Fast Food Chain Menu Items That Are Truly Made From Scratch

Don't be shocked — plenty of fast food is actually made from scratch. We get your suprise, though. A lot of descriptors come to mind when you think about fast food menu items. Tasty, certainly, is one word. Do you believe Taco Bell employees are practicing a labor of love, though? "Over-the-top" is certainly one that gets used, and we've chronicled the most over-the-top fast food items of all time. Maybe you wax nostalgic about, say, Wendy's menu items from the 1990s. "Where can I get something made from scratch," though? That's not exactly on the tip of your tongue while you're sitting in the drive thru. Some fast food joints go the extra mile, however.

The trick, of course, is maintaining speedy service while making food from scratch. This can be done. If there's any characteristic that all fast food restaurants share, it's knowing how to do things with maximum efficiency. Even if it's hand-pressing burger patties or slow-churning frozen custard. The customer's wait time remains short, but the quality improves. Here are a few fast food menu items actually made from scratch.

For a food with such big taste, guacamole is actually pretty simple to make. Of course, it is the type of food that tastes best when it's fresh and handmade, rather than pre-packaged and shipped to the store. Luckily, Chipotle keeps things simple, and makes guac in-house. Chipotle guacamole uses a mere six ingredients: hass avocados, jalapeños, onion, cilantro, lime juice, and kosher salt. Not a bad way to eat some plants.

There's something about delicious foods with few ingredients. We've celebrated the best recipes with five ingredients or less before, and we're celebrating Chipotle guac for similar reasons now. The condiment that's totally worth the extra cash is prepared in store daily, with people claiming to be former employees on Reddit saying that they still remember the recipe years later. That has to be the biggest perk of working at a place that makes food from scratch, right? Put your time in at Chipotle, and you'll have the best guacamole recipe at the party for the rest of your life. Only six ingredients, too.

Does In-N-Out count as a farm-to-table restaurant? The potatoes that eventually become french fries are shipped directly from the farm to the store, where employees cut the spuds into sticks and fry them. That's about as fresh as fast food fries can get, and you don't even have to pay the prices that those hoity-toity farm-to-table restaurants charge. Hey, maybe In-N-Out is the spot for your next date night.

Besides being hand cut right before your eyes, there's another reason In-N-Out's fries are special. You can order these spud sticks to whatever doneness you prefer, almost like a steak. There's extra light, light, standard, light well, well, and extra well. Between the fresh cut and the customizable doneness, In-N-Out is about as close as you can get to making fries in your own kitchen. Oh, and we haven't even gotten to all the fries on In-N-Out's secret menu. The only way to improve on freshly cut fries, of course, is by adding a topping of cheese sauce. Or — and you'll have to trust us when we say that the In-N-Out workers will understand — if you add a topping of roadkill.

Given that baking a potato is pretty much settled science at this point — you put it in the oven for about an hour — it'd be easy to dismiss the dish as a fast food item. It's gotta be a logistical nightmare, right? Getting hundreds of orders out during lunch rush, but also waiting an hour for spuds? Not so, uh, fast. Wendy's has been proving that conventional wisdom wrong since 1983, and the chain doesn't do it with any fancy tricks or weird shortcuts. At Wendy's, the baked potatoes are wrapped in foil and baked for an hour. Just like how a potato is supposed to be. Kind of unbelievable for a fast food chain, right? Not hard to see why no other fast food spots serve baked potatoes nationwide.

On its website, Wendy's lists the ingredients to the plain baked potato as simply "potato." When you're asking yourself what really makes Wendy's baked potatoes so delicious, start with that piece of trivia. If it seems like there should be more to it than that, you're overthinking. Sometimes, all good eating requires is good ingredients and simple preparation.

There are a few reasons why Shake Shack's burgers taste so much different from, say, McDonald's or Wendy's. No shade to the latter two establishments, but there's just something special about a Shackburger. Turns out, one answer lies in the ingredients and preparation. Shake Shack's patties come from a proprietary beef blend created by star butcher Pat LaFrieda. The patties are a blend of sirloin, brisket, and short rib, which are pretty tasty cuts of beef to go into a burger. The patties are then smashed to order, so to speak.

Shake Shack is a place where the workers take real pride in their burger smashing techniques. Famously, the chain uses paint scrapers to turn burgers on the grill. There's also no seasoning until the patty is in contact with heat. If the only descriptor you can find for this patty's taste is "beefy?" Well, that's because it's not much more than beef. Nice to see simple ingredients deployed with some skill.

The Midwest-based chain is known for high-quality dairy and beef products. No visit to Culver's is complete without some frozen custard, and there's a reason that the custard tastes so good. The stuff is slow-churned in the restaurant in small batches. With fresh custard available throughout the day, it's always a good time to hit up Culver's. The company's website claims that you're always getting a scoop from a fresh batch, regardless of whether it's lunch rush or the slow hour before dinner. Small batches are the key.

If it comes from a cow, Culver's takes special pride in it. Culver's is one of those magical fast food chains that doesn't use frozen burgers. A burger and shake from this spot just hits different. Throw in the fact that there are over 80 different flavors of the day — that's 80 unique combinations of custard and mix-ins — and it's hard to imagine ever getting tired of Culver's. The whole Midwest sure hasn't. The chain has been expanding, adding over 300 new locations between 2019 and 2024.

A good biscuit is an important metric of quality for any fried chicken joint. These are two food items that just demand a human touch. Well, Bojangles likes to boast that there are 49 steps to making the chain's biscuits. If it sounds like we're a long way from yanking a stiff puck out of the freezer, you're right. When you bite into a Bojangles biscuit and feel the fluffiness firsthand, take a moment to be thankful for the skilled biscuit makers at this franchise.

The freshness is evident, and there's real technique at work here, too. The recipe never changes, but techniques have to be adaptable. Biscuit makers approach the dough differently depending on an area's humidity, for example. To hear Bojangles' workers tell it? Biscuit making is a laborious process. You're on your feet for long stretches of time, working dough, and there is constant turnover. Fully baked biscuits can't stay in front of house for longer than 20 minutes before they're considered old, so you've always got to be ready with partially baked biscuits. There's a lot going on. The end result is absolutely worth it, though.