Copycat recipes bring restaurants into your kitchen

Copycat recipes are a time-honored tradition. As soon as someone claimed to have a secret recipe, someone else claimed to have cracked the code.

Cooking With Carrie has joined the copycat craze, offering a recipe for the bowtie chicken pasta at Paulo and Bill’s, the Italian restaurant in Shawnee that produces straightforward red and cream sauces. The recipe re-created in Carrie’s kitchen is a take on alfredo that uses fontina cheese.

The movement for restaurants to tell diners as much as possible about the components of a dish means it’s almost possible to create a copycat recipe just by reading the entree’s description. After that, a polite but curious question directed toward the chef can help. Try something along the lines of: “I really am enjoying this dish. I can taste [x] and [y], but there’s something else I can’t quite put my finger on. Is the chef willing to tell me?”