In the meantime, he’s doing a Certificate II in kitchen operations.

“Time goes fast in the kitchen,” he said.

Brough said it was a risky business that landed him in prison — importing a motherload of coke from Bali, where he had lived for seven years, to Darwin.

“I was coming back here to look at opening a smokehouse BBQ, but I went to jail instead,” he said.

The father-of-three says he was lucky not to be caught on Indonesian soil, where the best he could have hoped for would have been a long stay at hotel Kerobokan. Brough, a cocaine addict who was doing the smuggling job to repay a debt, got a five-year head sentence with 2.5 years non-parole.

“I deserve to be in prison and if I wasn’t here I’d be dead,” he said. “What I’m learning in the kitchen in this place is invaluable. I’m turning 58 this year and what I was doing before, it was just ridiculous. I need to make the most of the rest of my life.”

Thick binders, recipe sheets and a Women’s Weekly cookbook litter a big desk in a room off to the side of the industrial prison kitchen.

It’s a training ground and they have to do the theory as well as prep and cook tonnes of food, working to a deadline — meals must be served on time or the whole prison schedule is thrown out of whack. The workers don’t mind — time passes more quickly when you don’t have time to scratch, let alone think about where you are.

Meat, vegetables and rice are the staples, and special dietary requirements can be catered for. On Saturdays, the kitchen puts out 90kg of hot dogs.

Some watermelon, pineapple, cucumber and zucchini comes from the budding horticulture centre tended by low-security inmates over the road — the jail operates like a small town, with industry, trade and essential services.

GALLERY: SEE ALL THE PICTURES FROM INSIDE THE HOLTZE PRISON KITCHEN

Not many prisoners sit idle.

“The potential for horticulture here is huge, but it’s still early days,” Holtze chief industries officer Rick Drake said. “Your heart swells with pride when you see what the guys are capable of doing in the kitchen.”

Up to 73 medium- and low-security prisoners work in the kitchen, where some get their food service qualifications.

Head cooks Ronnie Daniels and Alfie Walker stand over three giant vats, each cooking 600 meals of satay chicken and vegies.

Daniels was a head cook on a previous stint in the old Berrimah jail. He said he did his time, then went home to Ngukurr, about 500km south east of Darwin, and set up the community’s youth division of the Work for the Dole program, before he wound up back behind bars. He got his old kitchen job back.

“I’ve got to work to motivate myself,” Daniels said. “It’s like meditation — it keeps me on the level.”

Walker, who has been in the kitchen about 10 months, said: “It’s a good spot to be in a place like this, keeping busy. It fills your days.”

He said they didn’t get many complaints because they made good food — and the best was probably satay pork.

When the cooks reach their meal quota for the day, the leftovers go in the freezer for back-up. The prison provides meals for emergency evacuees from communities during the wet season.

“That’s how we plan for cyclones, we have to be ready to go at the drop of a hat,” Mr Drake said.

The kitchen supplied food for 500 people from Nauiyu community who were housed at Darwin Showgrounds when the Daly River flooded at Christmas in 2015 — on top of its daily workload, which includes meals for Don Dale Youth Detention Centre and Stringybark alcohol mandatory treatment inmates.

Mr Drake said the kitchen also catered for prison functions and graduations.

“We have good tradespeople as staff here, some ex-military, used to bulk cookery, who underpin the operation,” he said. “But a lot of credit goes to the prisoners for being able to do what they do daily without the trade experience, purely from guidance. There are some natural leaders among them.”

Mr Drake is ex-air force and has worked in the NT Corrections system for about 20 years all up. He has been in the kitchen for about a decade this time around.

Safety is obviously a paramount concern. There are more than 20 knives in the kitchen, each with a scabbard and crimped down with a 1m steel rope fastening it to the bench.

“You can’t remove them without bolt cutters,” Mr Drake said, adding he keeps the vanilla essence in his office (it has a high alcohol content).

“We’ve had the odd hiccup, but anyone who mucks up or is lazy gets tossed out.”

Mr Drake said the number of prisoners employed in the kitchen fluctuated as people were released or put on other programs to prepare them for release.

He said he would like to see inmates who trained in the kitchen integrated back into the community through work experience that would encourage them to hone their culinary or food-handling skills.

“They come in here, we train them up and then their security rating goes down and they’re taken out to tidy up parks or do other jobs that don’t make use of their skills — it would be good to see them continue their training,” he said.

He said some blokes ended up back in prison because they were unable to get work — employers wouldn’t give them a go after they had done time.

“If they serve the sentence, get out and then can’t get a job, they’re being punished twice,” he said. “There are a lot of good people who are in here because they’ve done something stupid.”

Mr Drake said a proposal for a butchery course at Holtze was in the pipeline.

“It’s one of the most critical industries — Australia is losing butchers at a rapid rate because it’s messy, bloody and greasy. But people want to eat meat. We could help fill a void.”

FACTS & FIGURES

The capacity of Holtze is 1100 inmates.
Around 60 per cent of prisoners are employed.
The prison makes about 1.5 million meals a year, and creates on average 3300 meals a day for prisoners and corrections staff.
It has six cool rooms and a giant freezer.
In a week the kitchen uses 2000 loaves of bread, 700kg of potatoes, 250kg of rice and 1.5 tonnes
of meat.
The kitchen makes 2200 sandwiches a day.
Prisoners eat 1100 pies and 1100 sausage rolls
on a weekend.
They consume 90kg of hot dogs every Saturday.