Prison food, we've all heard the nightmares of how bland and terrible it can be.
But ingenious inmates have come up with ways to cook their own dishes with nothing more than what
can be found in their cells and a few goodies from the commissary. Sounds disgusting to us,
so naturally we turned to your favorite bigfoot-hunting lab rat to find out what these
contraband prison food recipes really taste like. Recipe 1: Jailhouse Tamales
So my new challenge is to try prison food recipes, and at first I was afraid that meant tasting
actual prison food- which I've heard nightmare stories about. If societies are truly judged
by how they treat their prisoners, then I'm afraid of what that says about us as a nation.
Luckily though, I get to try contraband prison foods- the stuff inmates make on their own
with a little ingenuity and makeshift cooking skill. First up on that list, Jailhouse Tamales.
For a comparison point, while I'm cooking up my jailhouse recipes, the girlfriend
will be making the real deal herself. So for my jailhouse tamales I need the
following ingredients: Fritos corn chips, Spicy Hot Cheetos, hot water, hot sauce.
That's it. You'll notice there's no mention of beans, cheese or meat of any kind.
To make my prison house tamales, first I crush up the fritos and spicy hot cheetos-
though I have it on good authority that any brand of spicy chips will do.
I mix them up together in a plastic bag. Then I heat up some water- there's no real measurement
for how much water you need so I guess you just sort of learn to eyeball it with experience. I
pour the water into my mix of crushed chips, which immediately turns into a horrible looking sludge,
and then I knead the bag thoroughly. I have some excess water so I poke a few
very small holes in the bag and gently squeeze to force the excess water out.
At this point I have an absolutely disgusting looking mix of what can be best described as
batter, and I roll it into the shape of a tamale. Then I have to let it sit for
about ten minutes to solidify more. After that, my jailhouse tamale is done, and
all that's left is to roll it out of the bag and pour some hot sauce on.
So how'd it taste? Honestly, it looked like a giant orange turd,
and it tasted like a giant, spicy orange turd. Compared to the girlfriend's real tamales,
they're awful. 10/10 would absolutely never eat again. Prison food must be truly horrible if
inmates have to resort to this garbage. Recipe 2: Prison Latte
I'm not a big coffee person, so for this recipe I'm going to have the girlfriend be the taste
judge. For comparison we got a regular old latte from McDonalds, figuring it would be unfair to
compare it to something more fancy like Starbucks. The ingredients are as usual, simple. You need:
1 small carton of milk, hot water, three teaspoons of instant coffee, one packet of maple syrup.
First, you run the carton of milk under hot water until the water starts steaming.
This makes sense, it's not like you can easily boil water inside a prison cell. Once the running
water has warmed the milk up sufficiently, you pop open the milk carton and dump the instant coffee
and maple syrup inside. We couldn't find a packet of syrup anywhere so we just used two tablespoons,
which according to our research is about how much is in the average syrup packet.
Now, shake the milk carton up and serve hot. How'd it taste? The girlfriend was extremely wary,
especially after getting her own taste of the absolutely horrible prison tamale,
but after a small sip, she took a second. “Not bad”, she said. Compared to the McDonalds stuff,
it's not too far off according to her. On a scale of 1 to 10, she judged the McDonalds latte at a 6
and this contraband recipe a 4. Recipe 3: Pad Thai
I really like Pad Thai, so I had my hopes up for this one. One look at the ingredients greatly
diminished those hopes. To make your very own prison pad thai you'll need: 1 packet Ramen
Noodles, 2 tablespoons peanut butter, hot sauce. Simply cook your ramen noodles, which in this
case means stick in hot water until they're soft. This can take a while when you don't have a stove,
and you have to keep changing out the water for hot water from the tap to speed the process along.
Once soft, drain them, dump in your peanut butter and douse in hot sauce. Boom- prison pad thai.
For comparison we ordered real pad thai, and... yeah the prison stuff was absolutely horrible by
comparison. Even without comparison, it's still pretty bad. I guess on a scale of 1 to 10 I'd
put it at around a 4. By all accounts, that still beats prison cafeteria food.
Recipe 4: Prison Pizza Yum, who doesn't love a delicious
pizza. Well, you gotta be pretty hard up for pizza if you want to try this contraband recipe.
Ingredients as follows: Ramen noodles (again), crackers, hot water, toppings.
Now, the toppings come with a caveat- you're pretty much limited to what you can either
sneak back from lunch at the cafeteria, or what you can get in the prison commissary.
I checked out an official list of commissary products from the Federal Bureau of Prisons and
was surprised. You can get tuna, salmon, mackerel, summer sausage, shredded beef,
spam, beef or turkey bites- even pepperoni slices. I'm assuming not all prisons have
this entire selection, but it's definitely more than I thought would be available.
I decided to keep things simple and picked up some pepperoni slices and shredded cheese. I
saw that something called 'rotating block cheese' was available on the BoP list of commissary items,
so figured that would probably be available too in most prisons.
To make your prison pizza, crush up the noodles and crackers together in a trash bag,
then add in hot water. There's no measurement, so assuming you pretty much just have to eyeball it.
Mix it all up together, and then mold it into a circular shape to make your crust.
Then it's as simple as throwing your toppings on top- no baking required!
And how'd it taste? We didn't even bother getting a pizza to compare this to, we all know how real
pizza tastes. It was awful. Truly, astonishingly awful. The girlfriend even gagged chewing up her
first bite. Maybe we're just not very good prison cooks, because the dough was still kind of wet.
I had the immediate feeling that my stomach would soon make me regret all these truly awful
things I was sticking inside it. Recipe 5: No Bake Cheesecake
Cheesecake, in prison? You're probably as suspicious as I immediately was. I love
cheesecake, it's my favorite dessert in the world and every year without fail the girlfriend either
makes me or orders a different type of cheesecake for my birthday. Last year she even ordered a
specialty one shipped all the way from Europe. So if anybody was going to be the judge of
prison cheesecake, it was going to be me. For this recipe you'll need: graham crackers,
margarine or butter (which is not a commissary item so you'll have to steal this),
Laughing Cow or similar type of cheese- the type that comes in those small wheels,
vanilla pudding, coffee creamer, and lemon juice. First crush the graham crackers and mix with
your stolen margarine or butter until you can make a nice crust out of it.
Stick your crust in a tupperware container and microwave it for one minute. While your
crust cools, smash the cheese up and mix it with the vanilla pudding until it's nice and smooth,
then mix in generous amounts of coffee creamer. There's no specified amount, suppose that's
something you also have to learn to eyeball. Furiously beat the whole thing until your filing
is nice and smooth, then start adding lemon juice until the entire mix starts to stiffen. Apparently
you'll need a lot of lemon juice for this. Now pour your mixture on top of the hardened
crust, and let it sit for 15 minutes. If you have access to ice somehow, put the ice in a
plastic bag and lay it over the mixture to help it cool. Now, enjoy your prison cheesecake.
The girlfriend made her own cheesecake for comparison, and you know what? My
prison cheesecake wasn't too bad. It didn't hold a candle to the real thing, but I can see how after
years of cafeteria slop this treat could be quite delicious. As is, I'd give it a 6/10, which easily
makes it the best contraband dish so far. Recipe 6: Flavored Water
Despite the fact that water comes free out of your tap- or at least incredibly cheaply- the
market for bottled water is so lucrative that even Coke and Pepsi got into it,
making billions. Well, if you're used to your fancy flavored waters then fret not,
because there's a jailhouse recipe for flavored water anyone can make- and it's incredibly simple.
For this recipe all you'll need is water and the flavoring packet from
your commissary Ramen. That's it. Not much explanation here,
just stick the ramen flavor packet in your water and vigorously shake. Ta-da,
prison flavored water. How's it taste though? I bought a few different ramen flavors for this,
just to be fair, and they were all immediately one of the worst things I've ever done to my body.
My first sip was beef flavor, and I immediately spit it out into the sink.
Creamy Chicken? Mistake. Picante Chicken? Tragedy. Shrimp flavor? Abomination. Soy Sauce?
Unmitigated disaster. There's no way to spin this,
Ramen-flavored water is disgusting enough to make you immediately want to blow chunks. You know what
you don't want to reach for when you're sweaty and thirsty? A bottle of beef-flavored water.
As it stands though, I guess when you're in prison long enough anything that's not just normal water
might start to be appealing. The girlfriend took a sniff of the first bottle of water I made and
flat-out refused to taste any of them. Unlike me, the show doesn't pay her for her participation.
Or maybe she's just a lot smarter than I am. Recipe 7: Correctional Cake
Another sweet treat, and in my research I'm pretty sure not only are these the easiest to make but
probably have the best chance at being something remotely delicious. For this unauthorized Federal
Bureau of Prisons snack, you'll need the following: oreos, peanut butter, and M&Ms.
Carefully pull apart a whole packet of oreos, scraping off as much of the inner
filling as possible. Keep the filling in a separate bowl, mixing it all together.
Then once you've separated an entire pack of oreos, crush the cookie halves into crumbs
and mix with water. You should only add enough water to give it a slightly batter-y consistency,
too much water and you'll ruin it. Use your oreo cookie batter to spread out
the bottom layer of a cake, then use the oreo icing to create another layer, and put peanut
butter on top as a third layer. Repeat the process until you're out of ingredients, though ideally
you should have at least three alternating layers of cookie crumb, oreo icing, and peanut butter.
Then simply use M&Ms to top your prison cake off. How's it taste? Surprisingly good. Then again,
it's hard to go wrong with what's just essentially oreos and peanut butter mixed together with some
M&ms on top. Even the girlfriend agreed that this was one contraband meal she could happily stomach.
Recipe 8: “The Spread” Alright, this is the one I dreaded the most-
the infamous “spread”. See, when you're cooking with jailhouse ingredients, you're bound to have
leftovers. But if you think you're tossing those leftovers away you better think twice.
Everything that's left over after your prison cell cantina shuts down for the day
gets used up in the ultimate potluck dish that inmates simply refer to as “the spread”.
I had several leftovers after my foray into cooking jailhouse pizza, cheesecake,
actual cake, pad thai and more. So I gathered up all my leftovers along with,
you guessed it, some ramen noodles, and prepared for what I predicted would be the
single worst dish I've ever forced myself to eat. I did have plenty of ramen noodles leftover thanks
to my foray into flavored water, and as I found out ramen is pretty much a staple of jailhouse
cooking. Makes sense, they're cheap to get in the commissary and have some surprising flexibility-
if your stomach can keep the dishes down that is. First I took my ramen and mixed
it up with whatever leftover flavorings I had, which included a few shakes from each of the
open flavored water packages since you waste nothing in prison and, well, not much else.
I figured salt and pepper were probably easy to get even in prison, so I threw in a dash or
two of both for good measure. I stuck this in a trash bag, and then threw in literally
everything I had left over that made any sense. I did not include syrup or peanut butter or
anything that would immediately make this dish vomit-worthy, but I did throw in some pepperoni,
cheetos, fritos, hot sauce, and cheese. Then, I added hot water to the mixture to
'cook' the whole thing. You have to be careful not to create a slurry, so I limited how much
hot water went in and kept the bag sealed until the ramen noodles were mostly soft.
Then I emptied the trash bag out on spread out newspaper and, well
that's it. It's time to grab a spoon and dig in. To her great credit, the girlfriend tried the dish
first, and instantaneously regretted it. She'd had enough of prison food and the plethora of strange
smells it had filled the house with, so she rushed off to the bathroom for a spot of dry heaving.
Figuring she was being a drama queen, I shrugged my shoulders and took a large spoonful myself.
I didn't puke, but it did make me regret my life choices up to that point. I couldn't bring myself
to actually chew it, so instead I just forced myself to swallow it down. Now, if you've seen
my previous challenges you know that I eat all kinds of stuff in survival situations. Scorpion?
Sure. Beetles and other large insects? Hey, just natural protein. But this abomination spread out
on newspaper in front of me? No. Just flat-out no. And honestly, if inmates are having to resort to
this as a flavorful experience because normal cafeteria food is so awful,
then we should really look into the way we treat prisoners. Now go check out my first live action
challenge in I went Bigfoot Hunting and This Is What Happened, or click this other video instead!