“It’s kind of this amazing accident that happened,” marvels Randy Garutti, CEO of Shack Shack, the burger chain restaurateur Danny Meyer founded as a kiosk in a NYC park in 2004. In a week, Shake Shack’s rapid growth and popularity manifests with its first cookbook hitting bookstores: Shake Shack: Recipes & Stories, written by Garutti, along with culinary director Mark Rosati, and author Dorothy Kalins, is just as fun as the restaurant — which has 131 locations and plans to open 24 more this year.
Cruising past the cover, it looks almost like a yearbook — though not as literally as Big Gay Ice Cream’s 2015 book — with stories about Meyer’s inspiration for the first Shack, his initial resistance to expansion, business insights he learned along the way, and those first back-of-the-envelope-style menu plans. Rosati shares almost all of the company’s recipes, though unfortunately he isn’t giving away any real secrets here. The processes have been adapted for the home cook, and Garutti told Eater that only “six people” in the world know the real recipe for Shake Shack’s signature sauce.
The recipe in the book for Shack sauce is a mixture of Hellman’s, Dijon, Heinz, pickle juice, salt, and pepper. “We make our own from scratch,” Garutti says, but when he and Rosati first started testing recipes for the book they came to the conclusion that these weren’t recipes “most people would want to make at home,” because they were labor-intensive, “messy,” and time-consuming.
“We didn’t want this to sit on your shelf, we wanted to put out something you would actually reference,” Garutti says. Ultimately the authors decided to adapt recipes using easier-to-find ingredients like store-bought mayonnaise rather than ask people to make their own mayonnaise from scratch. Because of that, the book is for super fans and those who want to learn how to mimic Shack’s taste without having to buy any fancy equipment.
Organized by menu item, each major category — burgers, chicken sandwiches, fries, concretes — gets its own “Anatomy” section. This is where some of Shake Shack’s secrets are revealed, such as hints about the Pat LaFrieda burger blend, the brand of chocolate sprinkles used in chocolate concretes, and the type of salt that seasons those crinkle cut fries.
When asked if they make Shake Shack recipes at home, Garutti says he’s “a grill burger guy” and prefers to go to a Shack for his griddle top fix. But Rosati says, “I do actually. These days my idea is just using great meat, a great bun, and cooking it properly. In terms of the toppings and what I put on there, I leave it up to [my guests]. I just like to put ton a different stuff on my table, different sauces, condiments, and let them build their burger. I want everyone to have fun with it.”
Shake Shack: Recipes & Stories will be released on May 16 and is available for pre-order now.
Reprinted from Shake Shack. Copyright © 2017 by Shake Shack Enterprises, LLC. Principal photographs copyright © 2017 by Christopher Hirsheimer. Published by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of Penguin Random House, LLC.
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