Prison Ramen: Recipes and Stories from Behind Bars

Last year, the Japanese company that created instant noodles sold 46 billion packs and cups of pre-flavored dried noodles. It is a ubiquitous food, especially beloved by anyone looking for a cheap, tasty bite-including, it turns out, prisoners in the USA, who buy instant noodles (they call them ramen) at the commissary and use it as the building block for all sorts of meals that foster bonds of loyalty and friendship.

Prison Ramen takes readers behind bars, with 65 instant noodle recipes combined with stories of prison life from the inmates who devised the (including celebrities like Slash from Guns n’ Roses and the actor Shia LaBeouf). Think of this as a cookbook of ramen hacks - or creative 2-minute dishes. There’s Ramen Goulash, Onion Tortilla Ramen Soup, The Jailhouse Hole Burrito, Orange Porkies-chili ramen + white rice + ½ bag of pork skins + orange-flavored punch. Packed with ramen, jalapenos, beef jerky, and more that cooks in an industrial plastic garbage bag, these recipes will feed 15 to 20.

The coauthors are childhood friends-one an ex-con, now free and living in Mexico, and the other a highly successful Hollywood character actor who has enlisted friends and celebrities to contribute their recipes and stories. Forget the typical recipe headnote about precious, organic ingredients-these stories are the real deal, each a first-person, firsthand look inside prison life, a scared-straight reality complementing the offbeat recipes.