sauce is easy to hack with just three ingredients and a mixer.

The biggest secret I reveal is how to make Belgian waffles with one flat side just like the real sandwich using a standard waffle iron and a piece of folded aluminum foil. Those exclusive tricks are here plus plenty of helpful step photos so your Carl's Jr. chicken & waffle sandwich copycat recipe will come out perfect.

Find more of my copycat Carl's Jr. recipes here. 

Researchers at University of Florida’s College of Medicine developed Gatorade in 1965 when the head coach of the Florida Gators football team requested a specially designed drink that could replace lost fluids during hot weather games. With players pounding the new sports drink, the Gators went on to take their first Orange Bowl victory in 1967 against the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets. When the head coach of the Yellow Jackets was asked why his team lost, he said, “We didn’t have Gatorade. That made the difference.” Later that year, Gatorade became the official drink of the NFL.

The secret to making Gatorade at home is not just about getting the flavor right but also about locating a simple source of the drink’s important supplemental ingredients, potassium and dextrose. Potassium (along with salt) replaces electrolytes that are lost when you sweat to ensure proper functioning of your brain and organs. I discovered that a good source of potassium is Morton’s salt substitute, which is made with potassium chloride. Most supermarkets should have it stocked near the salt.

Dextrose, on the other hand, is a natural sugar that absorbs quickly into your body to restore glycogen in muscles lost during physical activity. Bodybuilders and athletes use it during and after games and workouts to speed up recovery and stimulate muscle growth. Luckily, I was able to find the perfect product that added just the right amount of dextrose to 64 ounces of water and that also came in the perfect orange flavor: Willy Wonka Pixy Stix. Find the large 1-ounce size in the giant plastic straw, and grab two. I found them online for 50 cents each.

For my Gatorade copycat recipe below, you'll dump all the ingredients into a 64-ounce pitcher of water, stir to dissolve, and in just a few minutes you’ll have the same taste and energy benefits of one of the two original flavors of Gatorade, but at about half the price.

Find more recipes for more famous drinks here.

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

Domino’s new specialty pizza with seasoned ground beef, onions, tomatoes, and three kinds of cheese will shock your mouth. Even though this pie is more cheese than burger, the secret ketchup-mustard sauce hidden beneath it all makes each mouthful taste like you’re biting into a flat cheeseburger. The only thing missing is pickles.

Before getting to work on the ketchup-mustard sauce, ground beef, and blend of cheeses, I slightly tweaked the Domino’s pizza dough hack from Step-by-Step. The dough here calls for high-gluten flour, which you can find online, to create the same chewiness in the dough as the real thing. But don’t worry if you can’t find high-gluten flour, just increase the bread flour to 25 ounces (4½ cups).

The unusual combination of American, provolone, and Cheddar cheese is not what you’d expect on a pizza, but for this particular pie you won’t miss the mozzarella. You’ll need to dice the American and provolone since they usually come sliced and are too soft to shred. Stack everything on your custom dough, bake until the cheese browns, and it’s ready to devour. My Domino's Cheeseburger Pizza copycat recipe makes two large pizzas, so there should be more than enough for your crew.

You might also like my recipe for Domino's Crispy Bacon & Tomato Specialty Chicken.

It took more than good chicken for the small fried chicken shack in San Antonio, Texas to blow up into an international fried chicken superstar with over 1000 units in 35 countries. Thanks to these biscuits—so good they trademarked the name—hungry mouths have more than one reason for a quick Church’s run.

No need for a biscuit cutter to make Church's Chicken Honey Butter Biscuits at home since these are drop biscuits you form by hand. But it is recommended to use a silicone baking pad if you have one to keep the bottoms as light as possible.   

Brush on the honey butter the moment the biscuits come out of the oven, and when they cool they’ll have glistening tops just like the real ones.

Now, what's for dinner? Check here for cool copycat recipes for famous entrees.

If you like pizza and you like chicken tacos, you’ll love this recipe for Domino's Chicken Taco Pizza. Domino’s figured out how to combine grilled chicken, three kinds of cheese, green pepper, onion, and tomato onto a hand-tossed crust brushed with a secret seasoning blend so that each bite tastes like a taco.

The taco seasoning brushed on the dough plays a significant role in the secret, so that hack is here, along with the cheese blend you’ll need, and my method for creating a chewy, pizza chain-style crust, including the garlic spread brushed on at the end.

The dough recipe is based on the Domino’s Cheese Pizza hack that I sleuthed out on my show Top Secret Recipe and in Step-by-Step. It includes high-gluten flour for extra bite, but if you can’t find that you can increase the bread flour to 25 ounces (4½ cups), and your pizzas will still come out great.

Domino's is creating killer new appetizers. Check out my clone recipes here. 

For years, I’ve been hearing about a delicious seafood dipping sauce at Japanese steakhouses called "shrimp sauce" or "yum yum sauce." Research revealed many independent Japanese steakhouses with "the best sauce," but it was the name of an 11-unit chain called Kobe Ichiban in Central Florida that came up most often.

When I next found myself in Orlando, Florida presenting some cooking demos at a home show, I dropped in on Kobe Ichiban for dinner and there it was: the light orange creamy dipping "yummy" sauce that everyone was raving about. It was sweet and sour and salty and creamy, and it tasted amazing on the shrimp—as well as on everything else.

I poured some into some small plastic storage bags I had with me (always come prepared!), then popped them into a cooler for the long trip back to Las Vegas. Back in the underground lab, I developed my Kobe shrimp yum yum sauce recipe below. Now, you can enjoy this much-requested delicious dipping sauce anytime.

Find more of my copycat recipes for famous sauces here.  

Menu Description: “Fried jalapeno coins, house-made-salsa, pepper-Jack, lettuce, tomatoes, and chipotle aioli.”              

This 570-unit full-service chain has a sizeable menu, but it’s the thick 1/3-pound gourmet hamburgers, like this boomin’ bestseller, that bring in the crowds. And if you’re a burger lover who enjoys food that bites back, this recipe for Red Robin Burnin' Love hamburger is for you.

To assemble your own version of this big beauty, I’ll first show you (with photos) how to make perfect crispy jalapeno coins and a simple chipotle aioli. The seasoning formula for the beef patty that I’m including here is an updated and improved version of the secret sprinkle I hacked years ago, but this time we’ll use easier-to-find ingredients.  

Once you’ve prepped these components, it’s time to kick up the flames and grill some burgers. Top your burgers with pepper-Jack cheese, and assemble everything on sesame seed buns along with salsa, lettuce, and tomato. Then open wide. 

Look here for more of your favorite dishes from Red Robin, Yummm.

Menu Description: “Sauteed seasoned chicken, shrimp, and spaghetti tossed in a creamy sauce with bacon and roasted red peppers.”

Re-creating this top entrée from Olive Garden allowed me to come up with an easy way to assemble a delicious carbonara from scratch. Traditional carbonara sauce in Italy is usually made with guanciale and sometimes pancetta. But in America and other English-speaking countries carbonara is typically made with bacon, as is this one served at Olive Garden, so that’s what we’ll do for our clone.

Many traditional carbonara recipes also call for egg, but Olive Garden makes the carbonara sauce for this dish in a different, and much simpler, way: they combine bits of bacon with their classic Alfredo sauce which I cloned long ago. In this tweaked version of that sauce, the bacon flavors the sauce while it simmers, resulting in a perfect match.

The red pepper gets roasted in your oven, and the chicken and shrimp are sautéed on the stove top. Put it all together, and you've got four generous servings of Olive Garden Chicken and Shrimp Carbonara with that fabulous sauce, and an impressive dinner for your hungry carbonara cravers.

Try my Olive Garden Chicken and Shrimp Carbonara copycat recipe below, and find more of your favorite Olive Garden copycat recipes here. 

This is the hottest of Domino’s dipping sauce offerings, and many would say it’s the best. The big sweet-and-sour flavors hit you first right out of the gate, then the habanero creeps in to remind your mouth which ingredient is the boss.   

Sure, habanero is in the name, but there are actually several peppers at work here including jalapeno and red bell, and three juices: mango, orange, and lime. For your clone, everything gets pureed in the blender until smooth. When your Domino's Sweet Mango Habanero sauce has cooled, use it as a dip or baste for chicken fingers, nuggets, wings, coconut shrimp, salmon, and pizza (yes, pizza!). Give it a try with my Domino's pizza copycat recipes here. 

Come for the great flavor, but stay for the heavenly heat of my simple and delicious original recipe for Domino's Sweet Mango Habanero sauce. Includes handy step photos. 

I imagine a chef at Domino's in the middle of the development kitchen, surrounded by all the toppings they use on pizza, experimenting with new combinations of these ingredients, trying to come up with something delicious that isn't pizza. And then this dish happens: crispy chicken topped with garlic-Parmesan sauce, Cheddar-mozzarella cheese, bacon, tomato, and baked until gooey.  

Use my Domino's Crispy Bacon & Tomato Specialty Chicken copycat recipe below to make your own killer appetizer at home. To make it simple, you'll start with crispy chicken strips or popcorn chicken from the freezer section.

All the assembly instructions are here, including an original, and simple, hack for the garlic-Parmesan sauce that gets drizzled over the chicken before adding all the other good stuff.

Build your dish on a strip of parchment paper, just like the restaurant does, and bake it until the cheese is bubbly. Now you have a cool new thing to make with frozen crispy chicken strips.    

You might also like my Domino's Pizza recipe created with secrets I learned at Domino's HQ. Find this recipe and more in my book Top Secret Recipes: Step-by-Step.   

The country’s largest chicken chain offers some of the best choices for salad dressings you’ll find at any fast food restaurant. But good luck sweet-talking your order-taker into floating you a few extra packets of this great fruity vinaigrette to use on your home salads—they are under strict orders to be stingy. And that could be why you’re here.

Apple cider vinegar, pineapple juice, honey, lemon juice, and lime juice are just a few of the secret ingredients that make this dressing so great. Another secret you'll find here is xanthan gum, a natural thickener often used as an emulsifier to hold salad dressing together so that it doesn’t need shaking. You can find xanthan online or at Whole Foods, and you won't need much.

Try my Chick-fil-A Zesty Apple Cider Vinaigrette copycat recipe below, and find my recipes for Chick-fil-A Mac & Cheese, and their famous chicken sandwiches here.  

The sweet-and-savory breakfast sandwich made with two slices of French toast first appeared on the Burger King menu in 2019, but it was just for a limited time. In 2021, BK brought the breakfast sandwich back, and this time it came with a new ingredient: buttery maple spread. The first version of the Burger King French Toast sandwich was good, but the sequel with the new maple spread is great, so that's what I copied.

The hack for the buttery maple spread is just three ingredients, and it will chill out in your fridge while you make the easy French toast. Find small, thin slices of white bread for that. Sara Lee makes a loaf of bread called Delightful that works great.

BK's French toast sandwiches come with either sausage, bacon, or ham, so pick your favorite and insert it between the egg and cheese. If your ingredients cool down as you are prepping, just pop each assembled sandwich into your microwave for about 15 seconds prior to serving for perfectly warmed French toast and gooey melted cheese.

Try my Burger King French Toast Sandwich copycat recipe below and find more of my Burger King copycat recipes here.

Using his grandfather’s old recipes for sausage and smoked meats, Jack Link created his first kippered beef sticks in Wisconsin in 1986, and they quickly became a popular snack throughout the state. But that wasn’t enough for Jack, so he invested in a packaging machine and expanded into other markets. Eventually, with the help of a successful Sasquatch-themed marketing campaign, Jack Link’s became the #1 jerky brand in the U.S.

Beef jerky is usually made in a dehydrator designed to circulate air around the food at a low temperature. The optimal temperature for drying beef jerky in a dehydrator is typically 130 to 140 degrees, which is a lower temperature than can be reached with a conventional home oven. But that doesn’t mean we can’t use our home oven to make a perfectly acceptable beef jerky hack that tastes like Jack’s. And while Jack uses a smoker for his beef jerky, this recipe uses liquid smoke to create smokey beef jerky without a smoker.

The pineapple juice in the marinade is a crucial component of the flavor, but its primary contribution is a unique enzyme that helps break down the proteins in the tough cut of meat, thereby tenderizing it. Soy sauce and beef bouillon contribute to the umami savoriness of the jerky, and liquid hickory smoke is used in my Jack Link's Original Beef Jerky copycat recipe as a quick way to add the smoky flavor.

The marinating takes 24 hours, and the oven drying takes between 6 and 8 hours. So, get the sliced beef into the bath in the morning, and you should be munching on copycat Jack Link's beef jerky by dinnertime the next day.

Find more cool recipes for your favorite snacks here.

Starbucks’ Frappuccino, the most famous blended coffee drink in the world, is a hacked clone of this blended concoction invented at the California-based chain, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. In the mid-'80s, a store manager at the Westwood, California location mixed diet drink powder with ice, milk, and coffee in a blender and was pleasantly surprised by how delicious it was. The recipe was tweaked to include the chain’s chocolate powder instead of the diet powder, and a new hit product was born.

To make the vanilla version of Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf Ice Blended at home, we must first make the secret flavoring powder, which starts with dry coffee creamer. You’ll also need vanilla extract powder, which can be found online. And if you can find them, I recommend superfine sugar (Baker’s sugar) and superfine salt (popcorn salt), because the fine crystals will dissolve better in the cold drink. 

Once your secret powder is made, measure 1/3 cup of it into a blender with ice, cold espresso, and milk, and blend on high until smooth. In just a few minutes, you'll have a 16-ounce re-creation of the original blended coffee drink now served at over 1,100 Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf locations around the globe.

Try my Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf Vanilla Ice Blended copycat recipe below, and find more of my copycat drink recipes here.

It’s America’s #1 candy corn brand and the clear winner in taste tests, but just what is it that we’re tasting when we munch on this iconic Halloween candy? If you’re thinking about popcorn when you eat it, you’re on the right track. There is a dominating butter flavor and plenty of salt in there, but you’re also getting hit with notes of vanilla, honey, and the subtle nuttiness of sesame oil. Yes, sesame oil; like the stuff that's in Chinese food. Bet you didn’t see that coming.

Fortunately, this flavor profile means we can use all real ingredients to flavor our candy hack. Real butter and butter extract, real vanilla extract, real honey, and real sesame oil will give us the perfect blend of flavors for a great knockoff. I’m also adding the pleasant gumminess of gelatin to soften the final product. But flavor and texture are only part of the secret. Our fake candy corn should also look like real candy corn.

I was probably tapping into my childhood days of forming and slicing Play-Doh when I shaped my tri-colored ribbons of candy into flat rings and sliced those rings into wedges with a sharp knife. This technique gave me perfect little triangles that looked legit, even when placed right next to the real thing. I kept going, playing with my candy dough, forming it and slicing it, until I had 135 beautiful home-grown candy corn kernels, along with some highly edible misshapen scraps that somehow ended up in my mouth.

With my exclusive Brach's Candy Corn copycat recipe below, you can make this iconic candy at home, plus I've included a bunch of handy step pics, so your homemade candy corn comes out perfect.

I've hacked a lot of famous candy over the years. See if I copied your favorites here.

It’s not always on the menu at the huge Chinese take-out chain, but when this spicy special offering makes a limited-time-only appearance, I’m there. When it’s not on the menu, no problem, you can use my Panda Express Firecracker Chicken copycat recipe and make it at home in no time. 

This dish owes its great flavor to black bean paste, which is full of umami savoriness, just like soy sauce, so it enhances the taste of everything around it. You'll have a good laugh when you notice most recipes attempt to hack this dish with canned black beans. That's ridiculous, since black bean paste is a traditional Asian flavoring ingredient made with fermented soybeans, not with black beans like the kind you get in your burrito at Chipotle.

Plan ahead to brine your chicken breast for a couple of hours so that it's moist and flavorful. This is an important step for a spot-on hack.

Find more of my Panda Express copycat recipes here. 

Menu Description: “A deliciously different way to taco. Tangy grilled chicken, sweet Asian chile sauce and dumpling sauce stuffed into crispy wonton shells and topped with a crunchy slaw and cilantro mix.”

Re-creating Applebee's Chicken Wonton Tacos requires cloning four parts, none of which are difficult: grilled chicken, coleslaw, secret dumpling sauce, and the crispy wonton shell that holds everything together. For the chicken, we simply need to grill a couple of thighs and chop them up. Then, we’ll use bottled sweet chili sauce—usually found in your grocery store where Asian foods are parked—to punch up the flavor.

The coleslaw is easy to prepare with a dressing that includes only five ingredients, and it’s best after it has had some time to sit and marinate. You can slice the cabbage yourself, but using a coleslaw kit that combines sliced cabbage and shredded carrots can save a lot of time. Simply measure out four cups of the cabbage blend and mix it with the minced cilantro and dressing.  

Crispy wonton taco shells are not usually found in stores, so we’ll make our own using wonton wrappers and a skillet of hot oil. When the oil is hot, add a wonton wrapper and use tongs to fold it diagonally while it fries until crispy on both sides. It takes less than a minute to fry each wonton taco shell, and take it from me, you’ll get better at this as you go. Just be sure to leave plenty of room in the shell for all the delicious fillings.

Try my Applebee's Chicken Wonton Tacos recipe below, and find more copycat recipes from Applebee's here. 

Sweetened cream cheese and spiced plum jam are nestled in the center of this flakey seasonal pastry from the famous coffeehouse chain, and you can make a home copy of Starbucks Sugar Plum Danish using these delicious secrets.   

As with croissants, the dough is rolled and folded several times with a block of butter in the middle to create dozens of flakey layers. I found that this yeast dough tastes better and is easier to work with if the process is spread out over three days, but you can complete a perfectly fine batch of these in just one day if you want to bang it out.

The dough made here will fit perfectly into the six cups of a jumbo-size muffin pan to make Danishes that are not as wide and a bit taller than the real ones, but they’ll still taste the same. Get plum jam for the filling, add a few spices to it for seasonal flair, and spoon it over the sweetened cheese. After an hour of proofing, bake your Danishes in a hot oven until they’re golden brown.

Try my Starbucks Sugar Plum Cheese Danish copycat recipe and try more of my Starbucks recipes here. 

The plain butter croissant at Starbucks is perfectly golden brown, flakey, buttery, and delicious, and if you add almond filling and top it off with a pile of sliced almonds, you have one of the chain’s most popular pastries.

Making croissants takes time and patience since the dough must be rested, rolled, and folded a number of times to create the dozens of buttery layers that good croissants flaunt. The dough behaves best when the process is stretched over three days, with two overnight rests in the refrigerator to relax and ferment. Your patience will be rewarded since the long rests develop better flavor and the dough becomes easier to work with, although it is possible to make a copycat batch of Starbucks Almond Croissants in one day over a stretch of about 7½ hours if you avoid resting the dough overnight.

The laminated dough for traditional croissants is made by enclosing a flat block of butter in the dough, then rolling it out and folding it over several times. This process will create paper-thin chewy layers inside and golden brown flakiness on the outside, and I have all the steps here.

As for the filling and topping, I found that they could be easily hacked with pudding mix and ground almonds. A little cornstarch thickens the filling so that it doesn’t melt into the croissant dough or squirt out as the croissant bakes.

Doesn't a warm gingerbread latte or macchiato sound awesome right about now? Find all my Starbucks copycat recipes here. 

Menu Description: “Sweet caramelized onions, fresh mozzarella, Parmesan, slivered scallions, and cracked black pepper.”

Grill a chicken breast, caramelize half an onion, and slow-roast a whole head of garlic, and you’ll have prepped all the key ingredients for assembling two amazing clones of the chain’s famous sauce-less Roasted Garlic Chicken Pizza.

You won’t miss the pizza sauce on this “white pizza” since the toppings bring bold flavors to the show, and we don't want to upstage that great taste. Your homemade pizzas will just need a light brushing of olive oil over the dough, and you’re ready to pile everything on.

CPK’s wood-fired stone ovens are cranked up to a rocket-hot 800 degrees Fahrenheit, so a pizza bakes in just 3 or 4 minutes. It's not likely you have one of those special ovens at home, but it's still possible to bake copycat pizzas in a conventional oven in around 10 minutes. I recommend using a pizza stone to help brown the bottom of your pizzas, but the recipe will still work fine without one.    

Start your pizzas the day before you plan to eat them so that the dough can rise slowly overnight in your refrigerator. This slow, chilled rise produces fermentation that will ultimately give your crust a better texture and taste.

I'm including lots of step photos so your CPK Roasted Garlic Chicken pizza copycat recipe will come out looking just like the real pizza. If you like this one, click here to see if I cloned your favorite salads and appetizers from CPK.

This huge chicken chain offers seven delicious dressings to top three salad choices, and this is my current favorite of the bunch. The Avocado Lime Ranch Dressing is best on a Southwestern-style salad like the one on Chick-fil-A’s menu with mixed greens, black beans, corn, spicy chicken, and tortilla strips on top. But it’ll work on just about any mixed greens salad or burrito bowl you come up with at home, or use it as a dip for chicken fingers, taquitos, and Southwestern eggrolls.

For a good home clone, be sure to smash the avocado until no chunks remain and let the dressing sit for at least an hour before you use it so the dried herbs, onion, and garlic can rehydrate, and the flavors can bloom.

Try my Chick-fil-A Avocado Lime Ranch Dressing recipe below, and click here for more of my Chick-fil-A copycat recipes. 

Menu Description: Tender marinated steak, fire-roasted poblanos, cilantro pesto, yellow onions, Mozzarella, Monterey Jack and fresh cilantro. Served with housemade salsa verde.

One of California Pizza Kitchen’s most popular “globally inspired” pizzas is this fabulous pie topped with strips of marinated flank steak, cilantro pesto, and fire-roasted poblano pepper. I broke it down and hacked all the parts for you—including the excellent salsa verde that goes on top—so that you can assemble two beautiful pizzas that look and taste like the real thing.

Deliciousness often requires patience, so plan for your copycat pizza one day in advance to allow your dough to proof properly and the steak to fully marinate. You can also prep the pesto, salsa verde, and roasted poblano a day in advance so that when it comes time to make pizzas the next day, you just need to cook the carne asada, build the pies, and bake.  

Try my CPK Carne Asada Pizza copycat recipe below, and find more of my California Pizza Kitchen hacks here. 

Social media shredded Chipotle’s first queso dip which debuted in 2017, calling it “gritty,” “bland,” “watered-down,” and “a crime against cheese.” Chipotle was in desperate need of a re-do.

In early 2020, after months and months of test-marketing an improved cheesy dip recipe in Dallas, Detroit, and San Diego, the Mexican chain introduced Queso Blanco to the entire U.S., and this time the reviews were much better.

Chipotle claims their new formula contains exactly 13 ingredients, including 2 kinds of cheese and 3 different chile peppers. With cornstarch as the thickening agent, the preparation starts by making a white sauce with milk and cream. When the cheese is fully melted and smooth, the veggies go in, and in about 10 minutes it’s ready to serve.

Use my Chipotle Queso Blanco copycat recipe as a dip with tortilla chips or as a topping on your copycat Chipotle carne asada or carnitas tacos and barbacoa burritos. Find all my Chipotle recipes here. 

Chipotle’s popular limited offering is a good example of how straightforward and flavorful carne asada can be. It’s not overly mysterious since Chipotle is transparent about the ingredients used for the restaurant's entire menu—53 ingredients in all—but identifying which of those is used here is only the beginning of the process. There was still plenty of work to do in establishing ratios and settling on an ideal preparation method.

Carne asada is almost always made with flank steak or skirt steak. A server at Chipotle told me they use skirt steak, which is surprising since that is the tougher of the two cuts. Perhaps she was wrong about that? Flank steak also has a better flavor than skirt steak, so I'm recommending flank here. Just be sure not to marinate it for more than 2 days or the acid in the marinade may toughen your steak and you certainly don't want that.

After you grill it, slice the meat across the grain and use it in burritos, tacos, bowls, or as a Southwest-style salad topper.

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

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.

Joseph Walker used only the finest ingredients to create his famous pure butter shortbread recipe, crafted in 1898 at his bakery in Aberlour, Scotland. More than a century later, Walker's remains one of the bestselling shortbreads in the world, still made with the same four high-quality ingredients: flour, butter, sugar, and salt.

But just knowing these ingredients doesn’t mean you know how to make great shortbread—a fact that’s best confirmed by giving any other copycat recipe a try. If a recipe calls for all-purpose flour and/or standard granulated sugar and salt, you’re destined for disappointment.  

The secret ingredient for perfect Walker's Shortbread cookies is pastry flour. It contains less gluten than all-purpose flour, resulting in a tender bite that mirrors the original cookies while still providing a stable structure that won’t spread during baking. My favorite pastry flour is Bob’s Red Mill.

These cookies contain no leavening (hence their name, shortbread), so the sugar and salt are whipped into the butter until fluffy, creating air bubbles that help your shortbread rise when baked. Standard sugar and salt grains will not easily dissolve in the butter, so I'm using superfine sugar (baker’s sugar) and superfine salt (popcorn salt) to create perfect shortbread with a clean bite, free from detectable sugar or salt granules.

Try my Walker's Shortbread copycat recipe below, and click here for more great famous cookie recipes.

These flat, crepe-like flapjacks are reminiscent of the hotcakes enjoyed by miners during the California Gold Rush of 1849, and they are also a signature dish at the Original Pancake House chain. The chain’s 49’er Flap Jacks are thin, slightly chewy, lightly sweetened, and so large that they cover your entire plate. And this home version is one of the easiest meals you’ll ever prepare because breakfast shouldn’t be complicated.

Making my Original Pancake House 49'er Flap Jacks copycat recipe is as easy as mixing up a thin pancake batter and cooking it in a pan coated with clarified butter. Clarified butter has the milk solids removed so it won’t brown in the pan, and I’ll show you how to make it in the first step. According to my research The Original Pancake House uses clarified butter, so we should do the same.

Swirl the batter in the butter to the edges of your pan, cook it for a couple of minutes, then flip it over and cook it for another minute. Stack your warm flapjacks on a plate and serve them with soft butter and maple syrup on the side.

Also, check out my version of the Original Pancake House Apple Pancake for a decadent cinnamon apple-filled delight.

Menu Description: “A baked blend of Italian cheeses, pasta, and our signature five-cheese marinara.”

Creating a copycat version of Olive Garden’s famous baked ziti wouldn't be possible without a perfect replica of the chain’s popular five-cheese marinara sauce. Luckily, I had previously replicated Olive Garden’s plain marinara for Olive Garden’s Chicken Parmigiana, so I adjusted that recipe to suit this hack by adding five types of Italian cheese and heavy cream.  

It can be challenging to accurately identify which types of cheese are in a prepared sauce without some insider assistance. So, before cooking, I concentrated on persuading a server to ask the chef for the list of five cheeses, and I got it! The cheese blend used in this sauce comes directly from the kitchen of my local Olive Garden. When you taste it, you’ll know the intel was legit.

After the sauce is added to the pasta, it’s topped with a mix of cheese and breadcrumbs known as “ziti topping.” Then, it’s browned in a salamander at the restaurant or under your broiler at home. The result is a beautiful dish with excellent sauce and a cheesy topping that should satisfy even the pickiest baked ziti enthusiasts.

I've cloned a ton of dishes from Olive Garden. See if I hacked your favorite here.

Menu Description: “Sauteed chicken, shrimp, red bell peppers in a spicy Cajun Alfredo sauce, Parmesan-Romano and fettuccine. Served with a warm garlic breadstick.”  

In 1997, I published a clone recipe for T.G.I Friday’s Spicy Cajun Chicken Pasta because it was one of the chain’s most popular dishes at the time. But as the years pass and menus get tweaked, old food favorites are decommissioned to make way for fresh, new ideas. Sometimes the new dishes are twists on old favorites, as is this improved version of the classic Spicy Cajun Chicken Pasta, which now includes extra-large shrimp and a better spicy Alfredo sauce.  

My new T.G.I. Friday's Cajun Shrimp and Chicken Pasta copycat recipe starts with a quick brine for moist, flavorful chicken. Prep the chicken and creamy sauce in one pan; the shrimp, bell pepper, and garlic in another.

When you’re ready to serve the dish, toss the sauce with the pasta, then plate it and top it with minced parsley, and you've got a perfect restaurant-style hack.

There's a lot more T.G.I. Friday's clone recipes over here. 

It’s a good thing that Panera’s delicious tomato soup is made with pear tomatoes, so we can use canned San Marzano-style tomatoes for a quick and easy Panera Bread Creamy Tomato soup copycat recipe. We’ll pump up the tomato flavor with added tomato paste.

Other recipes will call for some form of broth here, but the broth is unnecessary, and it's not in the real thing, so a good copycat recipe wouldn't include it. There is plenty of flavorful liquid in the canned tomatoes, and we’ll sculpt the final flavor with herbs and spices, sugar, and lemon juice.

You can buy premade croutons to use on top of your soup, but I’ve also included an easy hack to make black pepper croutons from focaccia or ciabatta bread, just like those you get at the restaurant. 

Check here for more of my Panera Bread copycat recipes. 

A comparison of several shrimp scampi recipes reveals a variety of subtle differences in the way each chef makes the classic Italian dish, but the underlying technique is almost always the same: create a sauce, add the shrimp, dump the pasta into the pan, toss, and serve. But if you want to make the fantastic Olive Garden shrimp scampi, you’ll need to follow some very specific secret steps.

Many other shrimp scampi recipes start with garlic and onions, but you’ll only need garlic for this version. You’ll also be adding tomato to the dish along with chopped asparagus spears to bring some color to the dish and set it apart from traditional scampi recipes. Other methods usually don’t call for cream in the sauce, but Olive Garden uses it in their version so you'll do the same in this hack, and you'll be glad you did. The cream thickens the sauce so that it better coats the shrimp and pasta.

My exclusive Olive Garden shrimp scampi copycat recipe makes 2 large dinner-size portions but can be divided into 3 to 4 smaller lunch-size servings.

Find more of your favorite Olive Garden copycat recipes here.

This Southern-themed chain is famous for its gift shops filled with made-in-America products and delicious homestyle food, including a particularly good meatloaf. This dish ranks high in popularity, right up there with the Chicken ‘n Dumplins and the Hash Brown Casserole which I had already hacked, so a good Cracker Barrel Meatloaf clone recipe was obvious next mission choice.

Making meatloaf is easy. What’s hard is making it taste like the meatloaf at Cracker Barrel, which is tender, juicy, and flavored with onion, green pepper, and tomato. I sought to turn out a moist loaf of meat, and one that’s not dry and tough, but my first attempts were much too dense.

After playing around with the eggs-to-breadcrumbs-to-milk ratios and using gentle hands when combining everything and pressing it into the loaf pan, my final batch was a winner, and now I get to pass the formula along to you.    

Just so you know, it's best to use a meatloaf pan with 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 the meatloaf. 

Satisfy your Cracker Barrel cravings with more of my copycat recipes here.

The first buttermilk pie I tasted was at Cracker Barrel, and I was immediately hooked on the sweetened vanilla custard, which has a distinct, but not overwhelming, tang from buttermilk and lemon juice and is topped with a simple garnish of strawberries and whipped cream. It’s a crowd-pleasing dessert that is as well-suited for summertime get-togethers as it is for winter holiday meals, where it has become a longtime Southern tradition. 

I’ve tasted over a dozen versions of this decades-old favorite now—all but one of them coming out of my home oven—on a quest to discover the best way to duplicate Cracker Barrel’s Buttermilk Pie. I’m happy to tell you that I have finally cracked its secrets.

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. Mine was from Marie Callender’s, and it was delicious.

Whisk together the filling in stages as described here, then pour it into your pie shell. Bake it on the lowest rack, allowing the bottom of the pie to brown. If you have a convection oven, this is a good time to use it to ensure even browning on top. After about an hour, your pie is done, and when it’s chilled, dessert is served.

Find more of my Cracker Barrel copycat recipes here. 

The Chesapeake brand of cookies from Pepperidge Farm are crispy cookies with a light crunch and filled with various chunks of chocolate and nutty bits. One of the most popular choices features big chunks of dark chocolate along with pecan bits, and it can be duplicated at home with a few twists to one of my chocolate chip cookie recipes.

To make a crispy cookie that’s tender and not tough, I’ve replaced some of the butter with shortening, replaced one egg with an egg white, and tweaked the baking powder/baking soda ratio.

Nestle makes a 10-ounce bag of oversized dark chocolate chips that are delicious and work nicely for this clone. If you can’t find those, you can chop up a couple of your favorite dark chocolate bars into small chunks and add those to the mix.

When the cookies are cool, they should be lightly crispy and filled with flavor, just like the original Pepperidge Farm Chesapeake cookies. Store them in a covered container in a dry spot.  

Try more famous copycat cookies and brownie recipes here.  

There are many acceptable ways to formulate good queso, but to make this specific queso the Qdoba way, you must start with the correct ingredients—and most copycat recipes seem to miss the mark. A few recipes get one of the peppers and two of the cheeses right, but nearly every recipe out there is a big mess that I will now save you from.

Quesos can be made with various cheeses, including queso fresco, asadero, and Muenster, but this particular queso includes a cheese you probably didn’t expect: Swiss. That cheese is slow to melt, so we’ll shred it, along with the Jack. And you won't need to gum up the queso with flour or cornstarch by making a roux because the white American cheese in the mix contains either sodium citrate or sodium phosphate—additives that help the cheese melt smoothly and stay that way. 

The authors of recipes that include tomatoes in this dish haven’t looked closely. Those are actually red bell peppers, which are roasted, peeled, and seeded along with the poblano and jalapeños before being diced and added to the cheese sauce. The sauce cooks on low heat, without bubbling, ensuring it remains smooth and creamy.

When it’s done, your queso may appear thin in the pan, but it will thicken as it cools to a perfect consistency for dipping tortilla chips or as a topping for tacos and burrito bowls.

My Qdoba 3-Cheese Queso copycat recipe was our #2 most popular in 2021. Check out the other four most unlocked recipes for the year: Panda Express Chow Mein (#1), 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.

It’s not the hottest sauce at the famous Florida-based chain. That honor goes to the sauce they call “911” with heat so hot it overwhelms the flavor. This thick red sauce is the second fieriest choice on the menu, and it delivers both big heat you can handle and great flavor you can taste.

Now you can make your own version of this super spicy secret sauce at home by cooking a combination of cayenne pepper sauce, jalapeño, Tabasco, and a couple of other ingredients until thick.

When your homemade Hooters wings are a crispy golden brown, toss them in the beautifully thickened sauce, and serve up your pile of wings with a stack of napkins and cold drinks on deck to help put out the fire.

Try my Hooters 3-Mile Island chicken wings recipe below, and try more of my Hooters copycat recipes here.