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It took six years from the day I started writing the first book, Top Secret Recipes, for it to land on bookstores shelves.
Not having a formal culinary education made the process of writing the book especially tedious since I had to learn the science of cooking and figure out how to adapt what I had learned to recreating well-known products. I see now that this worked to my advantage since the recipes were written in such a way that the book was easy to use for folks who, like me, didn’t necessarily have a lot of kitchen experience. My recipes required no fancy techniques, commercial equipment, or hard-to-find ingredients.
As I was putting the book together I was working as a TV news reporter in Arizona and Pennsylvania, so I tapped into my experience gathering information to help create the recipes. I interviewed fast food restaurant employees. I educated myself by reading a variety of cookbooks and watching cooking shows on TV. I went to the library to gather information on food production, all the while wishing that someone would hurry up and invent the Internet. I sought out exactly what I needed to know for each recipe on my list, and after several years I had produced the cookbook that previously existed only in my mind.
My art background came in handy when I decided that schematic-style blueprints would be the perfect way to illustrate the “top secret” recipes. I created each of the blueprints by hand using drafting tools and black ink pens that I bought at a nearby art supply store. When the art was done I made copies of the entire manuscript, sent it out to 30 publishers, and waited impatiently for a response, which I was hoping would come soon because, in an unexplainable leap of faith, I had just quit my job. Thankfully, I didn’t have to wait long. Within a few weeks I had offers from five different houses who wanted to publish Top Secret Recipes. Of the five, I chose the biggest one, Penguin, only because at the time they were publishing books by a guy named Stephen King, and I figured if they were good enough for him, they probably knew what they were doing.
When the book finally came out it in 1993 it was so different from any other cookbooks on the market that it got incredible media attention. I wound up on several national TV shows and in newspapers, and book sales were off the hook.
 The success of Top Secret Recipes led to the next book, More Top Secret Recipes, which was more of the same type of convenience food clone recipes and it also sold very well. For the third book though, I thought I’d try something a little different. For Top Secret Restaurant Recipes, instead of creating clone recipes for fast food, snack cakes and candy bars, I decided to clone recipes for the signature dishes from the country’s most popular casual restaurant chains such as Chili’s, Cheesecake Factory, and T.G.I. Friday’s. This book was nearly triple the size of the first two books and it was my most ambitious project yet, but I had much more cooking experience under my belt and the book turned out really great. I even wound up appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show with that book, which, for any author, is the absolute best show to be on. Today, over 13 years later, that book still sells like crazy and is the all-time top seller in the series.
After that I wrote two low-fat clone recipe books (Low-Fat Top Secret Recipes & Top Secret Recipes – Lite!), a book of drink clones (Sodas, Smoothies, Spirits & Shakes), a couple more convenience food books (Even More Top Secret Recipes and Top Secret Recipes Unlocked) and another book of casual restaurant chain clones (Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 2). This next book due out in September, Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 3, is the tenth book I’ve written, and a personal milestone. Over 1000 recipes, 450 blueprints, and ten books, all inspired by a simple chain letter that triggered a career of cloning recipes which has now lasted for over half of my life.
(Excerpted from Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 3, to be released on 9/28/2010)
Several years went by before I saw my next clone recipe. In 1987 the second clone recipe I tried showed up in my mailbox in the form of a chain letter. At the time, these snail mail chain letters were similar to the chain letter spam that we get in our e-mail boxes today: Someone tells an inspirational/sad/angry story and asks you to make a copy of the letter and send it to five of your friends. If you break the chain, the letter warns, bad things will happen. Ooh, scary.
The chain letter I got told the story of a woman who visited a Mrs. Fields cookie store and asked for the chocolate chip cookie recipe. They told her that she could buy the recipe for two-fifty, and that she could put the charge on her credit card. She certainly could afford the bargain price of $2.50 cents for the recipe, so she immediately handed over her card. But several weeks later when the woman received her credit card statement she was shocked to see a charge for $250! When she went back to the cookie store they refused to refund her money since she had already received the recipe. So she decided to get even by sending the recipe along with her “story” out in a chain letter, which then proceeded to quickly spread across the country.
To this day no one knows who created that chain letter, but the story is obviously made up – Mrs. Fields would never sell her trade secret. And the recipe produced a cookie that tasted nowhere near as yummy as one made by Mrs. Fields. When I tried the recipe I knew it couldn’t possibly be real since the cookie was downright gross. Just to compare I drove to the Mrs. Fields store at a nearby mall to get the real thing, and that’s when I saw the sign. On the countertop was a placard that completely discredited the chain letter recipe and its story – the same chain letter that I had received. “Wow,” I thought, “this recipe must have become very popular.” I eventually found out that the company had posted similar signs in each of its 450 cookie stores! Indeed, this one little “secret” recipe had become quite a phenomenon. That’s the exact moment I realized that people love copycat recipes, especially if the recipes produce copies of well-known products.
My next step was to find out if I was able to improve the recipe so that it tasted more like the original chocolate chip cookie. It was just a cookie after all, and I knew how to make cookies. I got to work in the kitchen and over several days, after making a huge mess and a dozen or so batches, I finally had done it: I had baked my very own Mrs. Fields chocolate chip cookie clone from scratch in my own kitchen. I had just created my first clone recipe of a famous brand-name food!
I shared the cookies with friends, with family, with co-workers, and asked them all what they thought the cookies tasted like. When everyone said, “A Mrs. Fields cookie,” I had the confirmation I needed. I decided to create a bunch more clone recipes which would hopefully develop into a cookbook unlike any that had been published before. I got right to work. I found my Kahlua recipe from college, and improved it. Now, I had two recipes!
I had no way of knowing it at the time, but this was the very beginning of an adventure that would continue through the next two decades.
(Excerpted from Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 3, to be released on 9/28/2010)
 My first encounter with a clone recipe was in college. I was a freshman, and as is the case with most first-year college students, I had very little money. This was an unfortunate situation for many reasons, but especially because living right down the hall of my dormitory was a group of girls who really loved drinking Kahlua, and they really loved boys who gave them bottles of it. To show their devotion to the expensive coffee liqueur they would peel the fabric seal off the neck of each bottle they finished and proudly tape it to the outside of their dorm room door. By Christmas their door was about half-covered with the little booze trophies and the throw rug in their room smelled like Black Russians.
One day my buddy turned me onto a fifth-generation photocopy of a recipe someone had given him. It listed 5 ingredients – vodka, sugar, water, instant coffee, and vanilla – that when cooked together under the right conditions would produce a liqueur that tasted exactly like Kahlua. This was too good to be true! We immediately got to a kitchen and converted the cheapest vodka we could find into the party girls’ beverage of choice, loaded it into empty Kahlua bottles, and anxiously awaited the weekend. When we presented our female friends with a couple bottles of “special Kahlua” the party was on. And they loved it! The liqueur tasted exactly like Kahlua, but what we didn’t realize was that the proof was close to double what’s in the real stuff! You can imagine the shenanigans that ensued when everyone downed the usual number of drinks but with twice the alcohol content they were used to. It’s no wonder nobody noticed when we took the empty bottles home with us at the end of the night to refill again for the following weekend.
(Excerpted from Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 3, to be released on 9/28/2010)
At the age of 12 I was consumed with secrets and sweets.
It was then that I saw the price of candy bars increasing from 15 cents to 20 cents each. As a true candy lover – I was your typical kid, after all — this 25 percent increase in price was devastating. Each day I rode my bike for miles around Orange County, California searching out every liquor store, convenience store, and supermarket where I could spend my lawn-mowing money on any remaining inventory of candy bars that still had “15 cents” printed on their wrappers. To me these wrappers were a precious collector’s item — a symbol of my vanishing pre-teen candy-loving years.
 After spending several months finding as many of the 15-cent wrappers that I could, I continued to build my collection by saving every wrapper for each size of every candy bar on the market. Because I always ate what was inside each of those wrappers I tasted practically every candy bar sold in the U.S. from 1976 to 1978. I noticed how each candy bar was made and I studied the list of ingredients on the packaging. After carefully removing and consuming the contents from the packaging, I stored the wrappers in scrapbooks and shoeboxes until I had several hundred in my collection. I stopped collecting the wrappers a couple years later when the price of candy bars increased again, this time to 25 cents each.
While writing my first cookbook, Top Secret Recipes, 12 years after I started my candy bar wrapper project, I found myself in a kitchen creating clone recipes for some of the same candy bars that I had collected and inspected as a kid, including Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Snickers, Almond Roca, Mounds, and Almond Joy. I eventually cloned several others for later books, including Baby Ruth, Milky Way, 3 Musketeers, Twix, Payday, Nestle Crunch, York Peppermint Pattie, Mars Bar, 100 Grand Bar, and many more. As it turns out, my hobby as a kid studying candy bars and their ingredients had planted a seed in me that would later sprout into a facet of my career.
The money I didn’t squander on candy I spent at magic shops. In addition to obsessing over candy bars at 12-years-old, I had become fascinated with illusionists — back then these guys were cool. I bought dozens of magic props and piles of books about magic because I absolutely had to know how all the magicians did their amazing tricks. For me, watching a magician perform on TV was more about figuring out how the tricks were done rather than sitting back and being amazed. You might think that knowing all the secrets would demystify the performance and ruin the experience, but I found that  understanding the details behind the scenes gave me a larger appreciation of all the work that went into the craft. I actually enjoyed the show even more when I knew how all the tricks worked.
People who create good food have something in common with magicians. They too are artists in a specialized craft often reluctant to reveal their secrets. And just as earlier in life when I was compelled to uncover the secrets of the magicians who demonstrate their skills on stage, I now spend my time figuring out how the “magicians of the kitchen” perform their tricks. But what makes my current obsession more challenging than my hobby as a younger man is that there are no shops selling the secrets I now seek to uncover. I must figure out these culinary tricks all on my own.
It’s only recently that I realized that these two seemingly unrelated hobbies from the same moment in my childhood were the first signs of character traits which would guide me toward my career destiny.
(Excerpted from Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 3, to be released on 9/28/2010)
Back out to tour a few more cities with the new book, I stayed at the Hermitage Hotel in Nashville. Great hotel. And there’s this very cool retro bathroom downstairs, across from the Capitall Grill restaurant.
I don’t usually take pictures of bathrooms. This would be the first.
According to this plaque there have been many other cameras in this bathroom before mine. Even women pop in, but none showed up when I was there.
This may be the most famous bathroom I’ve ever adjusted myself in.
While staying in Nashville, I got a tip to try something called “hot chicken.” Nashville made this particular dish famous. Really. I swear. Google it. You’ll see.
And when you’re on a mission for the best hot chicken in town, this is the place you have to go: Prince’s. So I went.
The inside of this joint not much to look at and there aren’t many seats, so you’ll probably want to get the chicken “to go.” You order from this little window inside and wait at least 20 minutes to get your food. The chicken comes mild, medium, hot or extra hot. I told Minnie that I can handle hot. She raised an eyebrow and asked me, “Have you had hot before?”
I said, “No, but I can handle it.” I like hot food. She grabbed a slice of white bread and rubbed some of that sauce on it and told me to eat it, which I did. My tongue began to burn, my face turned red, my heart began to race, and my eyes teared up.
“Yeah, medium will be fine.” I told her. I ordered some water, found a seat, chugged the water, and recovered from my near trauma over the next 20 minutes.
When my number was called, this is what was passed to me through the window: One-quarter of a chicken that’s been breaded and fried, dunked in a secret sauce and stacked on two slices of white bread. The dish is finished with a random pile of dill pickles slices on top.
I know, it doesn’t really look like much. But after one bite I decided that this might be the best fried chicken I’ve ever had. The breading was thick and crispy, and the sauce was filled with big flavor followed by big heat. It reminded me of breaded-style buffalo wings, but the sauce was way better than any I’ve ever had on wings.
They may call this sauce “medium,” but after four bites I was breaking out in a sweat, and my eyes were tearing up all over again. But the flavor is so good, you can’t stop eating. You suffer the heat, drink lots of fluids, and suck it down.
If you’re ever in Nashville, and you like really hot food, you must check out this chicken.
Denver was the last stop on the tour. My hotel was right down the street from this area called Larimer Square. This is where I found a great restaurant called Rioja.
I went twice to Rioja while I was there, because I had to have this appetizer again. It’s called “Fresh Bacon.” It’s a curry-scented braised pork belly sitting in a fresh garbanzo bean puree.
Fresh Bacon is a signature dish here, and it’s amazing. I resisted the temptation to reverse-engineer it so that I might one day recreate it at home. I just sat there with a glass of red wine and enjoyed it.
My last TV appearance in Denver was at NBC on a show called Colorado & Company. Rob Schneider was also on the show promoting his standup appearance that night at Comedy Works.
They threw Rob onto the cooking set with me just before the commercial to tease his segment coming up next. He worked over the dough for the clone of McDonald’s Cinnamon Melts and generally goofed around with sharp instruments.
It went over so well that I hear he is now in talks with a couple major networks for a new cooking show called “Doin’ it in the Kitchen with Deuce Bigalow, Male Gigalo.”
I was in Philadelphia for an appearance at FOX 29 in Philadelphia today. Here’s a shot from the end of the show after Mike Jerrick (formerly on Morning Show with Mike & Juliet) ate a couple things from the book that are packed with sugar. He doesn’t usually eat sugar.
Look at him go — he’s doing the “sugar-high jig.”
After the show I set out to visit three top cheesesteak joints in The City of Brotherly Love for a down-and-dirty, loosen-the-belt-a-notch, Philly cheesesteak taste-off.
At each location I order the cheesesteak with grilled onions (”wit”), and chose the cheese that is considered the house specialty.
First stop is Tony Luke’s. Here the cheesesteaks are made with sliced rib-eye, and I order mine with white American cheese and wait about 4 minutes to get it. The bread here is perfectly fresh, but with a bite. Not too soft. And there’s lots of meat in there. I eat almost the whole thing but was forced to pitch about a quarter of the sandwich to save room for more cheesesteaks down the road.
Next stop is Geno’s Steaks. This place has the most colorful building and the most colorful characters inside. Hey look, there’s the owner, Joey Vento!
Now let’s get to the food.
I order the specialty of the house: One steak wit onions and Whiz (Cheeze Whiz), and it’s ready in about 20 seconds. Unfortunately the small amount of meat on my sandwich is lost in the large roll, and the bread has no character. Whiz tastes like fake cheese to me, so it ruined the overall flavor of the cheesesteak. And the sandwich would definitely have benefited from more meat.
And some ketchup.
The final stop is Pat’s King of Steaks, which is right across the street from Geno’s. Here I get the steak with provolone and it’s in my hands in about 30 seconds. The first thing I notice is that the provolone is laid into the roll and the steak is piled on top of it, which means it’s not melted. The sandwich would be much tastier if the cheese is worked into the meat on the grill a bit before loading the roll.
When I go to take a bite out of this one a river of beef juice slides down my arm. Good thing I was standing.
But once I get my mouth around this sandwich, I like what I taste. The meat is good, the sandwich is loaded, and the roll is exactly what you expect from a Philly Cheeseteak: Good texture, good flavor, with a slight chew.
The verdict:
A great Philly cheesesteak starts with a good roll. It shouldn’t be too big or you won’t taste the meat. And it should be slightly chewy, yet fresh.
It’s also important to use good quality beef, and the cheese should be entirely melted and combined with the meat so that every bite is a good one.
The only steak joint that got it all right was Tony Luke’s. You might have to wait longer for your steak here, but it’s worth it. The other spots didn’t take the time to work the cheese into the meat. They rushed the product, and it showed.
Tony Luke’s makes cheesesteaks the way I think great Philadelphia cheesesteak should be made, with good ingredients and with Brotherly Love. These steaks taste like Philly and not like something you’d get at a parking lot carnival in, say, Las Vegas.
Pat’s comes in at a close second.
As for Geno’s? Sorry, Joey. You’re a cool cat, but today your steaks were not my favorite. Perhaps it was the Whiz? I don’t like Whiz so I probably shouldn’t have ordered it that way. Maybe I should go back and try yours again with American? That would be a proper taste test.
And come to think of it, I do have another day here.
Right now though, I think I need a nap.
How cold is it in Chicago during the holidays? It was 2 degrees when I got there in December, and that’s farenheit! I totally did not pack for such crazy cold so I layered 4 shirts over another 4 shirts with another shirt on top, and went hunting for chow.
Good thing I could keep warm inside my stretch limo here.
Okay, that’s not my limo. I walked.
First stop is Portillo’s for Chicago-style hot dogs. I went there first not only because I’ve heard good things about these dogs, but also because it was really close to my hotel and I felt my face falling off.
I really love these dogs. Portillo’s slaps an oversized hot dog into a fresh poppy seed bun, adds mustard, relish, onions, tomatoes, peppers, and a wedge of dill pickle for a deliciously messy masterpiece that falls everywhere when you bite into it.
I liked the dogs so much that I went there three times in three days for the same thing each time (is that weird?): 2 Portillo Dogs with the works. Later I found out I should have tried the Italian Beef. That’s Portillo’s signature sandwich. Damn. But the dogs were great.
Next I went looking for deep dish pizza and found myself sitting with this beautiful pie at Pizzeria Due just a couple blocks from Portillo’s. This pizza was good, but not even close to as good as the deep dish made at my next stop. You can easily tell which joint had the better food even before going inside.
Here’s Pizzeria Due. No Line.
And this is Gino’s East. This is the pizza to eat when you’re in Chicago. The deep dish is awesome, but so’s the inside of the restaurant.
When you go to Gino’s bring a Sharpie and some Wite-Out because graffiti is encouraged.
While you’re waiting 45 minutes for your pizza to bake, take a stroll around the restaurant and look at the walls.
And the video games.
And the vending machines.
And the decor.
And the thermostat.
Even look down at the chair you’re sitting on.
And in 45 minutes you’ll get one of these beautiful deep dish pizzas. Mine came with sausage, pepperoni, mushrooms and jalapenos on top.
These pizzas are built differently than other pies. The cheese, which is delicious, goes on the dough first, followed by the toppings. Then sauce is spread over the top.
But the best part of this pizza is the crust. See that yellow tint? The secret ingredient in this crust is cornmeal. There’s a lot of crust here, and you’ll want to eat it all. It’s great, and totally worth the wait.
I went back again the next day.
While I was waiting for my pizza the second time around I found this upstairs…
It’s Larry Thomas as The Soup Nazi from Seinfeld! (Check out this post)
Gino’s rules.
Okay, here we go again.
Although this is the 9th time I’ve set out on a multi-city promotional tour with a new book, I still haven’t figured out how to pack right. But who cares? You can always buy a scarf here and a hat there when you find out that temps will plunge to single digits by the time you hit Chicago.
The bottom line is this: These trips are a total adventure, and you’re really lucky to be there (wherever “there” may be).
You find yourself in a lot of airports. That’s when you try to enjoy the journey as much as the destination.
You often reach those destinations late at night and fall into bed without unpacking. When you wake up and throw open the curtains in the early morning, you often discover a great sight like this one from my room at the Four Seasons in St. Louis.
But on some mornings it still looks like night out.
You get to appear on some great national TV shows like Fox & Friends on the Fox News Channel.
Here’s the view of the set from behind the table where I’m about to clone Krispy Kreme Original Glazed Doughnuts. When we plugged in the fryer it knocked out the power to part of the set. They lost a few monitors and lights, but somehow got everything back on just before coming over to me.
Sometimes you experience crazy, unforgettable moments like that.
Sometimes you appear on a shopping channel, like The Shopping Channel in Toronto. It’s basically Canada’s version of QVC. I appeared on the channel 7 times throughout the day — all that food on the table was sitting there for over 24 hours.
So don’t eat the shrimp.
But mostly what you do is appear on morning and afternoon news shows on local affiliates like this one here at KSDK-TV, the NBC station in St. Louis.
This is the “Noon News,” and I’m about to go on with these cloned Starbucks Cranberry Bliss Bars.
Do they look nervous?
This one is the “Noon News” at WCPO-TV in Cincinnati. Julie was on a diet, so she didn’t eat any of the food. That was okay since we only had a few minutes for the interview and it’s hard to talk with your mouth full.
This is “Chicago This Morning” at WBBM-TV (CBS). Here I’m talking about McDonald’s Cinnamon Melts with Don Schwenneker who happened to have an old copy of Top Secret Restaurant Recipes with him. He says his wife bought it years ago for the Olive Garden Salad Dressing clone. That’s so cool.
He had me sign the book.
And here I am at KDFW-TV, Fox 4 in Dallas with Lauren and Tim. They helped me make a clone of Panera Bread French Onion Soup.
Lauren spilled beef broth all over the cooktop. But the soup still looked good.
Now it’s time to go home.
I’m glad. I had my adventure and everyone was really great. It’s moments like these that make a book tour special.
Those are just a few of the hits. And this…
This is what I miss.
 I’ve cloned 999 recipes since 1987 and I think the next recipe I create should be entirely up to you.
It was 22 years ago when I first received the chain letter that claimed to hold the secret recipe for Mrs. Fields famous chocolate chip cookie (you can read more about the chain letter with its bogus story here). When that silly letter failed to produce a decent copy of the popular cookie I got to work creating a real knockoff recipe, and I haven’t stopped cloning famous food since.
Now here I am, nine books later, pondering which recipe to clone for #1,000, and I thought I’d let you decide. After all, it has been you all along — fans of the Top Secret Recipes books – who have helped choose which recipes I dissect. For years now I’ve been recording the recipe requests that you’ve sent to Top Secret Recipes Headquarters, and it’s that list of ideas I first go to when picking the recipes to clone for each book.
So, which famous brand name food would YOU like to see cloned next? Perhaps it’s your new favorite pastry from Starbucks, or a bagel from Panera Bread that you can’t live without. Maybe you want me to hunker down and finally solve the mystery of the deep dish dough that makes Pizza Hut’s Pan Pizza so good. Or maybe you’re a big fan of a newer item like Pinkberry frozen yogurt or Cheesecake Factory Lemoncello Cream Torte. Do you think I should get to work on Oprah’s favorite guilty pleasure, Serendipity 3 Frozen Hot Chocolate, or should I go back and improve one of my early recipes that could use some tweaking, like KFC’s Original Recipe Fried Chicken?
Whatever recipe you have in mind for #1000 I want to know and I’ve set up a place on my website for you to quickly and easily get your suggestion to me. In addition, as a way to celebrate this milestone clone recipe, we’ll be sending out three sets of all NINE Top Secret Recipes books to three people from the group who drop us the most popular suggestion. Just go to this link on the Top Secret Recipes site, and let us know what you want to see cloned. After the holidays we’ll tally everything up and let you know which recipe will be #1,000.
I can’t wait to see what you come up with.
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