Five Copycat Recipes to Start With

Almost everybody who starts cooking chain food at home starts with the wrong thing. They pick the most impressive item on the menu - the fried chicken, the doughnuts, the pan pizza - and spend an afternoon on something with four techniques in it, and if any of the four goes wrong the whole thing is disappointing.

These five are the right order, and they are in this order for a reason.

Start with a sauce, because it takes eight minutes, costs about a pound and immediately improves every burger you make for a fortnight. It is also where you learn the single most useful lesson on this site: that dried aromatics need to rest, and that a sauce tasted straight from the bowl is not the sauce you made.

Then a spice blend, because it takes five minutes, lasts six months and unlocks four other recipes.

Then a burger, because it teaches the smash, which is the most transferable technique here.

Then a batch-cook, because it is where the money actually is.

And a syrup, because it is the highest return per minute of anything on this site and it costs about forty pence.

By the end you will have made a cold emulsion, a dry blend, a seared protein, a long braise and a sugar syrup - which between them is most of what cooking is.