Introduction

In 1993, regardless of wind, rain, or snow, I set out on weekly trips to my local B. Dalton Bookseller to see how my first book, Top Secret Recipes, was selling, and to buy the latest—often hefty—books on food and cooking for my collection. At the time, I never suspected that one day we would have the ability to fill our personal libraries effortlessly with books downloaded in a digital format through thin air or via computers without ever leaving the comfort of our cozy homes.

Today I am still publishing my Top Secret Recipes books with the great gang at Plume, an imprint of Penguin Books. The books have always been top sellers in bookstores, book clubs, wholesale stores, and on QVC, and now I am super-stoked to be the first author at Plume to bring you this eSpecial digital book: The 25 Greatest Top Secret Recipes, which features a special handpicked collection of twenty-five of my original famous food clone recipes developed over the past three decades.

Creating each Top Secret Recipe is a challenging and painstaking process. I use a variety of techniques to break down and reverse-engineer each of these brand-name foods so that I can rebuild an entirely original carbon copy of the dish in a basic kitchen using only common ingredients. Many attempts are required to get each formula just right on my end, but the final result I present to you is a recipe with the fewest steps possible that guides you through creating a dish that looks and tastes just like the original brand-name product.

If you want perfect clones of these products, I strongly suggest that you follow the steps of each recipe exactly as presented. But that is not always how folks use my books. Many exercise their creative culinary freedom and tweak the recipes to suit individual dietary requirements and personal tastes. You want a cloned Oreo cookie with Triple Stuf? Go for it. You want your Big Mac with a ground turkey patty and low-fat mayo in the special sauce? You’re the boss, and now you can always have it your way. These formulas are yours to experiment with and to customize so that you can create a special twist on the famous food that is not obtainable in any restaurant or store. And as an added bonus, you will almost always save money by making these cloned dishes at home (versus buying the originals)—which is great news in challenging economic times. Plus you’ll have fun in the process, and your friends and family will be amazed by your results.

To create this eSpecial digital book, I pored through seven top-selling Top Secret Recipes books and found the top twenty-five most requested and most popular clone recipes out of the more than a thousand recipes I have developed.

Some of the recipes included here are for popular products from fast food chains—such as McDonald’s French Fries, KFC Cole Slaw, and Wendy’s Chili—while others show you how to duplicate packaged products you find in stores, such as Stouffer’s Macaroni & Cheese and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. The balance of the recipes will show you how to duplicate the tastes of your favorite dishes from America’s most popular casual restaurant chains, including Red Lobster Cheddar Bay Biscuits, Chili’s Baby Back Ribs, and Applebee’s Bloomin’ Onion.

Each recipe you make from this tasty collection is iconic American fare enjoyed by millions, and many of these products were likely created years ago in a home kitchen that probably had less equipment in it than you have in yours today. We’re bringing these foods back around to where they were once born—away from the factories, out of the hands of assembly-line cooks, and into your warm kitchen, where food cooked with special care and a dose of love seems to always taste a little bit better.

As I wrote in my first book, Top Secret Recipes, “What was once a world of home-cooked meals is now a world of prescribed and proven secret formulas. This book is an occasion to combine the best of those two worlds.” Every book that I have written since celebrates those words.

Please enjoy this eSpecial book. And as always: Happy cloning!

—Todd Wilbur