For kosher consumers wondering whether they’re missing out by forgoing the delicacies at The Cheesecake Factory and never sinking their teeth into a bucket of fried chicken at KFC, take heart.
“America’s Most Wanted Recipes,” a new book published by Simon and Schuster, reveals more than 200 secret recipes from 57 of America’s popular food chains. Last week, the publisher invited kosher foodies to make their own kosher versions of the recipes — and hand out samples to passersby in Bryant Park, to see whether they could taste the difference.

The recipe for Starbucks’ Chocolate Fudge Squares with Mocha Glaze was already kosher, a fact that surprised Alessandra Szulc, a 23-year-old Upper East Sider who baked that for the kosher taste test.

“The only thing I did was substitute margarine for butter,” she says. “What kosher house has butter?” To make the fudge squares pareve (non-dairy), she recommends using soy milk.

“These are incredible,” gushed Amy Oppenheimer as she tasted a piece of Rabbi Shoshana Ohriner’s Cheesecake Factory Pumpkin Cheesecake. “I looked at the recipe and thought to myself, ‘Maybe I can attempt something like this one day.’”

Rabbi Ohriner, a self-proclaimed foodie who used to teach challah baking classes at Makor, blogs about pareve desserts at www.couldntbeparve.com. To make the cheesecake non-dairy yet tasty, she used tofutti cream cheese and sour cream and added a little lemon juice. “I like the challenge,” of making desserts non-dairy, she says. “Plus, I got tired of eating bad [pareve] cakes and cookies,” she says.
“Kosher consumers can save money and have fun preparing their favorite restaurant dishes at home,” says Ron Douglas, the author of “America’s Most Wanted Recipes” and founder of recipesecrets.net. “Many of the recipes in America’s Most Wanted Recipes can easily be converted to meet kosher standards. For example, a soup recipe that calls for meat and cream may taste just as good when prepared with coconut milk, and a baking recipe calling for lard may be just as good when prepared with kosher vegetable shortening.”

You don’t need to be a professional chef to try the famed recipes at home, says fellow “chef” Sarah David, as she handed out Dipped Chocolate Chip Cookies, a staple at Dollywood, the Dolly Parton-inspired theme park.

Cooking and baking at home not only saves money, but also allows home-based chefs to modify recipes so that they’re healthier. But some recipes can’t be saved. “Originally I wanted to make chocolate lasagna,” David says. “But with 12 eggs and six sticks of butter, that would have been my caloric intake for a week.”