Wendy's
Wendy's Frosty Copycat Recipe
Malted milk powder and a deliberately under-frozen texture. Five minutes of work, four hours in the freezer, no machine.
How to Make Five Guys Milkshake at Home
A Mix-In Bar, and the Malt That Makes It Taste Like a Diner
A shake thick enough to need a spoon, and the mix-in list that makes it a Five Guys one.
AI-generated illustration created for food.fast. It is not photographic evidence of a prepared batch.
Five Guys' milkshake proposition is the same as its burger one: a plain base and a wall of free additions. One vanilla shake, eight mix-ins, and you build what you want - which includes, famously, bacon.
The base is a malted vanilla, and the malt is what stops it being frozen milk. The same malted milk powder that carries a Frosty does the job here: a faintly toasted, slightly savoury sweetness that plain vanilla does not have, and which is what people mean when they say a shake tastes like a proper diner shake.
Three minutes in a blender, and the only technique is restraint with the milk.
How this page shows its working
The method gives quantities, timings and observable cues rather than asking you to guess. The 4 cases in If it goes wrong explain likely causes and corrective action.
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Why most home milkshakes are too thin
The instinct is to add enough milk for the blender to move freely. That is the mistake, and it is why a home shake is usually drinkable through a straw and a shop one is not.
The right ratio is about 4 parts ice cream to 1 part milk by volume - 500 ml of ice cream to 125 ml of milk for two shakes. It will look impossible in the jug. It is correct.
Two techniques for getting a stiff mixture to blend:
Pulse rather than run. Short bursts, scraping down between. Running the blender continuously heats the mixture and thins it.
Use a tamper if your blender has one, or stop and stir with a spatula.
The other reason shop shakes are thicker is temperature: a commercial shake machine serves at around −6 °C, where a blended one warms as it blends. Putting the glasses in the freezer for ten minutes beforehand is a small thing that visibly helps.
How to make it, step by step
Make it
-
Freeze the glasses for ten minutes if you have time
It genuinely changes how long the shake stays thick.
About 10 min -
Everything except the mix-ins into the blender
Ice cream, milk, malt powder, vanilla and salt. Pulse in short bursts, scraping down between, until just combined. Do not let it run.
About 2 min -
Mix-ins in, two or three more pulses
Anything you want distributed - fudge, caramel, peanut butter, purée - goes in now. Anything you want as pieces, like bacon, is stirred in by hand afterwards.
About 1 min -
Pour and serve immediately
Whipped cream if you want it. A spoon, because it should be too thick for a straw.
About 1 min
The bacon one, which is not a joke
Bacon in a milkshake sounds like a stunt and it is Five Guys' most ordered mix-in for a reason: salt and fat against sweetness and cold works exactly as salted caramel does, and the smoke adds something neither of those has.
The practical rules:
Cook the bacon properly crisp - oven, on a rack, as set out on the Baconator page - and let it cool completely. Warm bacon melts the shake.
Crumble it and stir it in by hand at the end, do not blend it. Blended bacon disappears into a greyish shake and the whole point is the texture contrast.
Streaky, not back. You want the fat.
It goes particularly well with the salted caramel and the malt, less well with the fruit mix-ins.
Ways to change it once you have made it once
Malt shake
Double the malted milk powder to four tablespoons. This is the classic and it is better than the plain version.
Espresso
Two tablespoons of cooled espresso. Effectively an affogato in a glass and the best of the non-obvious mix-ins.
Dairy free
Oat or coconut ice cream and oat milk. Use a malt extract syrup in place of the powder, which contains milk.
What went wrong, and how to fix it
Each entry names a likely cause as well as a correction, so the advice remains useful when equipment, ingredients or batch size differ.
Too thin
- Why it happened
- Too much milk, or the blender was run continuously.
- What to do
- 4 parts ice cream to 1 part milk, pulsed not run. Ten minutes in the freezer thickens a thin shake.
The blender will not move
- Why it happened
- Correct - it is meant to be difficult.
- What to do
- Pulse and scrape down between. Add milk a tablespoon at a time only if you genuinely have to.
It tastes like frozen milk
- Why it happened
- No malt powder.
- What to do
- Two tablespoons. It is the whole difference between this and a blended ice cream.
It melted within two minutes
- Why it happened
- Warm glasses, or the blender ran too long.
- What to do
- Freeze the glasses and pulse.
Questions people actually ask about this recipe
Why is my milkshake thin?
Too much milk. The ratio is about four parts ice cream to one part milk, and it should be hard work for the blender.
What is malted milk powder doing in it?
It adds a faintly toasted, slightly savoury sweetness that plain vanilla lacks. It is the difference between a shake and blended ice cream.
Is bacon in a milkshake actually good?
Yes, for the same reason salted caramel is. Cook it properly crisp, cool it, and stir it in by hand rather than blending it.
Can I make it ahead?
No. Make it and drink it - it is at its best for about three minutes.
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