- Who taught you this?
- Doing time and seeing other people do it.
They had life, did 30 years, different ways.
So, you know, you perfect certain things
or you do things the way you like it.
- It's really hot.
- Hi, my name is Mario, and I'm an ex-felon.
- Hi, I'm Kevin Meehan.
I'm the chef/owner of Kali Restaurant in Los Angeles.
- Today, I will be teaching a pro chef
how to make a meal I perfected in prison.
Ready to do this? - Absolutely.
(upbeat classical music)
- So today we'll make one of my specialties, a wet burrito.
So what we have here is a styrofoam cup,
Double this because of hot water,
and we have a bag to insert inside the cup.
Open the bag up
and you're gonna put the bottom part inside there.
And...
Put it up -- - Is that good?
- Yes, sir.
This is how you start your wet burrito.
You get the tortillas.
So you take one of the tortillas,
and you put in half on the side right here,
like a backward C. - Okay.
- So we get a full circle burrito,
and take the other half and make it all the way down.
- And they have tortillas available in prison?
- Yes, sir.
You buy 'em every month
on your commissary if you have enough money.
It's like $2 a pack.
So now, the next thing we're gonna do is get our bowl.
We're gonna take all the ingredients
we're gonna put, that we want inside here,
we're gonna put inside here first,
and we're gonna to shake it up.
- Okay.
- So we're going to start first with our canned good
because we need the top of the canned good
to cut the meat and the chicken.
You take your prison ID,
and you go borrow this utensil
because you can't keep this overnight in your cell.
- Everything is conserved, right?
- Yes.
- In a can or a jar? - Yes.
- Do they use like glass jars or plastic jars?
- Plastic jars, we can't have no glass
in prison. - Really, right.
- Canned chicken.
Smells like canned tuna.
- We're going to take this chicken
and we're gonna pour it inside the bowl.
- All right. - All right.
And we're going to take this
and if you have soft fingers or like that
or you're scared to get cut,
you take a paper towel or a napkin
and you put it right here on this part.
You gonna use this to chop it --
- This is what you use to cut?
This is the knife? - Yes, that is the knife.
- That's pretty clever.
- [Mario] Yes, and we use that to break the meat down,
you know, and you can do it slow, there's no race.
- That's really smart.
- (chuckling) Take Maruchan noodle and you crush it up.
So you gonna put that in there.
You're gonna take your seasoning pack
and you're gonna put that to the side.
Next you wanna get our pork rinds.
Put 'em in here.
I'll take the can and I'll always put it in the bag
with some trash 'cause your cells are small in prison.
- Wow, that's clever. - Yeah, you know.
You always try.
Next, we're going to get one bag of chips.
- [Kevin] Oh, Hot Cheetos.
- I'm going Doritos. - Okay.
- We're going to crush them up real good.
Next we're going to get our beans.
You put in here.
- No, what kind of beans are these?
- These are refried beans.
- And then they're refried and re-dried?
- Re-dried, refried and re-dried.
Exactly. - They look like cereal.
- Next we're going to get our Hoisin sauce.
- What kind of sauce is this?
- This is Hoisin sauce.
It's like Asian sauce?
- Hoisin. - Hoisin sauce.
Excuse me, yes.
- We're probably both saying it wrong.
- (chuckling) Right.
Some people like to put these inside and on top,
which I prefer, so what we do is,
we're gonna pick some of the yellow peppers here
just to give it flavor,
and we're just gonna put some in here
to go inside the burrito. - Okay.
- Yeah, gotta open the Sriracha.
What is this pronounced? - There's an A at the end.
- Srirach-ey? - Sriracha.
- Sriracha, well, a lot of people say police too.
It's really police.
- I'm from Long Island, New York.
I say everything wrong.
- If you want to, we can add meat.
We're going to use a third of it
because you're gonna save it for your next meal.
Just cut right into there.
- [Kevin] Look at that, it cuts right through.
- Mm-hm, so what I do now is I take the top
of my bowl that's already clean
and I use that as my platter.
- I'll try not to cut my fingers off.
So when you're cooking,
do you have to hide what you're doing?
- Well, no, you just throw it away
because they give us canned goods.
You're allowed to have canned goods
so I don't understand why we can't use this to cut,
but they just don't want you to keep it in your cell.
- They don't keep tabs of this stuff?
- No, they think you've touched this.
This is all made up. - Can you use this, like,
I don't know, like as a weapon, like as a key to get out?
- I can use anything as a weapon
but if you can use your own teeth as a weapon,
they can't really shield you from all the stuff.
- But you guys aren't trying to get into fights here.
- Exactly.
- You're trying to get rehabilitated and go home,
huh? - Exactly.
Everybody that goes to jail is not in a gang.
Everybody that goes to jail probably for a traffic ticket
or I didn't pay child support.
Everybody that's criminal, not doing criminal things
on the street in my opinion. - Yeah.
- I've been in jail with people
that's really just doing time for myself
and for other people, you know,
because I didn't want to be a snitch
or I didn't want to have my family's life in jeopardy
so I just decided not to say nothing,
let the police do their job.
- Yeah.
- And it cost me 12 years of my life.
You know? - Yeah.
- But it's a lesson learned for me,
I put myself in a situation.
- Yeah, there's a lot of hard stories, I'm sure.
- [Mario] Okay, I'm going to put that in here.
- [Kevin] Okay.
- Whilst you do that, let's shake it up.
Okay, so now we gonna take the lid off the top
and we're going to pour it inside the hole of the burrito.
- [Kevin] Okay.
- Get all this properly pushed down, all that.
We all ready to go now.
All we need now is the hot water.
This is not a hot pot that we use in prison.
That's not allowed, metal is not allowed in prison,
so there'd be a plastic thing similar to this, Kevin.
- [Kevin] Got it.
Do I have enough of this?
- [Mario] No, put some more until you see
the water come on top of it. - Oh, I got it.
- [Mario] You gotta do it all the way to the top.
- [Kevin] All the way to the top of the --
- Right there, all that, full, yeah.
- Is that good? - Yeah, that's good.
That's good. - Smells good.
- So what we're going to do, we're going to take
the slack of it, like that, twist it
onto the top of the burrito. - Okay.
- And then we're going to tie it
right to where we're gonna tie it to right here.
- Who taught you this?
- Doing time and seeing other people do it.
They had life, did 30 years, different ways.
So you know, you perfect certain things
or you do things the way you like it.
- It's really hot.
- So we have to stay for about three to five minutes.
Some people go longer 'cause they like everything
to be cooked.
I have a question for you.
Do you have any fancy foods
that's even similar to this
where you have to tie it and do this?
- Well, what we do in our kitchen
is we call it sous vide, it means in French under pressure.
- Okay.
- Which is kind of ironic in prison.
I assume there's a lot of that.
- Right.
- But what we do is we actually have
like a vacuum sealer,
but what we do is we'll take a bag
and put like maybe a chicken breast in there
and then a little olive oil and let's say herb,
vacuum seal it, remove all the atmosphere,
and take that bag and put it in warm water
and it slowly cooks in that warm water.
- [Mario] We're gonna do it now, right?
- Look at that, looks good.
Okay, it's like a tamale. - Yeah.
- It's more like a tamale technique, with steaming.
- [Mario] Now we're going to take our cheese
and we're going to spread it on top of it.
- Look at this. - Cheese up.
So then what you're going to do now
is you're going to take your Sriracha
and you're going to do like a little squiggle.
You're going to take your other bag of chips you have,
whether it's Doritos or Hot Cheetos,
so you're going to spread this over your burrito.
Then the last thing you do,
is if you want jalapenos,
you take the same jalapeno bag, get some,
sprinkle them over the top.
- [Kevin] That's why you told me to reserve these.
- Yes I did. - Smart.
- [Mario] If you want a little juice,
in case you like jalapeno juice,
you can pour just a little juice on it,
get a good little twang to it if you want to do that.
- [Kevin] Twang.
- And then, whatever your religion is, you bless your food
and voila, here's your wet burrito.
You want to open it, you want to taste it?
- How does mine look? - Yours is outstanding.
- You know what, yeah? - Oh my God.
- It looks good, right?
- Here we go. - Okay.
- I've still got it.
Now give me your honest opinion.
- You know what, I don't hate it.
(Mario laughing)
I don't hate it.
- Now people what want these burritos request
different things, you can have it without the Hoisin,
can you put more beans it, can you put mayonnaise,
can you put jelly?
- I'm still eating it, I kinda...
I'm not hating on it. - Right!
- I have an interest in this just because I love cooking
and this is something I would,
I never had prison food before,
but this is the stuff that you use
while you have downtime
and you can be a little more creative.
- Exactly.
- And so I learned something today for sure.
- I learned something there too
that you're really talented
because the way your burrito looks looks better than mine
and I'm gonna teach you.
- You know, but we can learn something from each other.