Top Secret Recipes You Can Make at Home

It's no secret that the Blooming Onion - and its delicious sauce - are among the star attractions at the Outback Steak House. Kentucky Fried Chicken guards its "eleven herbs and spices" recipe secret closely. And there are dozens of restaurants with thousands of mouth-watering recipes that draw their customers back time and time again. What if you could make the same tasty recipes at home, without the hassle, driving time (and gas), and expense of going out to the restaurant - and what if you could modify those top secret recipes yourself to eliminate the sugars, fats, or other ingredients you'd just rather not have?

Today you can!

All over the Internet hundreds of people have created their own versions of different top secret recipes of name-brand and restaurant dishes, and their recipes. figured out through trial and error, are out there for the taking.

Imagine being able to prepare some of the wonderful Outback restaurant chicken recipes on your own backyard barbie, or learning how to marinate a thick steak Aussie-style right in your own kitchen, using spices you have on your own shelf?

The best news:

It's not any harder to whip up copycats of top secret recipes than it is to make any recipe straight out of a cookbook. Anyone with basic cooking skills can do it, and any kitchen with decent equipment will work for your recipes, though gourmet kitchen setups will do a better job overall. Imagine that: using your ordinary kitchen to create dishes from faux Outback restaurant recipes, dishes everyone will love.

The even better news: using those top secret recipes in the course of making your own meals will teach you cooking skills you would never otherwise learn, including clever substitutions the pros use to accomplish the exceptional flavors and textures you find in restaurant foods, the ones that you thought you could never duplicate: the very fluffy mousse, the "bloom" of onions and the unique texture and flavor of potato skins, the delicate tenderness of broiled mahi.

How easy is it? A duplicate recipe for the onion dipping sauce from Outback:

Blend together 1/2 cup mayonnaise, 2 teaspoons ketchup (Heinz is best), 2 tablespoons cream-style horseradish, 1/4 teaspoon paprika, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1/8 teaspoon dried oregano, Dash ground black pepper and cayenne pepper. Chill for one hour, covered, to let the flavors set, and serve with onion rings or your Blooming Onion.

How hard is that? This recipe and many, many more are easy to find online if you just look for them.

There is a drawback - there always is, isn't there? Professional restaurant recipes assure quality control - you know the recipe tastes as promised. Copycat top secret recipes are much less certain. If you don't use a good qualifier, like a review site, you could find yourself spending hours and dollars on recipes that really aren't what you expected. Caveat emptor.