Author Biography

For more than 25 years,Todd Wilbur has been reverse-engineering America's most iconic foods for his series of 11 Top Secret Recipes cookbooks. With over 5 million books in print, the self-proclaimed "food hacker" has appeared in over 100 media outlets including The New York Times, People Magazine, Newsweek, The Daily News, Entertainment Weekly, The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Today Show, Good Morning America, Fox & Friends, The Show, and The Food Network. His website is the #1 copycat recipes website with 1 million visitors every month. He lives with his family in Las Vegas, NV.

Review

"[Wilbur's] problem isn't that the recipes he's devised aren't good enough, it's that they're too good."—Entertainment Weekly
 
"There is something magically compelling about the idea of making such foods at home...The allure is undeniable, and [the books are] stuffed with tidbits and lore you're unlikely to find anywhere else. These probably come as close as you can get to the original recipes."—Boston Herald
 
"This is the cookbook to satisfy all your cravings."—Juli Huss, author of The Faux Gourmet
 
"The recipes are easy to follow and...by preparing your own versions of restaurant meals you will almost always save money."—Arizona Daily Star
 
"[Wilbur's] recipes use everyday supermarket ingredients to bring brand-name foods to the home kitchen. Perhaps not surprisingly, his recipes are not complex. If anything, they reflect how easy home cooking can be."—Star Tribune (Minneapolis—St. Paul)
 
"The assignment: Find out how to make the tasty Jack Daniels Grill Sauce used by T.G.I. Friday's restaurants. The client: Oprah Winfrey. The gumshoe: Todd Wilbur. Mission Impossible for even the most savvy food expert. But not so for Todd Wilbur, a crackerjack culinary sleuth."—Pocono Record
 
"Many of [Wilbur's] dishy imitations come, like a box of Cracker Jacks, with a surprise inside."—Mademoiselle

Review Quote

"[Wilbur's] problem isn't that the recipes he's devised aren't good enough, it's that they're too good."

Excerpt from Book

THANKS INTRODUCTION The first title I gave this book when I started writing it more than three years ago was Joy of Cloning. Not because I was scheming to pick up new readers who stumbled upon my cookbook while searching for Irma S. Rombauer''s Joy of Cooking--although I admit that wouldn''t have been such a terrible thing--but really because, as Rombauer imparted in her culinary classic, the process of entertaining and creating delicious food for friends and family is a true joy. And I think that sentiment pertains as much, if not more, to this niche of cooking. There are practical reasons why we clone famous foods, which I will explore later in more detail, such as saving money and duplicating the taste of our favorite dishes with ingredients that we prefer. But the enjoyment we experience when everyone is amazed by the successful re-creation of a delicious dish they thought they could only get in a restaurant or in a package sets this type of cooking apart from any other. Over time, as this book evolved from a cookbook with dozens of photographs into one with hundreds of photographs detailing each important step of every recipe, the current title, Step-by-Step, made more sense. A NEW LOOK WITH PHOTOS I considered using photographs when I began writing my first Top Secret Recipes cookbook in 1987. I studied photography in college--even took second place in an L.A. Times photography contest with ten thousand entries while I was in school--but at that time I only knew how to process black-and-white photos in the darkroom, and digital cameras were not yet the norm. I wanted to use some art that I could make myself so I decided to illustrate the books with hand-drawn blueprint-style schematics that nicely suited the "top secret" theme of the books. Over a period of twenty-five years, working on a tiny worn-out drafting table using a combination of stenciling and freehand drawing, I inked a total of 450 blueprints to illustrate the first ten Top Secret Recipes cookbooks. As the years moved on I heard from an increasing number of cookbook buyers and TSR fans who expressed a strong desire for photographs in the cookbooks. I decided it was time to leave the blueprints behind and begin a new look for the Top Secret Recipes cookbooks with step-by-step color photos for each of the recipes. This is the first copycat recipes cookbook that guides you with photographs through every important step of the replicating process for each of the brand-name clone dishes. By using the photos along with the instructions, you will now have a clearer understanding of how each part of each recipe is made, virtually guaranteeing that all of these famous dishes come out as intended, so that you will produce delicious and accurate copies of the popular brand-name foods that everyone loves to eat. I kept the photos simple and shot many from a first-person perspective, helping you to see exactly how the cooking process should progress in front of you. Since I work alone, it''s a little tricky to pose, focus, and shoot this way, but I dig the angle so it''s worth the extra effort. When the last ingredient was added, I had shot more than 35,000 photos to get the 1,100+ pics that made it into the book. WHAT''S IN STEP-BY-STEP All 125 recipes in this cookbook are new, never-before-published recipes. Most of them (a total of 75) are formulas that I have not cloned in any of my cookbooks. I call them "First-Time Hacks." I chose these recipes from a long list of fan requests that I have compiled over many years and from researching what is popular in today''s food business. Some of these items have been big sellers for many years like McDonald''s McRib Sandwich (here), The Cheesecake Factory Stuffed Mushrooms (here), Carrabba''s Italian Grill Steamed Mussels (here), Gatorade Orange Sports Drink (here), Ben & Jerry''s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Ice Cream (here), and Legal Sea Foods Legal''s Signature Crab Cakes (here). Some of the First-Time Hacks you''ll find here are top-selling newer items like Chili''s Chipotle Chicken Flatbread (here), McDonald''s Premium Sweet Chili Chicken McWrap (here), and Wendy''s Pretzel Bacon Cheeseburger (here). The other fifty recipes in the book are what I call "Improved Hacks." These are some of my most popular classic clone recipes that I have gone back and re-hacked to make much better than my original previously published versions. I tapped into some new techniques and tricks that I''ve picked up over the last two and a half decades of cloning foods to make these classic recipes even better culinary carbon copies of their famous brand-name counterparts. For these improved hacks I chose my most popular recipes for which I had discovered new information that helps makes the recipes better, or recipes that needed an update because the original product formulas they clone had been altered. If you like my early version of KFC Cole Slaw, then you''ll really like the new hack here where dairy is no longer in the ingredients list. If you''re a fan of the Tony Roma''s Ribs recipe I published almost twenty years ago, then you''re going to be crazy about the new version in this book, which incorporates a restaurant trick I learned to make smoky ribs at home without a smoker (here). The Olive Garden Salad Dressing (here) is better now, as is Wendy''s Chili (here), Applebee''s Fiesta Lime Chicken (here), and El Pollo Loco Fire-Grilled Chicken (here), just to name a few. To make it clear which of the two categories a recipe falls under I have tagged each one with either "First-Time Hack" or "Improved Hack." Eight of the recipes included here (some are Improved Hacks and some are First-Time Hacks) were developed from information I gathered on the eight episodes of my CMT TV show Top Secret Recipe. In the show I travel around the country in my food lab on wheels to the headquarters of some of the country''s biggest food companies and attempt to re-create their famous products. I am given three days to gather enough information--using whatever sneaky means I can muster--to re-create a dish that can fool three judges in a blind taste test. Sometimes I am successful, sometimes not so much. Three days is not a lot of time to hack dishes that were developed and perfected by these companies over years of research and development, so the task is a challenging one--especially when the judges are often picked by the company whose product I''m hacking. Every recipe from the show is here: Cinnabon Classic Cinnamon Roll (here), Chili''s Grilled Baby Back Ribs (here), Dippin'' Dots Banana Split Ice Cream (here), Domino''s Large Cheese Pizza (here), KFC Original Recipe Fried Chicken (here), Mrs. Fields Chocolate Chip Cookies (here), Outback Steakhouse Bloomin'' Onion (here), and P.F. Chang''s Chicken Lettuce Wraps (here). BETTER RECIPES, BETTER RESULTS With this book I have made a few changes to the way I write recipes. These tweaks should help give you more consistent and reliable results that closely match the finished products I intend for you to create. Because weight is often a more accurate way to measure certain ingredients like flour and powdered sugar, I specify weight measurements for ingredients that are best measured that way. I recommend that you get yourself a kitchen scale and measure ingredients by weight whenever possible. This measuring method will give you more consistent results, especially when baking. If you don''t have a kitchen scale, don''t worry. I also list the volume measurements for those ingredients. Because the amount of salt in salted butter can vary from brand to brand, I am now creating all recipes with unsalted butter. This small change will help give you results that are closer to mine. In previous Top Secret Recipes books I often use ingredient shortcuts to make the recipes easy, but this sometimes results in a finished product that could have tasted better if I had used a scratch method. For example, my previous version of Chili''s Molten Chocolate Cake (here) called for a boxed cake mix for the cake and bottled fudge for the molten center. In this book I have redesigned the recipe by making the chocolate cake and fudge filling from scratch. It takes a little more time to write recipes this way, but by creating scratch versions of these formulas I can make adjustments in individual ingredients so that the finished product is a better clone of the original recipe. There are several other re-hacks in this book that I have converted to scratch recipes to give you improved results: the Hostess Twinkie (here), which formerly called for a box of pound cake mix, and the Red Lobster Cheddar Bay Biscuits (here), which called for Bisquick baking mix, are a couple other examples. I have also made an effort to create most of the First-Time Hacks in this book with scratch ingredients for more accurate and great-tasting clone recipes. I have included an info box at the top of each recipe to give you an idea of the time required for each recipe and the difficulty level. I estimated the time required for the active and inactive preparation of each recipe. The "Active Prep" time is the hands-on time required to make the recipe, while the "Inactive Prep" time is the passive time required to make the recipe, such as when ingredients are marinating or something is baking. In addition, I have estimated the difficulty of each recipe by tagging the recipe with either "Easy," "Medium," or "Hard." If you are a novice cook I suggest you use only the recipes that are either "Easy" or "Medium" difficulty. These recipes make up the bulk of the recipes in this book. There are, however, a handful of recipes here that I consider to be "Hard." A little more cooking experience is suggested for these recipes and the time required to make these recipes is considerably longer. You up for the challe

Description for Sales People

The Top Secret Recipes series (Plume) has more than five million books in print. Todd Wilbur is a top-selling QVC cookbook author. More than 1100 photographs illustrate the recipes. Wilbur has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Today Show and Good Morning America. UK readers will be keen to duplicate Big Macs and those American chains they can't find at home.

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