Jollibee Chickenjoy Gravy Copycat Recipe
A dark roux gravy with soy and more black pepper than seems reasonable. Fifteen minutes.
Cooking Jollibee at home, and what its menu costs
Sweet-style spaghetti, Chickenjoy and a gravy people queue for.
AI-generated editorial illustration created for food.fast; not a product photograph from Jollibee.
The Jollibee recipes on this site
Not every menu item has a recipe here, and that is deliberate - We write a page when there is something genuinely worth saying about how to make the thing.
Jollibee Jolly Spaghetti Copycat Recipe
Sweet tomato sauce with banana ketchup, hot dog slices and grated cheese. Thirty minutes, and it feeds four for under…
What Jollibee food actually tastes of
Banana ketchup is not optional in the spaghetti. Invented in the Philippines in the 1940s by the food technologist Maria Orosa, when tomatoes were scarce, it is mashed banana with vinegar, sugar and spices, dyed red. It is sweeter than tomato ketchup, more aromatic, and it tastes like nothing else. A version made without it is sweet spaghetti; a version with it is Filipino spaghetti. It is in every Asian supermarket and the recipe gives a substitute while saying plainly that it is one.
Brown the hot dog slices before they go in. Two minutes on the cut faces. It is a small step that adds a great deal and almost nobody does it.
Chickenjoy's crust is thin and crackly, not craggy. A wet batter rather than a thick dredge, which is the opposite of the KFC approach and gives a completely different bite.
The gravy is dark, peppery and slightly sweet. A properly browned roux, soy sauce doing the savoury work where a British chain gravy would use a stock cube, a tablespoon of sugar you will not taste as sweetness, and considerably more black pepper than seems reasonable. It is thicker than a roast gravy because it has to sit on rice without running to the edge of the plate.
About Jollibee
Jollibee is the most distinctive chain in this dataset, and the only one that beat McDonald's on its own ground. It out-competed the global chains in the Philippines through the 1980s and 90s by doing something they could not: making Filipino food rather than American food adapted for Filipinos.
The sweetness that surprises first-time visitors is completely deliberate and it is not a local tweak - it is a national palate. Filipino savoury cooking runs sweeter than almost any other in Southeast Asia, and Jollibee is built on that rather than around it.
Jolly Spaghetti is the clearest example. Banana ketchup and sugar in the sauce, sliced hot dogs, and a heavy blanket of grated cheese. It is not bad Italian spaghetti; it is a different dish from a different tradition, and made at home properly it is a genuinely lovely thing and one of the cheapest family meals on this site - four generous portions for under three pounds.
Chickenjoy is the other half of the business, and its gravy has a following that extends far beyond the Philippines. It is darker, sweeter and thicker than the British chain gravies, built on soy rather than a stock cube, and it is served in a pot beside the chicken rather than poured over it - because it is meant to go on the rice as much as on the meat.
For the Filipino diaspora both items are a homesickness cure, which is a different kind of loyalty from the one most chains earn.
What Jollibee charges, from the menu we hold
58 priced options across 85 menu sections, as last recorded in United States. Prices move and vary by outlet, so treat these as a reference point rather than a quote.
Half the menu sits between $5.99 and $11.99. Here is the whole spread:
| Position | Item | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest priced item | $2.74 | |
| Middle of the menu | $9.99 | |
| Dearest priced item | $29.49 |
Jollibee changes its prices without telling you. We read this menu once a month and keep the reading – have the changes emailed to you, free, one click to stop.
Every reading we hold is on the Jollibee price history. The full list is on the Jollibee menu page, and the 2 items we have rebuilt at home are listed here.
What Jollibee charges in 7 countries
The same item, priced from each country’s own menu and converted to one currency so the columns can be read against each other. Jollibee sets prices per market, so a gap here is the chain’s pricing rather than an exchange rate artefact – and the widest gap on this list is Jolly Spaghetti, which costs $7.26 in the dearest market and $1.05 in the cheapest.
| Item | 🇺🇸 USD | 🇬🇧 GBP | 🇸🇬 SGD | 🇵🇭 PHP | 🇭🇰 HKD | 🇲🇾 MYR | 🇹🇭 THB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $3.74 | $2.90 | $1.41 | — | $1.66 | $1.43 | $1.04 | |
| $6.49 | $7.26 | — | $1.05 | $6.63 | — | $2.53 |
Only items Jollibee prices in at least 5 of the markets we hold are listed, because a row with three figures in it is a gap rather than a comparison.
What Jollibee sells nearly everywhere
Ranked by how many of the markets in our price data carry the item with a published price. This is computed from the menu tables, so it reflects what the chain actually sells rather than what it advertises.
| Menu item | Markets priced | Recipe |
|---|---|---|
| Peach Mango Pie | 6 | - |
| Jolly Spaghetti | 5 | Jollibee Jolly Spaghetti Copycat Recipe |
| Cheesy Yumburger | 4 | - |
| Aloha Burger | 3 | - |
| Jollibee Chicken Sandwich | 3 | - |
| Yumburger | 3 | - |
| Jolly Crispy Fries | 3 | - |
| Mashed Potatoes | 2 | - |
| Double Cheesy Yumburger | 2 | - |
| 3pc Chicken Tenders (Ala Carte) | 2 | - |
| 3pc Chicken Tenders Meal | 2 | - |
| Aloha Yumburger | 2 | - |
Build your Jollibee order, see what it costs
Tick what you would actually order. The total runs as you go, and where we have built the item at home you will see both figures side by side - 2 of the items below have a fully documented copycat recipe on this site.
More chains to explore
What else people compare Jollibee against, and what we hold for each.
Jollibee is a trademark of its owner. food.fast is independent and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Jollibee. Recipes on this page are our own interpretations, not the company’s formulas.