How to Reverse-Engineer Restaurant Food in Your Own Kitchen

Most copycat recipes on the internet are somebody's guess, repeated. A blogger tastes a sauce, writes down what they think is in it, and three hundred sites copy the list without ever making it. That is why so many of them are subtly wrong in the same way - they inherited the same original mistake.

There is a better method, and it is not complicated. It has four steps, and this hub is about all four.

Read what the company already tells you. Almost every major chain publishes a full ingredient list somewhere, because food law in the EU, UK, Australia and increasingly the US requires it. Those lists are in descending order by weight. That single fact tells you more than any amount of tasting: if pickle relish appears before ketchup, the sauce is a relish sauce and the argument is over.

Identify the process, not just the ingredients. Two kitchens with the same ingredient list produce different food. A patty smashed on a flat-top and a patty grilled over flame are the same beef and are not the same product. Most of the distance between a home copy and the original is process, not composition.

Work out which gaps close and which do not. A commercial pressure fryer, a nitrogen-flushed par-fry, a 400 °C conveyor oven and a soft-serve machine with an overrun pump are real advantages that a domestic kitchen does not have. Some of those gaps close with technique. Some do not, and a recipe that pretends otherwise is wasting your afternoon.

Then cook it, three times, and change one thing each time. This is the step everyone skips and it is the only one that actually produces a recipe.

The articles below go through each of these in detail, with worked examples from the chains covered on this site.