Make Your Favorite Meals at Home - 25 Copycat Olive Garden Recipes (2024)

FAQs

Is the food at Olive Garden made from scratch? ›

Our soup and sauce masters create dishes by hand and from scratch, every day. With fresh, whole ingredients like kale, peppers and squash. Because they know cooking that way – the Italian way- everything tastes better. to everything they make.

Every Olive Garden restaurant participates in the Harvest program, which has been in place for 20 years. Each day, restaurants collect high-quality surplus food that was not served to guests and donate it on a weekly basis to local nonprofit partners.

It wouldn't be unreasonable to guess that Olive Garden, the massive Italian-American restaurant chain with over 900 locations, follows a similar process. But by most accounts, the majority of items on Olive Garden's menu are made in-house, from scratch, on a daily basis — including its signature soups.

The Microwave Isn't Olive Garden's MVP

The only dishes that arrive at the restaurants fully prepared and frozen, then microwaved to order, are the desserts. Everything else on the menu is made in-house, including the soups and sauces, which are prepared fresh each day.

Some of the food is frozen

The soups are made in-house daily—but all the desserts are frozen. The pasta, however, is made to order. The restaurant only uses microwaves for heating dipping sauces and warming desserts. Otherwise, everything is pan fried, deep fried, or grilled.

61.99. Layers of pasta, meat sauce** and mozzarella, ricotta, parmesan and romano cheese. **Our meat sauce is made with pan-seared beef and Italian sausage.

Many items are simply reheated in the microwave.

"Yes, they do use a microwave," the former server is said to have alleged about Olive Garden. "Your potatoes, your veggies, certain sauces, and some of your meats are just microwaved and put on your plate."

The Pasta Pass is not available for redemption with To Go orders, but in-restaurant redemptions are unlimited with the Never-Ending Pasta Pass^®.

Sounds good, right? But there's a catch. Some items are a healthier meal choice on their own, but once you add soup, salad (with dressing), breadsticks, and dessert, the fat, calories, and sodium content soars. Keep this in mind as you plan your next Olive Garden meal.

Zuppa Toscana – Olive Garden Copycat (VIDEO) Zuppa Toscana is Olive Garden's most popular soup. This one-pot, homemade Zuppa Toscana recipe is hearty and loaded with Italian sausage, kale, bacon and potatoes.

Does Olive Garden put MSG in their soup? ›

Our food recipes do not use added MSG (Monosodium Glutamate) and, based on information from our suppliers, MSG is not added to any of the ingredients we use. However, certain foods and ingredients naturally contain glutamate or glutamic acid (such as tomatoes, milk, cheese, mushrooms and certain yeasts and proteins).

The very first Olive Garden was opened in 1982 on Orlando's busy International Drive. It's still open today, although if you visit, be aware that extensive remodeling has left it pretty unrecognizable from the original restaurant.

Unlike other companies, hosts didn't get a share of the tips made, so you were expected to do a lot for minimum wage.

Olive Garden is an American casual dining restaurant chain specializing in Italian–American cuisine. It is a subsidiary of Darden Restaurants, Inc., which is headquartered in Orange County, Florida.

The pasta is pre-cooked.

A former Olive Garden employee opened up about some of the chain's kitchen practices in a Quora Q&A forum and revealed that the pasta is never cooked fresh. In fact, the chefs boil huge portions of pasta to an al dente finish every morning, then toss it into ice water baths.

— the parent company of Olive Garden — outsources the bread from Turano Baking Company. The baking company sells 8-inch long par-baked breadsticks, meaning they're partially baked before being frozen and shipped to Olive Garden locations.

According to employees, it's really true: Olive Garden does send some of their chefs to Italy to train. An anonymous employee told PopSugar, "Every year, more than 200 managers and team members travel to Olive Garden's Culinary Institute of Tuscany.

Olive Garden Salad Ingredients

To make this salad, you will need iceberg salad mix, tomatoes, red onion, pepperoncini peppers, black olives, croutons and parmesan cheese.