per month

($23.88 annually)*
Save $19.16 vs. monthly

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

Before he became America's sausage king, Jimmy Dean was known for crooning the country hit "Big Bad John." That song came out in 1962 and sold more than 8 million copies. His singing success launched a television career on ABC with The Jimmy Dean Show, where Roy Clark, Patsy Cline, and Roger Miller got their big breaks. The TV exposure led to acting roles for Jimmy, as a regular on Daniel Boone, and in feature films, including his debut in the James Bond flick Diamonds are Forever. Realizing that steady income from an acting and singing career can be undependable, Jimmy invested his show-biz money in a hog farm. In 1968 the Jimmy Dean Meat Company developed the special recipe for sausage that has now become a household name. Today the company is part of the Sara Lee Corporation, and Jimmy retired as company spokesman in 2004.

My Jimmy Dean breakfast sausage copycat recipe re-creates three varieties of the famous roll sausage that you form into patties and cook in a skillet. Use ground pork found at the supermarket—make it lean pork if you like—or grind some up yourself if you have a meat grinder.

Check out more of my famous breakfast copycat recipes here.

Source: Top Secret Recipes Unlocked by Todd Wilbur.

This 220-unit downscaled version of P.F. Chang’s China Bistro targets the lunch crowd with a smaller menu that features bento boxes, bowls, and small plates. Obviously, a clone is needed for this one, stat.

The name “Wei Better Orange Chicken” is a competitive callout to Panda Express's signature orange chicken, which is made with pre-breaded and frozen chicken. Pei Wei claims its orange chicken is prepared each day from scratch with chicken that is never frozen, so we’ll craft our clone the same way. But rather than assemble the dish in a wok over a high-flame fast stove like they do at the restaurant, we’ll prepare the sauce and chicken separately, then toss them with fresh orange wedges just before serving.

By the way, Pei Wei Better Orange Chicken goes very well with white or brown rice, so don’t forget to make some.

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

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

per month*

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

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.

According to polls, these fries are considered the #1 or #2 best fast-food fries in America—they flip-flop with McDonald's for the top spot. 

Much of what I know about how Arby's makes these fries comes from an episode of Food Network's Unwrapped that reveals what the potatoes go through during the automated prep process at a ConAgra Foods processing plant in Southern Washington. The potatoes are sliced at high speed, then they rush down a conveyor where they are blanched in hot water for 20 minutes to deactivate an enzyme that turns them brown and to help create the perfect texture when the potatoes are fried. The potatoes are then battered, par-fried for 30 seconds, frozen, and shipped to each Arby's restaurant, where the cooking process is completed with a final frying step.

My process at home is simple and incorporates all these steps, but you'll need a curly fry slicer if you want your fries to look like they came from Arby's. The one used here in my Arby's Curly Fries copycat recipe is from Progressive, which makes perfect curly slices and costs around 30 bucks. If you don't want to pay for a slicer, you can still use my recipe with fries sliced on a mandoline or by hand. They won't be curly, but they'll still have the same fantastic flavor and crispiness as the original curly fries. 

Find more famous french fries copycat recipes here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

If I told you that Häagen-Dazs Vanilla Ice Cream was formulated generations ago on a dairy farm in the rolling hills of Denmark, you’d probably believe me. It sounds true and that’s precisely what Rueben Mattus wanted you to think when he created his new ice cream brand in 1960. In the Bronx in New York City.

Mattus used a marketing technique called “foreign branding.” To set his brand apart from others, Mattus created the impression that his new ice cream was an exotic, special recipe made with hard-to-obtain ingredients. To come up with the name, Mattus sat at his kitchen table in the mornings blurting out non-sensical words until he eventually landed on one that sounded Danish: Häagen-Dazs. The word is meaningless, it’s not Dutch, and it even includes an umlaut, which doesn’t exist in the Danish alphabet.

While the name may suggest a fancy, complicated recipe for ice cream, the Häagen-Dazs label is one of the simplest and cleanest you'll find for any major ice cream brand. There are just five very ordinary ingredients and nothing else: cream, skim milk, cane sugar, egg yolks, and vanilla extract. And those will be the ingredients we’ll use in our hack.

To create my Häagen-Dazs Vanilla Ice Cream copycat recipe, I played with the ratios through many batches until I finally honed in on the right combination for a perfect French vanilla ice cream, prepared like custard, but with less egg, and just enough butterfat to re-create the smooth mouthfeel of the original.

Cook your ice cream base with the simple instructions, then get it cold and into an ice cream maker. After 30 minutes of churning grab a spoon, because you'll have a heaping quart of the best homemade ice cream you’ve ever tasted, and it's best when served a little soft.

Try using your freshly made ice cream in one of my famous shake 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.

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.

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 to hold it all together. For the chicken, we’ll 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 with a dressing that has only five ingredients, and it’s best when it has some time to sit and marinate. You can slice the cabbage yourself, but a coleslaw kit that’s a combo of sliced cabbage and shredded carrots is a big time-saver. Just measure out 4 cups of the cabbage blend and mix it with the minced cilantro and dressing.  

Wonton taco shells are not a thing you can usually find 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 over diagonally as it fries until it’s crispy on both sides. It takes less than a minute to fry each wonton taco shell, and you’ll get better as you go. Just be sure to leave plenty of room in the shell for the delicious fillings to come.

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

To help fill the void left by a lack of dine-in customers when the coronavirus pandemic struck the U.S. in early 2020, restaurant operators had to get creative. That spring and summer we saw a surge in ghost kitchens and virtual restaurants where all the food was prepared for delivery only. Ghost kitchens are kitchens without seating and minimal, if any, signage. Virtual restaurants are delivery-only services where food is prepared in established restaurant kitchens.

It's Just Wings is a concept cooked up by Brinker, the team behind Chili’s and Maggiano’s, with a menu limited to wings in three styles—bone-in, boneless, and smoked—tossed in your choice of eight creative sauces or two dry rubs. Since I've already hacked a variety of traditional wings and boneless wings, I chose to clone It's Just Wings stand-out smoked wings which are prepared in the same pecan wood smoking ovens (called Combitherms) Chili’s uses to make baby back ribs. 

The secret is to brine the chicken first, then blot it dry and rub the skin with oil to help make it crispy while it smokes. If you don’t have a smoker, you can smoke the wings on your grill by heating one side of the grill and placing the wings on the other side. Set wood chips or pellets in foil over the heated side, then close the lid.   

Below you'll find my recipe for It's Just Wings Smoked Wings and three of their most notable sauces: Honey Sriracha, Honey Chipotle, and Truffle Hot Sauce. Pick one (or more), toss your wings in it, and dive in. Or maybe you just want to go naked? These wings also taste great without any sauce at all.

I've hacked a ton of famous fried chicken wings. See if I cloned your favorite here. 

Imagine a giant soft sugar cookie with sweetened cream cheese on top and served warm as if it just came out of the oven, and you have California Pizza Kitchen's Butter Cake, a delectable dessert described on the menu with five simple words: “Trust us…just try it.” 

This dessert is an easy one to prep in the restaurant since the cakes are made ahead of time and chilled until ordered. Once an order comes in, the cake is zapped for a minute in the microwave, then topped with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and surrounded by dollops of whipped cream. I've designed my CPK Butter Cake copycat recipe below the same way, so you can make your cakes in advance and then chill them until dessert time. Or, you can serve the cakes right after they come out of the oven. Either way works.

The construction is an easy one—you’ll need four 4-inch cake pans, ramekins, or anything you can bake in that is 4 inches across. To make the batter I used a stand mixer with the paddle attachment, and it worked great, but a hand-held granny mixer also works fine.

You're gonna love this one. Trust me...just try it.

Find more of my California Pizza Kitchen copycat recipes here.

Korean chicken is famous for its extra crispy coating, and Bonchon’s recipe—especially the wings—is one of the best in the world. That chain's famous formula is why there are now over 340 Bonchon outlets in nine countries, including over one hundred in the US and more planned to open here in the near future. 

The biggest challenge when creating my Bonchon chicken wings recipe was finding the perfect magical mixture for the batter that fries to a golden brown, and with tender crispiness that stays crunchy long after the wings have been brushed with the flavorful glaze.

I knew that a traditional double-frying technique would help create the crunchy coating we needed, but it would take some trial and error to determine the best time splits. The wings are par-fried, rested, and then fried again until done, but just how long to give each stage was yet to be determined since every recipe I found for Korean chicken used different times and temps. Some recipes even changed the temperature between frying steps, but that extra step made the recipe too difficult to manage when frying multiple batches.

I eventually settled on 350 degrees F with most of the frying done up front in the par-fry stage. A three-ingredient batter is all that’s needed for crispy golden-brown wings, and the soy garlic sauce is a quick hack using your microwave oven. If you like your wings spicy like I do, it’s very easy to kick them up by adding Korean red chili paste (gochujang) and Korean red pepper powder (gochugaru) to the soy garlic recipe in the measurements listed below.

Click here for more delicious copycat appetizer recipes. 

Braised and shredded pork shoulder is a staple of Mexican cuisine that Chipotle prepares with a simple blend of flavors, and a surprising ingredient you may not have expected: juniper berries. Once you track those down (they’re easy to find online), the berries are combined with thyme and bay leaves in a braising liquid that will transform your own pork roast into an easily shreddable thing of beauty in under 3 hours. Then you can use your Chipotle carnitas clone on tacos, in burritos, or in a bowl over rice and beans just like they do in the restaurant.

When picking your pork roast, try to find one without too much fat. If your roast has a thick cap of fat on it, trim off the excess. You want some fat in your braising liquid, but if the cap of fat is too thick, it may not fully render down and you’ll get chunks of fat in the shred.

It’s often assumed that the pork butt is from the rear end of the pig, even though cuts from the back region already have a name: ham. The pork butt, also known as a Boston butt, is cut from the other end, the upper shoulder of the pig. It’s called a “butt” because in pre-Revolutionary War New England the roasts were stored and transported in barrels called “butts”, and the confusing name stuck.

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

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

The Wingstop menu offers nearly a dozen flavor variations of fried chicken wings, including original hot buffalo-style, Parmesan-garlic, and mango habanero, but it’s the lemon pepper wings that get the most raves. And even though they’re referred to as “dry rub” wings on the menu, the secret to a perfect Wingstop lemon pepper wings copycat recipe is in the wet baste that goes on first.

The lemon pepper won’t stick to the wings without making them wet, and that’s where the sauce, or baste, comes in. The baste is easy to make by clarifying butter and combining it with oil to prevent the butter from solidifying, then adding lemon pepper and salt.

I obtained a sample of Wingstop’s lemon pepper seasoning and took a few stabs at cloning the blend from scratch, but ultimately decided the task was a time-waster when pre-blended lemon pepper is so easy to find. I compared Wingstop’s lemon pepper with the blends from McCormick and Lawry’s—each is slightly different than what Wingstop uses. McCormick’s is lemonier than Wingstop’s blend, and Lawry’s version is chunkier and less lemony, but either blend is close enough to deliver a satisfying clone.

After the wings are fried, baste them with the sauce below and sprinkle them with your favorite lemon pepper. Now you've made homemade Wingstop's Lemon Pepper Wings like a pro.

Find my copycat recipes for Wingstop's original and Parmesan-garlic wings here. 

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.

I like making fortune cookies because it means I get to write fortunes. My fortunes are sometimes ridiculous (“No matter what, be sure you don’t…ah, never mind. Have a cookie.”), sometimes sarcastic (“Wow, you broke a cookie! Have you been working out?”), and sometimes paradoxical (“These cookies are filled with lies.”). But’s let’s face it, the fortune isn't the best part. What matters most is that the cookie tastes good.

Contrary to popular belief, fortune cookies are not from China. They don’t even serve them in China. Fortune cookies are an American invention, created either in San Francisco or Los Angeles in the early 1900s—the exact origin is in dispute. Originally, I set out to clone the best-selling fortune cookie in the U.S., called Golden Bowl, made by Wonton Foods. But I found out that I don’t like those cookies. They're thin and tasteless and have an unnatural orange tint to them. Instead, I chose to hack the thicker, tastier, golden brown Panda Express fortune cookies.

Fortune cookies start their life looking like pancake batter. The batter is formed into 3-inch circles that, when baked, become thin cookies. These are pliable when warm and crispy when cool—so you’ll need to work fast when forming them. Because they’re so thin, it’s best to bake the cookies on a silicone pad or nonstick foil. You can also use parchment paper, but it tends to ripple from the moisture of the batter, and that ripple shows up on the surface of the cookies.

I suggest baking just three or four cookies at a time so that they'll all be warm and pliable while you add the fortunes and shape them. And if you're very fortunate, you can find a helpful someone to assist you with that part, so you'll be able to make more cookies faster. 

Garlic mashed potatoes are a great side for many entrées, especially when the mashed potatoes are as creamy and flavorful as those at Olive Garden. In our hack, the cloves of peeled garlic are boiled with the potatoes. When the potatoes get passed through a potato ricer (or mashed) the softened garlic cloves go along for the ride and get mashed up too. This way, you’re guaranteed to get the perfect amount of flavorful garlic in every bite.

I settled on cream as the dairy here in my Olive Garden Mashed Potatoes copycat recipe after my attempts using milk and half-and-half resulted in thin and runny potatoes. I found that cream adds the perfect thickness and smooth richness to the mashers, and it made the closest duplicate to the original potatoes.

This side goes great with our Olive Garden Stuffed Chicken Marsala copycat recipe.

After the success of Panera Bread’s Cinnamon Crunch Bagels, the popular sandwich chain went back into the development kitchen and came out with these incredible scones, filled with the same crunchy cinnamon drops found in the bagels and drizzled with cinnamon icing.

When first released, these scones were cut as triangles and frosted, but in 2018 the shape was changed to more “rustic”-shaped round blobs with drizzled or piped icing on top. I like to hack the newest version, so my Panera Bread Cinnamon Crunch Scones recipe here re-creates that scone.

These are cream scones, so cream is the main wet ingredient that holds the dough together—but keep the dough crumbly as you mix it, and try not to compress it much, or you risk making the final product too dense. The best way to form the scones is to use both hands and shape the dough like you’re making a loose snowball. Then use one hand to place the dough onto the baking sheet and form it into a rough dome shape. The scones will flatten and spread out a little bit as they bake, creating the same rustic shape as the original.

Try my Panera Bread Cinnamon Crunch Bagel recipe here.

Samuel Bath Thomas immigrated from England to New York City and opened his first bakery there in 1880. That is where Thomas created skillet bread that would one day become the famous muffins known for their craggy texture when split in half. This hack for Thomas’ English Muffins uses a special kneading process to give the muffins the "nooks and crannies" they are famous for, making craters in the finished bread to better hold on to melted butter and jam.

I have seen several recipes that claim to re-create these muffins, but none produce the large air pockets that a proper Thomas' English Muffin recipe requires, in addition to great flavor and a perfectly cooked interior. To ensure proper nooks and crannies and muffins that are cooked all the way through, I've included some important steps.

The dough you'll make here is like a ciabatta dough in that it is very wet. So rather than kneading the dough, you stretch and fold it over several times on a well-oiled surface. Then, when the portioned-out dough has proofed on baking sheets for another 1½ to 2 hours, you par-bake the muffins.

After baking, the muffins are cooked on a griddle or in a pan until dark brown on both sides, then they must cool. This is the hardest part. The muffins will be too soft to open for at least four hours, and now you have to fight off the temptation to eat one. It’s hard, I know. The muffins smell great and you’ve waited all this time, but resist for now and your patience will be rewarded.

When the muffins have had their rest, split them with a fork and toast them as you would any English muffin.

Check out all my top secret recipes for famous bread here. 

Menu Description: "A tasty twist on a family favorite. Red, ripe tomatoes slowly simmered in a rich cream sauce and seasoned with basil and select herbs."

My easy copycat recipe requires two large cans of crushed tomatoes. Your homemade soup will still have the impressive taste and texture of gourmet tomato bisque, requiring fresh tomatoes and more work. 

You may notice that the large amount of basil used here contributes an overwhelming flavor and aroma when first added, but as the soup simmers, the herb mellows to create the perfect clone of the original. And there's no need to make croutons from scratch for the garnish when you can buy lightly seasoned packaged croutons in just about any market.

Try my Applebee's Tomato Basil Soup copycat recipe below, and find more of my Applebee's copycat recipes here.

Source: Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 3 by Todd Wilbur.
 

Menu Description: "Loaded with cheddar cheese and bacon. Served with sour cream and chives."

Perfume salesman Alan Stillman was a single guy in New York City in 1965, looking for a way to meet women who lived in his neighborhood. He figured out a way to get their attention: buy a broken-down beer joint in the area, jazz it up, and call it "The T.G.I.F." to attract the career crowd. Within a week, police had barricaded the area to control crowds flocking to Alan's new restaurant. The restaurant made $1 million in its first year—a lot of dough back then. Soon restaurateurs across the country were imitating the concept.

In 1974 T.G.I. Friday's invented an appetizer that would also be copied by many in the following years. Potato skins are still the most popular item on the T.G.I. Friday's menu, with nearly 4 million orders served every year. The recipe has the added benefit of providing you with leftover baked potato ready for mashing.

T.G.I Friday's has several popular dishes. See if I cloned your favorites here.

Source: Top Secret Restaurant Recipes by Todd Wilbur.

One of America's favorite casual chains brings us a popular salad dressing that you can't buy in stores. Instead, grab these six simple ingredients and use my Chili's Honey Mustard Salad Dressing copycat recipe below to make your own version cheaply and quickly.

Find more of my Chili's copycat recipes here. 

Source: Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 2 by Todd Wilbur.

This is the spicy sauce that comes on your Gordita or Chalupa at Taco Bell. But the only way to get a significant amount of the delicious creamy sauce to use at home on tacos, fajitas, and burritos is by making some yourself. With my Taco Bell Baja Sauce recipe below, you will make enough to hold you over for a while. 

You need a food processor to purée the vegetables, but don't expect to use all the purée. I've made the measurements for the purée larger than required so that your food processor will have something to grab on to. This is a mayo-based sauce, so if you want to eliminate some fat, use light mayonnaise in the recipe and make low-fat homemade Baja Sauce. You can't get that at Taco Bell.

Find more of your favorite Taco Bell sauce recipes here. 

Source: Top Secret Recipes Unlocked by Todd Wilbur.

The secret to perfect pan pizza is pressing the dough into a well-oiled pan (Pizza Hut uses soybean oil), then the pan is covered and the dough rises in a heated cabinet for 45 to 60 minutes. When the dough is topped, the edge is sprayed with a butter-flavored “food release” and the pie is baked at 500 degrees F until perfectly browned on top. You can use a 9-inch, 12-inch, or 15-inch deep dish pizza pan or cake pan for my Pizza Hut Pan Pizza recipe, and you’ll want to preheat your oven with a pizza stone in it to simulate the type of oven used at the chain. The hot ceramic surface of the pizza stone will cause the oil in the pan to cook the bottom of the dough so that it’s brown and crispy, like an authentic pan pizza crust should be. 

I tried making the dough with cake flour, all-purpose flour, superfine “00” flour, bread flour and many combinations of these different flours which all contain varying amounts of gluten. I even tried rising the dough slowly in the refrigerator for various lengths of time, as long as up to four days. But after a month of testing and about 30 pan pizzas later, I found the best dough to be straight bread flour, and to let the dough rise at room temperature. I did find that if you let the dough rest for at least 4 hours before the final rise in the pizza pan you will get the best texture with the perfect chewy bite to it, just the Pizza Hut Pan Pizza. 

Try my clone recipes for Pizza Hut Stuffed Crust Pizza and Giordano's Famous Stuffed Deep Dish Pizza.

Source: Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 3 by Todd Wilbur.

Menu Description: "Tender chunks of chicken with seasonings and vegetables."

All the Marie Callender's restaurants try to maintain a homestyle ambiance, kind of like being at Grandma's house for dinner. The wallcoverings reflect styles of the thirties and forties and are complemented by dark mahogany-stained, wood-paneled walls and brass fixtures. You'll also find old-fashioned furnishings, many of them throwbacks to the forties, the time of this restaurant chain's founding fifty years ago.

The menu, which features meatloaf, pot roast, and country fried steak, reflects a satisfying homestyle cuisine that today is all too rare. If you wondered whether a company that is known for its great dessert pies could make a great pot pie...it can.

For my Marie Callender's Chicken Pot Pie copycat recipe, try to use small 16-ounce casserole dishes that measure 4 or 5 inches across at the top. Any casserole dishes that come close to this size will probably work; the yield will vary depending on what size dishes you decide to use.

Checkout my recipe for Marie Callender's cornbread and of course, pie. 

Source: Top Secret Restaurant Recipes by Todd Wilbur.

Menu Description: "A delicious combination of ham and turkey, plus Swiss and American cheeses on wheat bread. Lightly battered and fried until golden. Dusted with powdered sugar and served with red raspberry preserves for dipping."

It sounds crazy, but it tastes great: a triple-decker ham, turkey, and cheese sandwich is dipped in a tempura-style batter; fried to a golden brown; then served with a dusting of powdered sugar and a side of raspberry preserves. For over ten years, tons of cloning requests for this one have stacked up at TSR Central, so it was time for a road trip. There are no Bennigan's in Las Vegas, and since the Bennigan's chain made this sandwich famous, I headed out to the nearest Bennigan's in San Diego.

Back home, with an ice chest full of the original Bennigan's Monte Cristo sandwiches well-preserved and ready to work with, I was able to come up with this simple clone for a delicious sandwich that is crispy on the outside, and hot, but not greasy, on the inside (the batter prevents the shortening from penetrating). My Bennigan's Monte Cristo recipe makes one sandwich, which may be enough for two. If you want to make more, you'll most likely have to make more batter so that any additional sandwiches get a real good dunking.

Recently, Bennigan's restaurants across the country have been closing, but with this secret formula you can still experience the taste of the chain's signature sandwich. 

Try more of my copycat recipes for famous sandwiches here.

Source: Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 2 by Todd Wilbur.

Menu Description: "A large flour tortilla topped with melted Monterey Jack and cheddar cheeses, grilled chipotle chicken, shredded lettuce and pico de gallo. Rolled, sliced and served with a Mexi-ranch dipping sauce."

Take Applebee's delicious chicken chipotle chicken, roll it up in a large flour tortilla with lettuce, cheeses and fresh pico de gallo, and you've got a meal to wrap your hands around. Use my Applebee's Chicken Fajita Roll-up recipe below to make it at home. 

The Mexi-ranch dipping sauce is the perfect creamy compliment for this wrap, and you can use what's left over for a dressing on your next salad. The sauce recipe is actually just a kicked-up ranch dressing that includes a small amount of buttermilk in the ingredients list. But if you don't want to buy a whole carton of buttermilk to use just a tablespoon for this recipe, that's okay. Substitute the regular moo juice you've got sitting in the fridge. 

For the spicy marinade recipe, it's best to use ground chipotle pepper (dried smoked red jalapeño) made by McCormick. If you can't find that stuff, cut the amount in half and use cayenne pepper. For the cheeses, many major brands make a cheddar/Jack blend that will work great here if you'd rather not buy the cheeses separately. That's helpful if you're about to tip the limit for the express lane checkout line.

Find more recipes for your favorite Applebee's dishes here.

Source: Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 2 by Todd Wilbur.

Here's a dish from a rapidly growing Chinese food chain that should satisfy anyone who loves the famous marinated bourbon chicken found in food courts across America. The sauce is the whole thing here, and it's quick to make using my Panda Express Mandarin Chicken recipe below. You'll make the sauce right on your stove-top, then fire up the barbecue or indoor grill for the chicken. Then, whip up a little white rice to serve on the side. 

Panda Express - now 370 restaurants strong - is the fastest-growing Asian food chain in the world. You'll find these tasty little quick-service food outlets in supermarkets, casinos, sports arenas, college campuses, and malls across the country passing out free samples for the asking. 

You might also want try my Panda Express Honey Walnut Shrimp Recipe.

Source: "Even More Top Secret Recipes" by Todd Wilbur.

Not even Tony the Tiger is a match for the world’s most beloved toaster pastries. Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes is the best-selling cereal in the U.S., but Pop-Tarts are an even bigger seller for the food manufacturer, with $330 million in sales in 1996. The two-to-a-pack rectangular snacks were born in 1964, when Kellogg’s followed a competitor’s idea for breakfast pastries that could be heated through in an ordinary toaster. With the company’s experience in cereals and grains it was able to create pastries in a variety of flavors. Pop-Tarts have always dominated the toaster pastry market, but in the first half of the 1990s Nabisco was coming on strong with its own toaster pastries called Toastettes. Toastettes became so appealing to consumers because the package held eight pastries, while Pop-Tarts had six to a box. In June of 1996, Kellogg’s added two more Pop-Tarts to each box without changing the price, and Toastettes sales quickly dropped by 45 percent.

Another move against competitor Nabisco came that same year when Kellogg’s introduced its new line of low-fat Pop-Tarts. Nabisco had earlier introduced low-fat toaster-pastries in its SnackWell’s line, but Kellogg’s low-fat version of Pop-Tarts was a much better seller.

My Kellogg's Low-Fat Frosted Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tarts recipe makes eight, or a box’s worth of the toaster pastries. Be sure to roll the dough very flat when preparing the pastries, and toast them on the very lowest setting of your toaster. Watch the pastries closely and pop ‘em up if the frosting begins to turn brown.

Find recipes for more of your favorite Kellogg's products here.

Nutrition Facts
Serving size–1 pastry
Total servings–8
Calories per serving–219
Fat per serving–3g

Source: Low-Fat Top Secret Recipes by Todd Wilbur.

Menu Description: "Grilled chipotle chicken breast with guacamole and sour cream on a bed of greens tossed with two cheeses, pico de gallo, tortilla strips and our Mexi-ranch dressing."

Follow my Applebee's Santa Fe Salad recipe below to create a robust chipotle marinade that fills your chicken fillets with flavor. As you wait for the chicken to marinate, you have plenty of time to throw together the Mexi-ranch dressing and fresh pico de gallo. Now most of the work is done, and you're standing in front of the gate to salad heaven. When you're ready to enter, simply grill the chicken, assemble your salads and open wide.

You should know that if you don't have buttermilk for the dressing, and don't want to buy a whole carton to use just a single tablespoon, simply substitute regular milk. You'll find ground chipotle pepper where all the spices are stocked in the market: I use McCormick. If you can't track down ground chipotle, use ground cayenne pepper. Just be sure to measure roughly half the amount, since cayenne packs more heat than chipotle.

Find more recipes of your favorite Applebee's dishes here.

Source: Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 2 by Todd Wilbur.

The talented chefs at Benihana cook food on hibachi grills with flair and charisma, treating the preparation like a tiny stage show. They juggle salt and pepper shakers, trim food with lightning speed, and flip the shrimp and mushrooms perfectly onto serving plates or into their tall chef's hat.

One of the side dishes that everyone seems to love is the fried rice. At Benihana this dish is prepared by chefs with precooked rice on open hibachi grills, and is ordered a la cart to complement any Benihana entrée, including Hibachi Steak and Chicken. I like when the rice is thrown onto the hot hibachi grill and seems to come alive as it sizzles and dances around like a bunch of little jumping beans. Okay, so I'm easily amused.

My Benihana Japanese fried rice copycat recipe will go well with just about any Japanese entrée, and can be partially prepared ahead of time and kept in the refrigerator until the rest of the meal is close to done.

Re-create more of your favorite dishes from Benihana here.

Source: Top Secret Restaurant Recipes by Todd Wilbur.

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 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 mom 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 nicely matched the dough from Little Caesars in texture and flavor.

After recently discovering that Little Caesars Crazy Sauce is the same recipe as their marinara pizza sauce, I redesigned my Little Caesars Crazy Sauce recipe 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. The sauce will eventually cook 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. 

You can make 21 Crazy Puffs clones in 2 batches using a 12-cup muffin pan coated with butter-flavored oil spray. I've made sure to include instructions for both versions: pepperoni and cheese & herb. Because choices are nice.

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

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.

Protein is very powerful these days. According to a 2024 International Food Information Council survey, 71% of participants are trying to eat more protein. That's up from 67% in 2023, and 59% in 2022. Noting the trend, manufacturers have been developing ways to add protein to more products, and restaurants are following suit, as IHOP did with this new protein-packed stack.

For my IHOP Protein Power Pancakes recipe, I carefully measured ingredients and calculated protein so that your counterfeit pancakes have 10 grams of protein each, just like the real ones—a stack of four pancakes like you get in the restaurant weighs in at a hefty 40 grams of protein.

Also, as with the restaurant version, most protein is added as unflavored whey protein powder. I made sure to use the same combination of flour as the chain, including oat flour, which you can buy already ground or grind to flour yourself with a coffee grinder or small food processor.

Once your batter is mixed, cook the pancakes on a well-buttered flat grill or on two or three non-stick sauté pans to make at least two pancakes at a time. The recipe yields 16 pancakes, so cooking multiple flapjacks simultaneously will streamline the process.  

Check out my other IHOP recipe clones here.

In 2024, Jack-in-the-Box introduced the chain’s best-reviewed burger, the Smashed Jack, with a ¼-pound “smashed-inspired” burger, grilled onions, and a new secret sauce. A press release from Jack-in-the-Box claimed that consumers in a taste test picked the new Smashed Jack as the best burger compared to McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Burger King burgers.

You may have guessed that “smashed-inspired” means that these burgers aren’t prepared like burgers that are smashed with a press or heavy spatula on the grill—a process that triggers the Maillard reaction when amino acids and sugars are browned to give food a flavorful crust. But Jack-in-the-Box created a secret shortcut for speed and consistency that still gives the burgers that crust and the appearance of smashing without relying on cooks to actually smash them.

For my Jack-in-the-Box Smashed Jack copycat recipe, we’ll smash the burger for real, but we’ll start with a knockoff of the new Boss Sauce, which gets its smokey flavor from just a little bit of liquid smoke. Once that sauce is done, it’s time to cook the burger patty, which I found is best copied with ground Angus beef. Use a press or heavy spatula to press down on the burger as it cooks to create a browned crust on both sides of the patty.

After the burger is flipped, grilled onions are stacked on top, followed by American cheese. Then, the burger is finished with thick pickles and lots of your copycat Boss Sauce. This recipe shows you how to make one burger, but you’ll have enough leftover secret sauce to make several more.

If you're a fan of Jack in the Box Jumbo Jack or any of Jack's Shakes, or their famous tacos, click here for my clone recipes.

Chef Paul Wahlberg joined with his acting brothers Mark and Donnie Wahlberg to open the first Wahlburgers restaurant in Hingham, Massachusetts in 2011, and with the help of an A&E reality show in 2014, the chain experienced steady growth for over a decade, opening the 100^th restaurant in February 2024.

The famous family was a fantastic promotion machine for the chain, but let’s face it, the restaurant wouldn’t have become successful if the food didn't taste good. The secret to the chain’s great-tasting beef patties is a custom blend of Angus chuck, brisket, and short rib, and it’s the super secret Wahl Sauce that puts their burgers over the top. Once I tasted the chain’s signature “Our Burger,” it became clear that I needed to make a home copy of that special sauce, stat.

For my Wahlburgers Wahl Sauce copycat recipe, it takes just nine common ingredients to replicate the spread, with lots of finely minced onion and sriracha sauce as standout ingredients that contribute to the special taste. This formula will give you one cup of sauce to use on your home burgers or as a dip for a variety of finger foods, but let it sit for a bit before you use it so that the flavors can mingle.

Find more of my copycat recipes for famous sauces here.

Every March through November, Marie Callender’s sells fresh strawberry pies made with the chain’s signature flakey crust piled high with whole strawberries tossed in a sweet glaze and finished with a crown of whipped cream.

The pies are made-to-order to ensure the freshness of the berries, but the glaze that’s added to the beautiful berries tastes like the everyday goopy red stuff found in grocery store produce sections that’s usually made with corn syrup and other crud, and no natural fruit. For my Marie Callender’s Fresh Strawberry Pie copycat recipe, I set out to improve the glaze by making it with real strawberry puree, hoping to get a tastier finished product. Thankfully, it worked out. The new glaze was vibrant and fruity; it transformed into a nice gel and didn’t upstage the strawberries. This small change makes a strawberry pie that’s even better than the original.

I designed the glaze to use frozen strawberries, so it’s quick and easy, and I’m also including scratch recipes here for the whipped cream and pie crust. You can buy each of these pre-made to speed up your build, but taking a little time to make the whipped cream and/or crust from scratch will absolutely be worth the extra effort. Also, I slightly tweaked my previous Marie Callender’s pastry formula to make it more closely match the current pie crust served at the chain.

Try my Marie Callender's Fresh Strawberry Pie copycat recipe below, and find more of my Marie Callender's pie 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 how to improve 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 then systematically tweaked the formula through more than 35 batches, making minor adjustments each time. Through that process, I discovered the perfect ratio of brown sugar to white sugar improved texture 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 most reliable method.

Crumbl uses a large scoop to portion these cookies, but you can use your hands to form the dough into mounds with rough tops, and then be sure to bake the cookies on parchment paper. I found silicone baking mats to be too slippery, causing the cookie to spread from the bottom and split. And 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.

Find more famous cookie copycat recipes here.

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 started by rinsing 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.

Find more copycat recipes for famous sauces here.

Loose meat sandwiches were born in Iowa in 1926 when Maid-Rite started selling burgers made with ground beef that isn’t pressed into patties. These sandwiches quickly became a Midwest phenomenon, and they were often served with a spoon to scoop up the loose meat that would inevitably fall out. This dry and crumbly characteristic of the loose meat sandwich might be why, in 1930, a chef named Joe, as legend has it, created a tomato-based sauce, possibly with ketchup, which he mixed into the loose ground beef. Joe’s new sandwich had more flavor than its drier cousin, and the loose meat stayed in the bun.

Sloppy Joes became a common restaurant and diner menu choice for decades, with the sandwiches selling for as little as 10 cents. In 1969, Hunts brought Sloppy Joes home with the introduction of the first canned Sloppy Joe sauce that, when added to 1 pound of browned ground beef, made enough filling to feed a family of four. It was easy, and it was cheap.

The original sauce 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 and instead built the sauce with ketchup ingredients, including tomato paste, sugar, vinegar, and spices. My version is also easy and cheap and tastes like the real thing, but because it’s fresher, it tastes a little bit better.

Find more of my copycat recipes for iconic sandwiches here.

In March 2024, Taco Bell debuted the Cantina Chicken menu, featuring 2 types of tacos, a burrito, a quesadilla, and a chicken bowl, each starring the chain’s new slow-roasted chicken. The Mexican chain also introduced avocado salsa made with peppers, tomatillos, lime, cilantro, and avocado as a companion to the latest items. But unlike all the other hot sauces, extra packets of the new sauce cost 20 cents each. And the 2½ teaspoons of salsa they hold doesn’t go very far. But 3½ cups sure does.

For my Taco Bell Avocado Verde Salsa copycat recipe, I found there was no need to go through the extra time-consuming step of roasting fresh tomatillos and peppers when canned ingredients worked so great. The avocado, lime juice, and cilantro will be fresh, and the dry ingredients, namely the onion and garlic, will rehydrate nicely as the salsa rests.

The first ingredient in Taco Bell’s version is oil, but for our purposes, we can reduce the ratio. Taco Bell chefs most likely add all that oil to their salsa to prevent the avocado from oxidizing and turning brown, thereby extending its shelf life. The oil has the same function in my version, but I call for ½ cup, which is much less percentage-wise than the real thing. The oil will indeed extend the life of your salsa, but feel free to reduce the amount substantially if you plan to eat the salsa within a couple of days and prefer to avoid the added fat.

Followed as written, this recipe makes 3 1/2 cups of salsa or the equivalent of 67 Taco Bell blister packs. 

Try more of my Taco Bell copycat recipes here.

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.

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.

The fruity lollipop with gum inside is Charms' bestselling product, but the cool combo candy was the brainchild of a different candy company. Thomas T. Tidwell of Triple T Co. invented and patented his method for encasing gum inside candy in the 1960s, and sold his new lollipop, Triple Treat, for a short time. In 1973, Tidwell sold the product idea to the Charms Candy Company who renamed it Blow Pop, and for over 50 years the famous pop has been enjoyed by millions of happy mouths.

I’m not privy to the details of Tidwell’s method, but I can see by the vertical seam on a real Blow Pop that it's probably made by sealing two halves of the pop together, one half with gum and one half without. I tried various silicone lollipop molds for my Charms Blow Pop copycat recipe with little success and decided instead to create a technique using half of a slightly altered cake pop mold. I first poured half of the pop into the molds, added the gum on a stick, and when it hardened I removed it, poured the other half of the candy into the mold, and added the hardened first half on top. When all was set, I had perfectly spherical pops with seams just like the original. And it didn’t seem to bother anyone that my pops were more than twice as big as the real thing.

I designed my recipe to call for 1 dram of LorAnn Oils which you can find online. The original Blow Pops come in five flavors, and I’ve got four of them for you here: cherry, grape, watermelon, and sour apple. I also made a batch of cinnamon pops just for fun and added those instructions to the Tidbits below. Real Blow Pops don’t come in cinnamon flavor, but after tasting these, you might wish they did.

Click here to make more famous candy at home. 

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 order 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 flavor of 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, preferably one 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. 

For a delicious slice of your favorite iconic American pie, Marie Callender’s is the place to go. The chain serves tasty breakfast, lunch, and dinner entrees, but it's mostly famous for great homestyle pies, and the classic coconut cream pie is no exception. Like many other pies I’ve hacked from Marie Callender's (Pumpkin Pie, Double Cream Blueberry Pie, Chocolate Satin Pie), the Coconut Cream Pie is sold in your store’s freezer section. But none of these frozen pies are as good as a fresh one you make from scratch. 

The filling for my Marie Callender's Coconut Cream Pie copycat recipe takes just 10 minutes to make, and if you use a premade pie crust, this becomes a very low-impact recipe. I recommend you make the whipped cream topping from scratch using the recipe here that will produce much better whipped cream than anything from a can, and it's also quick. The most time-consuming step is making the dollops of whipped cream that cover the top of the pie, but even that’s pretty fun.

If you’d like to make your pie crust from scratch, I’m including a recipe from my previous Marie Callender’s pie hacks. It’ll add time to your build, but the extra effort will be worth it.

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

This top entrée pick from Cheesecake Factory is a classic dish, but its preparation is far from traditional, and perhaps that's why it's so popular.

The creamy scampi sauce is flavored with a handful of whole roasted garlic cloves, plus shallot, basil, and tomato. The shrimp are lightly battered and fried until golden, then arranged upright around the plate to keep their crunching coats from sogging.

In addition to all the secrets you’ll need to assemble two servings of my Cheesecake Factory Shrimp Scampi copycat recipe, I’ve also included a cool technique for easily roasting the garlic cloves in just 15 to 20 minutes, and you won’t even need to peel the cloves. After your garlic cools, the skins will slip right off.

Now, how about dessert? Find my copycat recipes for Cheesecake Factory's signature cheesecakes here.

Fans of Cheesecake Factory’s Steak Diane don’t seem to care that the dish isn’t a traditional take on the classic dish. The restaurant chain’s version is indeed served with mushrooms and medallions of beef tenderloin just like the old-school recipe, but you won’t find any Dijon mustard, Worcestershire sauce, cognac, or cream that one would expect in a true Steak Diane. Instead, the chain douses steak with the same Madeira sauce served with its Chicken Madeira entrée, and it's delicious.

I hacked the chain’s Chicken Madeira many years ago in Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 2 but was happy for the chance to go back and improve the great sauce. After some fiddling, I came up with an improved formula that calls for less wine and uses a more thorough reduction to intensify the flavors. When shopping for ingredients for my Cheesecake Factory Steak Diane copycat recipe, it's okay to pick the least expensive Madeira wine on the shelf. Just know that Madeira wines have different characteristics, so your final flavor may slightly vary from the restaurant version.

For your tenderloins, start with thick steaks, since you’ll be slicing the portions in half through the middle, making them thinner. You’ll need 7 to 8 small steak portions to be sliced in half for 14 to 16 medallions. 

Now, how about dessert? Find my copycat recipes for Cheesecake Factory's signature cheesecakes here.