27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fun and interesting, but I got mixed results, August 1, 2004
This review is from: Even More Top Secret Recipes: More Amazing Kitchen Clones of America's Favorite Brand-Name Foods (Mass Market Paperback)
If the poor condition of the library copy is any indication, Even More Top Secret Recipes is a very popular book!
Todd Wilbur has a number of books, and it can be a little confusing sorting them out. There are three "Top Secret Recipes" books, Top Secret Recipes, More Top Secret Recipes (this book) and Even More Top Secret Recipes. These books focus on what Wilbur calls "convenience foods." That is, most packaged sweets and fast food. He also has a book Top Secret Restaurant Recipes, in which he attempts to duplicate the foods of mostly casual dining restaurants like Chili's and Applebee's. He also has a book solely on drinks.
Wilbur explains in the Introduction of More Top Secret Recipes that these are not the actual recipes used by restaurants, and he did not obtain them through bribery, theft other illegal or illicit means. He starts with the ingredient list on packages of food and modifies the relative amounts, or with fast food, tries to identify the ingredients by taste. He admits that the real producers of these foods often use custom ingredients unavailable to the consumer, and that the goal was to match the texture and flavor of the food, and appearance is secondary.
So why try to clone commercially-available food? In both More Top Secret Recipes and Even More Top Secret Recipes, the author mentions availability. Some of the foods are regional, and you may not get them where you live. In the introduction to More Top Secret Recipes, he gives a list of reasons including low cost and curiosity. I'm not so sure about the cost argument, since I have to sacrifice two boxes of Macaroni and Cheese to make half a box of Cheese Nips, but the curiosity is what applied to me. I just wanted to know, "Can I really duplicate these commercial foods at home?"
This book contains 88 recipes, a big increase over the 37 of the previous book. The recipes clone the likes of McDonald's, Nabisco, Carl's Jr. and Taco Bell. Every recipe includes a history of the food item, something alone which makes this book valuable, and a dimensioned engineering graphic of the product. Even More Top Secret Recipes includes an interesting introduction discussing the fast food industry, and gives some tips on creating the clones. The recipes make as much use as possible of premade food and mixes. For example, most candy bars are coated with melted chocolate chips, so you will not find that you have to crush cocoa beans, or perform any such low-level task.
From this book, so far, I attempted to make Girl Scout Thin Mint cookies, (I AM a Girl Scout after all. Really. My wife signed me up. It was a surprise to me, too!) and Nabisco Cheese Nips. The thin mints turned out pretty good. The flavor and texture were pretty close. The only problem is that the chocolate was a little thick. Applying it to a desired thickness is difficult. Also, the chocolate remained quite soft. A little more experimentation with cookie thickness and baking time and temperature might make the centers a little more consistent, too. The Cheese Nips are made using the cheese packets from Kraft Macaroni and Cheese (Cheese and Macaroni?). They turned out crispy, and although bright orange like the real thing before baking, turned out grayish-tan when done. Although crispy, they weren't light and bubbly like the real thing, but were more like crispy cookies. They needed to be cheesier. They tasted like the flour and shortening. They weren't bad, though, and my wife liked them, but they weren't much like Cheese Nips. A lot of recipes would benefit from the use of rolling pin rings to establish uniform dough thickness.
I also had mixed results with the recipes from More Top Secret Recipes. You can read my amazingly similar review on that book for more details.
Using this book was fun and informative. I've had mixed results using these books. In short, have fun, but don't expect miracles with every recipe.
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38 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Worst of the series, April 5, 2003
This review is from: Even More Top Secret Recipes: More Amazing Kitchen Clones of America's Favorite Brand-Name Foods (Mass Market Paperback)
I own all of the Top Secret books from Tood Wilbur, and this one is the absolute worst of the series. Contains repeats from previous books, and some from his website. A few new, but I was not impressed. If you are new to the Top Secret series, I would recommend the Restaurant Recipes, and the Soda/Smoothies one. They are the best of the series.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fun Book With Great Duplicates, August 2, 2006
This review is from: Even More Top Secret Recipes: More Amazing Kitchen Clones of America's Favorite Brand-Name Foods (Mass Market Paperback)
This is a superb way to duplicate some of your favorite snack items like Cinnabon CinnabonStix , KFC Honey BBQ Wings, and Cheese Nips. I've tried several recipes and all of them came out great.
The Boston Market Meatloaf, one of my favorite take-out foods, was right on the money. I also recreated Cheese Nips and got them to taste just like the original, though the color was off slightly. The KFC wings were perfect and delicious (as is his cloned recipe of KFC original recipe chicken in an earlier boook). The recipe for Devil Dogs came out as dry as the actual Devil Dogs you can get in a store. So I made a few slight changes and produced a wonderfully moist version. They're also good with a chocolate glaze and/or a chocolate cream filling.
That's one of the reasons why people want to have these recipes even though you can buy most of these products quite easily. We like to make slight changes or additions that make them more fun. I've made Twinkies with a ton of different fillings, extra-large thin mints, Cinnabon buns with chocolate chips, and a host of other personal variations of popular dishes. It's for cooks who like to have fun. I recommend this highly, along with all of his other books.
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