My first mistake in making the viral subway recipes—the food filler content beamed onto the system's advertising screens—was cooking while hungry. My second mistake was forcing my friends to consume these nauseatingly inedible meals with me.
If you've ridden the subway in the past two years, you've probably spotted these "recipes" yourself: videos of anonymous hands combining foods in incomprehensible and horrific ways, offering instructions that often leave out the proportions of each ingredient, how long to cook a dish, or what temperature to bake it at.
That's because these meals, sourced from the cooking brand So Yummy, were not meant for human stomachs. As Hell Gate's Willa Glickman pointed out in 2023, these videos function as a visual snare that drags a straphanger's eyes to the nearly 15,000 digital advertising screens across the subway and streets. Those screens, operated by MTA advertising partner Outfront Media, can then hawk 5G phones, aerosolized deodorant, and overpriced handbags to a captive and captivated audience.
I have spent years staring at these videos—of Baked Brunch Boats, Chocolate Monkey Bread, and "Brieghetti Pie" to name a few—debating whether there was some human vision inside these heavily commodified, rapid-fire meals. These dishes don't look tasty per se, but I thought that they would at least be edible, right?
Not exactly.
My creations (Hell Gate)
With a sort of hubristic glee, I planned a brunch of five clickbait cuisines: a Baked Brunch Boat, Brieghetti Pie, Baked Potato Spiral, Graham Cracker Cheesecake, and Chocolate Monkey Bread. I assumed these dishes would be simple to make, and physically they were. But mentally, each step felt like an affront to food, god, and Anthony Bourdain.
So Yummy's parent company, First Media, and Outfront Media did not respond to requests for comment.
You cannot tell me that this looks right to you. (Hell Gate)
Baked Brunch Boat
I nearly retched when carving up the Baked Brunch Boat, which calls for a full raw egg and a tablespoon of butter to be placed in individual holes in a loaf of bread, and then baked for an undisclosed amount of time (presumably until it's salmonella-proof). I wanted, desperately, to try to improve the recipe for the five hungry friends who had begun arriving at my apartment, but I shoved down whatever guilt I felt at potentially poisoning them and focused on my much greater fear of messing up this journalistic experiment. I poured one large egg into each hole, as instructed, and watched the whites slough off onto my baking pan.
No Hell Gate subscribers were harmed in the making of this dish. (Hell Gate)
Once fully baked and seasoned with only salt and pepper, the boat tasted like a hardboiled egg with a side of crust. The bottom was charred and clung to the tinfoil, but either because we were starving or out of fear of the next course, my friends and I ate the entire Brunch Boat, top to tail. It would be the only dish we actually finished.
Hmmm (Hell Gate)
Brieghetti Pie
Brieghetti Pie is a pasta dish with brie shoved in the center and then baked until it forms a solid, pie-shaped mass. (I hesitate to call the recipe similar to carbonara, both out of fear of disrespecting every living Italian, and because, unlike carbonara, this recipe left out any seasoning whatsoever—not even pepper).
I asked my friend Nick to place the greasy amalgamation of parsley, bacon, olive oil, raw eggs and fully-cooked pasta into a pie dish. He begged me not to.
"Please don't make me do this," he said. "This is like 'Ratatouille' but the rat has brain damage."
But there was no turning back. We had already drenched pounds of pasta with three raw eggs, and baking it for an hour (alongside all of the other dishes) meant at the very least, it wouldn't kill us.
Despite following the instructions (which did in fact specify a cooking time and temperature—50 minutes at 400 degrees), the inside was an unchewable mash of thick, congealed pasta that tasted like ammonia and bacon grease. Another friend (who arrived at my apartment thinking I had thrown a Subway sandwich themed party) asked if it was actually made of pasta.
"Honestly, this hurt my stomach. I knew what I was signing up for. I cracked the eggs. I'm guilty," Nick said. "But the pasta just tastes raw. I believe it was cooked fully, but it's now crunchy and hard."
My spiral strategy needed work. (Hell Gate)
Baked Potato Spiral
I had begun to feel guilty too. I had realized, too late, that my friend Sara had a gluten allergy and could only eat the Baked Potato Spiral—a skewered sweet potato doused with butter and cinnamon sugar.
A little frantic, I stabbed the potato with a fork and microwaved it "briefly to soften" its insides. (After a few attempts at 30-second increments, I realized "briefly" meant five full minutes in So Yummy time.) The orange lump, once it was cut, coated, and baked, looked hideous for a dish designed to rack up online views, but actually tasted like a normal sugared sweet potato, if a bit bland. It reminded me of a Depression-era survival dish ("Times are tough, kid, here's your TikTok potato.")
You can have your cake and not want to eat it too. (Hell Gate)
Graham Cracker Cheesecake
No one was full and everyone was a little sick by the time cut into our first desert, a Graham Cracker Cheesecake. According to my roommate Tessa, you can make a cheesecake crust by crushing up graham crackers and adding butter and a little sugar. According to So Yummy, laying down individual, uncrushed graham crackers into the base of a spring form pan will work just as well.
Without measurements or added sugar (the mix was 90 percent Philadelphia cream cheese), the cake came out tasteless with burnt, "sinister" edges, as Tessa described them. It was so zestless that I ate half a slice just to understand the flavor, but each mouthful felt like chewing on spray foam insulation. Everyone else stopped at a single bite.
"This isn't completely inedible," Tessa said. "It's edible."
Yum (Hell Gate)
Chocolate Monkey Bread
By the time the Monkey Bread was done, everyone wanted to leave. I could not convince them to stay and try the Monkey Bread, which came out undercooked, with several raw chunks of pastry dough stuck to the top of the bundt pan. But I tried the Monkey Bread.
The pastry dough-wrapped chocolate chunks were cloyingly sweet and chewy, like carnival food one step away from the deep frier. (I had to pick it off my molars with my thumb nail.) It seemed designed to be made for toddlers, by toddlers, with as little adult interference as possible.
Most of that Monkey Bread still sits on my counter, compacted into little lumps rigid enough to break a window, and about two pounds of Brieghetti Pie stinks up the bottom of my fridge. Out of resistance, stupidity, and a long-held fear of food waste, I've now had three meals of reheated Brieghetti Pie, topped with sausage so I can pretend that it's food and not filler. [Editor's note: NO CELIA! NOOOOOOOOO!]Â Most of the noodles are hard, flavorless strings. Others snap under my teeth. Each bite confirms that these recipes were not meant to exist in the real world, but some algorithmic sludge that has leaked into the New York City subway.
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