Prison Food That You'll Actually Want To Try

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.

Do you remember how gross your old elementary school cafeteria meals used to be? Mystery meats and succotash, with maybe a little blob of semi dried-out jello. Well, imagine having to eat that three meals of that a day, every day, with no option to brown bag it. That's pretty much what it's like for prison inmates. According to Reason, dissatisfaction with prison food has been a contributing factor to numerous prison riots, including the deadly one at Attica.

What inmates do have access to is a prison commissary which sells a limited number of food items such as canned goods, drinks, and snack foods. These items can be purchased with funds added to an inmate's account by friends or family on the outside, or by the tiny amount of money the inmate is paid for their assigned job — the Zoukis Consulting Group reports this to be about $10 to $20 per month for federal inmates.

Should you ever find yourself on the wrong side of prison bars, as even sports stars and other famous folks have been known to do, learning how to make the most of your commissary items may keep your taste buds from dying a slow death from boredom when your 85^th meal of Friday fishwiches rolls around. If you're not a celebrity chef inmate, you probably won't have unlimited access to the prison kitchen, so all these recipes can be prepared using the cell block microwave and improvised cooking tools and utensils like flattened can lids and trash bags.

A surprising amount of prison snacks are ramen-based, as that's one item that seems to be always available and usually affordable in any prison commissary. Prison Spreads 101: Prison food, culture and recipes by Andrew Bolsinger, an author who claims to have lost 100 pounds while locked down, concocted a ramen sandwich recipe that seems to have predated last decade's whole ramen burger trend.

Bolsinger's recipe calls for mixing a packet of tuna with half a garlic pickle and a pepperoni stick (a flattened can lid could be used for chopping these, as could the plastic ruler the author suggests) and stirring in just two to four packets of mayonnaise. As Bolsinger says, "Most moms use WAY too much mayo on tuna," (yes, even inmates have moms). Season with an equal amount of mustard, a dollop of chili garlic sauce, and either contraband salt and pepper or else about half the seasoning packet from the ramen noodles.

The noodles themselves — two packets of these — are softened in a pitcher of hot water, then opened up like a sandwich. Each half of the "sandwich" is then spread with cheese spread — the recipe calls for City Cow, which is a brand evidently sold exclusively in prisons (via Quora). The tuna/pepperoni mix is piled on, then sprinkled with smashed Flamin' Hot Cheetos before being folded back into sandwich shape. As with any gourmet creation, these sandwiches need to rest a few moments to let the flavors blend.

Orange Porkies, which is, you got it, yet another ramen creation, comes from a book called Prison Ramen: Recipes and Stories from Behind Bars by Clifton Collins Jr. and Gustavo "Goose" Alvarez. As Alvarez told Peter O'Dowd, host of WBUR's Here & Now, ramen noodles are "everybody's staple in prison. No matter who you are, you're cooking with ramen." This particular ramen-based dish is somewhat reminiscent of Panda Express's orange chicken, at least if that dish were made without chicken. And with pork rinds.

To make this dish, you crush your ramen noodles, cook them in hot water, then drain. (Save the seasoning packet for another use — when it comes to prison cuisine, there will always be another use.) Mix in a cup of cooked white rice. Make the orange sauce out of a few tablespoons of unsweetened orange Kool-Aid powder mixed with a little hot water. Toss the pork skins in the orange sauce until they're all coated with the stuff, then microwave them for about five minutes until they puff up. Serve the orange-y pork skins on a bed of rice-a-ramen. It ain't P.F. Chang's, but it's edible.

Another recipe that comes in ramen and ramen-free versions is one for prison pizza. The former version, which comes courtesy of CorrectionsOne, includes a crust made from crushed ramen and crackers. These ingredients are blended with hot water to form a paste which is then shaped into a circular pizza crust (except for inmates from Detroit, who presumably make their crusts square as per their region's pizza preference). This ramen crust is then topped with salsa, squeeze cheese, summer sausage, or any other vaguely pizza topping-like ingredients on hand.

A fancier version provided by Kevin Bullington, involves making a personal pan pizza from tortillas which are glued together with squeeze cheese to form a thicker crust (perhaps he's from Chicago). The sauce is formulated from ketchup mixed with crushed cheese crackers and more squeeze cheese, and real shredded cheese is used on top. The pièce de résistance? Summer sausage and pepperoni that have been sliced and heated in the microwave, the appliance which is also used to melt the pizza's cheese topping. Bullington claims it's "fun to make and good to eat," or at least good enough "to get that [pizza] monkey off [your] back."

In prison, there's always time for dessert. If you're lucky enough to have a cellie who likes (or fears) you enough to make you a cake, Business Insider shares one way they might go about doing so. This recipe comes from Clark County Jail in Jeffersonville, Indiana, and according to the inmate who supplied it, was only made for special occasions such as birthdays or release dates (the latter of which must have come around fairly frequently, as jails, unlike prisons, only house inmates for relatively short periods of time).

It involves taking a whole package of peanut butter cookies, separating the cookies from the filling, and crushing the cookies to a powder before adding enough water to make a dough. A package of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups is then broken up and mixed with the peanut butter cookie filling along with two scoops of powdered cappuccino mix and a little water. This mixture is heated in the microwave until melted. The cake is formed by alternating layers of dough – pressed into the tray in which the cookies originally came – and peanut butter filling. For the topping, a Hershey bar is placed in a cup of hot water until it melts, then squeezed over the entire cake. The final touch is a scoop of peanut butter melted in the microwave and drizzled over the top. The cake is then placed on top of a bowl full of ice for two hours until it sets.

While cream cheese is hard to come by in prison, as it's not an item stocked by most commissaries, inmates nevertheless manage to make mock cheesecakes. Piper Kiernan, author of the book Orange Is The New Black: My Year In A Women's Prison — the book that was turned into that hit Netflix series Orange is the New Black, shared with NPR a recipe for prison cheesecake that she learned from a fellow inmate. This cheesecake has the typical graham cracker crust — crumbs mixed with margarine smuggled out of the dining hall. Just four pats of the latter, so not the kind of serious contraband likely to land you a stint in the SHU (secure housing unit, formerly known as solitary). The filling is made from an entire round of Laughing Cow cheese wedges, smashed up and mixed with the contents of a vanilla pudding cup, an entire container of Cremora non-dairy creamer, and the juice from almost an entire plastic squeeze lemon. Once thoroughly mixed and beaten until stiff, the filling is poured into the crust and set atop a bucket of ice to chill until set.

Prison Talk's forum offers another cheesecake variant, this one using crushed oatmeal cream pies as the crust, with the filling made from powdered milk flavored with lemon "Kool Off" (commissary brand knockoff Kool-Aid) and half a can of lemon-lime soda, with strawberry or grape jelly spread on top.

Since Starbucks has yet to open its first corrections-center based location, sometimes an inmate's just gotta improvise. CorrectionsOne suggests that the enterprising detainee make a lockdown latte by holding a carton of milk under hot running water until it's hot enough to start steaming, then adding three teaspoons of instant coffee and a packet of pancake syrup from the chow hall (breakfast leftovers). This drink needs to be served hot in order to be palatable — hot enough to dissolve the instant coffee, at least.

Kevin Bullington supplies a recipe for convict cappuccino that involves mixing four packets of instant coffee with four coffee creamers, two envelopes of instant hot chocolate with marshmallows, and six sugar packets. The man obviously appreciates a serious sugar buzz, since he also came up with an iced coffee that involves just two coffee packets but four hot chocolates (again with marshmallows) and 20 sugars. Guess if that's the closest you can get to living the sweet life, well, you go with what you got — and hope your facility provides decent dental care.