Todd Wilbur, who has authored a series of eight Top Secret Recipes trade paperbacks containing taste-alike recipes for well-known brand-name products including McDonald’s® Big Mac® and Red Lobster® Cheddar bay Biscuits, posted a video to YouTube earlier this week which shows him quizzing KFC® employees through a drive-thru speaker, and then driving off with a sample of the seasoning used on the new chicken product.

In the video Wilbur demonstrates his simple recipe for recreating the chicken, which includes ingredients such as liquid smoke and chicken bouillon, and a baking technique that requires the chicken to be first seared on a grill pan to add grill marks similar to the original version.

On the day the video was posted to YouTube it ranked in the top 20 most viewed How-to videos for the day. Wilbur reveals the entire recipe on his website at TopSecretRecipes.com, along with hundreds of other copycat recipes for famous foods.

Top Secret Recipes Unlocked hits shelves in November

Since 1993 Todd Wilbur has sold over 4 million of his clone recipe cookbooks (published by Penguin), and is the top-selling cookbook author on QVC. His next cookbook, Top Secret Recipes Unlocked, goes on sale November 24. It features new copycat recipes for brand-name foods such as Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Carnegie Deli Cheesecake, Burger King Onion Rings, Starbucks Cranberry Bliss Bar, and Chipotle Mexican Grill Barbacoa Burrito.

Wilbur left his news reporting job job at WFMZ-TV in Allentown, PA in 1991 to complete work on his cookbook manuscript. The book was an instant success, landing him on several talk shows, including The Oprah Winfrey Show, Live with Regis and Kathie Lee, The Today Show, and Maury Povich.