Today we’re putting two grocery stores to the test. It’s Sam’s Club versus Dollar Tree. Today we’ll be answering the question, does it actually matter where you buy your groceries? Now we will be making the same version of spicy chili oil noodles with salmon and stir fried green beans. One of the dishes will be cooked with ingredients from Sam’s Club. Costco’s slightly less attractive younger brother versus Dollar Tree, the 99 cent store’s more successful younger brother who like really superseded everything they did and then watched their brother go bankrupt and was like, well, we’re thriving and we’re not gonna, anyways, we will have a judge blind taste test the two dishes to decide if it actually matters where you buy your groceries. Now the Kitcheners are out shopping. Let’s see what they got. You guys ever watch clips from the first ever UFC? Does anybody know what I’m talking about? Like back when they used to, just had, there’d be like a 400 pound summa wrestler and they’d be fighting like 160 pound American boxer inexplicably only had one glove on. That’s what we got here. We have just a ton, a ton of products because this is Sam’s Club, you have to buy in bulk versus, I mean, you can see the space between all the ingredients over at dollar tree, but we are inexplicably making the same dish here. We’re making salmon with a nice little sweet honey soy glaze, and then some chili oil noodles right here. The price difference again, sumo wrestler versus lightweight American boxer, but like maybe he can pepper him a couple times. Also the sumo wrestlers in UFC one all, they kinda just like fell down and then someone would start hammer 50 with the back of the head. Brutal. Don’t go back and watch, but like do watch. It’s really interesting. We spent a total of $161 over at Sam’s Club. Only $26 to make the same dish over Dollar Tree. Again, that is because Sam’s Club, just like Costco, they rely on you buying in bulk, which seems like a good idea, but then you realize that roughly 40% of all food American households does end up in the trash. So I think we should start factoring that into the price, frankly. But we’re not gonna do that today. When you break it down on a dish by dish basis, it is remarkably similar. It’s only about a 30 cent difference, which is like literally less than 5%. So at the end of the day, these are going to be really similar from a dish by dish perspective. But man, look at this giant grocery, all Who could eat who needs this amount of apple cider vinegar? Oh God, it’s leaking apple cider vinegar. Now that’s. Mm, probiotics. Uh, okay, let’s look at the actual product. So salmon for salmon dollars, you guys frozen salmon. Frozen fish is a great thing. I keep frozen fish in my house all the time. This is like that weeknight dinner where you don’t want to go to the grocery store. So you just kind of run warm water over this and cook it in a pan, however you can, you know what I mean? Um, if you look at the ingredients here, yeah. Pink salmon, and then you have water, and then sodium trip. Try polyphosphate. Yeah, that’s pretty cool. It’s to retain moisture, you see. But that does mean they’re injecting this with water and salt, which gets prices down for them because you’re selling six ounces of salmon when it might only be five and a half ounces of salmon. That over time is a lot, but also it might make the salmon taste really good over here. Sam’s Club Salmon, both of these definitely just pumps full of food dye, those farms Salmon ain’t looking like that. Yeah. Color added through feed. Okay, that’s not too bad, but this is pure salmon. There’s no sodium or anything added to that. A couple other products here are really interesting to see the difference. Like I don’t think bees would recognize this as honey. If you put this in front of a bee, they’d just be like, that’s not me, man. We didn’t, we didn’t do this. You can look at the ingredients. The number one ingredient is indeed corn syrup. They don’t even, okay, this is actually a wild form of branding. ’cause they don’t call it honey, they call it. Little bear blend syrup. You know, you have maple syrup, you have chocolate syrup, you have blend syrup. Um, but this does have a honey in it. Uh, although any viscous substance, although that is just not even a liquid inside of a bear, you automatically think of as honey. Again, bears also don’t claim this. Uh, over at the Sam’s Club. Nice dark honey here. Yeah. Only one ingredient. Pure premium honey, that could make a big difference. Get back here. God, there’s so much stuff for the noodles. We are going for like a vaguely East Asian stir fried noodle, which again is something I make at least once a week. At home because I always have soy sauce and shelf stable in my pantry. What reason? Spaghetti, if you look at the actual ingredients between like a Chinese mien noodle and an Italian spaghetti, there’s kind of only one difference and that tends to be, uh, what’s it called? Uh, come on. What’s the name? What’s the scientific name for baking soda. So you sound smarter. Sodium bicarbonate. There we go. Sodium bicarbonate in the noodles. But otherwise it’s just wheat and water that’s gonna taste pretty similar. Canned green beans, both Del Monte over here. Overall, I’m excited to get cooking. I have no predictions for this bout, all I know is, um. Yeah, that dude with one taped on boxing glove, man, he was really out there fighting the good fight. To quote Chris Tucker as Smokey in the Seminole Oscar Snubbed film Friday. Y’all always got Kool-Aid and no sugar. Y’all’s got cereal and no milk. While I always have spaghetti and no sauce. So this is a great way to make a nice little homemade spaghetti sauce. We are making the ultimate shelf stable sauce for noodles to add flavor there. So we are making a homemade chili oil right here. I am going to add oil to heat. We’re gonna try and get this up to 375 degrees, and then we’re gonna add all of our. Ingredients into the bowl that we’re gonna pour the hot oil over and that’s gonna bloom all the garlic and spices. Boy, look at the shades of that garlic man. Yale James wrote about 50 shades of gray. I’m write about the 50 shades of garlic. ’cause these are two opposite sides of the spectrum. You can, you can completely smell the difference like this smells like fresh chopped garlic, which is really good from Sam’s Club. And then over here, what the hell actually happened? Damn. They really went to the bottom of the barrel on that. Well, we’re gonna dump that in. Chili flake. Even the chili flake from Sam’s Club looks brighter and redder. We’ll see how that changes. And then we’re also adding a little bit of dried cilantro in there. Once that gets the hot oil on it, it’s gonna get nice and crisped up nice and aromatic. A little bit of dried chive as well. Then a little bit of garlic powder. And a little bit of sugar. Sugar and hot oil is actually a really cool technique that’s used in a lot of different cuisines because you kind of get a little bit of caramelization on it and it’s gonna add it to the noodle. So we’re gonna get the oil hot. We’re gonna pop that over that, then toss that directly with the noodles with some soy sauce and vinegar. Alright, we got our oil to exactly 375 degrees. If you’re a little bit over, a little bit under, it doesn’t really matter. What we’re gonna do is pour that in this glass bowl and we don’t think the glass is gonna shatter. Right. No. All right. Cool. Nice and sizzling. Don’t shatter. Don’t shatter. Don’t shatter. Don’t shatter. Don’t shatter. Don’t shatter. Don’t I? Like Pyrex isn’t supposed to shatter, but like sometimes it shatters. It’s the only thing about that that I’ve learned in my professional cooking career, pop this over that. Look at that sizzle. That sizzle is flavor. That means your garlic is getting toasted a little bit. Those chilies are gonna bloom. Get nice and aromatic. We’re gonna let that sit for a sec and pop it in there. I wanna talk about the soy sauce real quick because it says soy sauce, all purpose seasoning, and anytime that an ingredient has to explain itself, you might think there’s something fishy going on. You know, it’s like somebody who talks too much. It’s like you might get the sense that they don’t know what they’re talking about. No, no, not, not me. Certainly not me. That’s for the other people. If you look at the ingredients on this, yeah, so the first ingredient is water. Then the second ingredient is soy sauce. They’re watering down the soy sauce. Man, God, it’s bleak sometimes, but hey, still might taste good. It does seem lighter in color. There’s caramel coloring added to it. That is crazy. It tastes like if you just ate fried rice but then got a mouthful of ocean water. You know when you’re at the beach and you’re like ripping through some panda express and you’re like, I wanna go boogie boarding, and you jump in immediately. It legitimately just tastes like the mad amount of salt water in a little bit of soy sauce. And soy sauce is gonna be a real big driver of flavor here. Yeah, that is nuts. That difference there, like soy sauce has this deeply intense like multi kind of brewed flavor to it. You know, that isn’t just salt, it’s a salty ingredient. Sure. But at the end of the day, that’s adding a lot of flavor and damn that, uh. Ah, that’s rough. Well, going in the butt, we’re gonna add some soy sauce and just a little bit of vinegar to the noodles. We’re gonna get all of that nice bloomed chili oil in there. And then we’re gonna let this sit for a second and that’s gonna kind of absorb all those flavors once you mix it together. Gotta jimmy it that. It’s fun. I mean, it’s almost like kind of pasta salad. I think people, you know what we’ve never done, this is a weird food fantasy of mine and I have a lot of them, uh, most of them SFW, but make macaroni salad, you know, with like the mayonnaise and the sugar and little crunchy veg, but do it with spaghetti and just let me slurp up the cold mayonnaise spaghetti. No one’s ever let me done that before. And why are people disgusted by it? Spaghetti and macaroni are the same ingredients. Eating it specifically. I think vinegar, soy sauce, chili. Yeah, this just, man, it looks better right off the jump. Eh, Barilla is one of those brands that is actually Italian, um, and like is pretty well respected in Italy as far as being like a normal everyday pasta brand. Alright, noodle are done. Let’s make some salmon. Hey, are you as passionate as I am about groceries? Doubt it. Name their first three albums. Anyways, if you wanna know everything about groceries at over to Sporked.com, they’re friends of the show. They do a lot of great work in terms of ranking groceries. You can actually really learn a lot. I always learned about new products from Sporked and I’m also biased ’cause I consider them well. Friends at this point, guys, you do this. They’re my foot friends. We’re gonna go ahead and sear off some salmon, putting a little bit of oil in the pan. We’re just gonna go for quick Sears on each side, and then we’re gonna finish by glazing it in a nice little soy honey glaze. Super, super simple. Great way to add flavor to your salmon. Always salt your proteins. These look. Well, I’ll tell you what, these look, these look different. Um, everything at Dollar Tree has been run through. You remember the early Instagram filters where one was like. Do you want this one to be a little bit blurry and kind of brown? And we’re like, I guess if that’s the only option you’re giving us, that is what Dollar Tree seems to have done. Which is kind of funny because this is just straight food dye. We know that like that’s how you create that pink color in farm salmon. You feed it things that will effectively dye it’s flesh. They didn’t do that here. I’m thinking. I do appreciate the food dye. Like I think maybe in children’s cereal, I don’t know, but like in Salmon Boy does that look more appetizing. ’cause this isn’t great. However. We don’t know what it’s actually gonna taste like, so we’re gonna let that pan get a little bit hot and then we’re gonna start making our glaze. This is the, the blend syrup, the honey from Dollar Tree. That’s not normally how a honey works, but that’s okay. We’re just gonna go ahead and see if we can whisk this up. There’s a strange film on top of that. We’re gonna add the soy sauce to it. Little bit of the world’s finest ground black pepper. Listen, we’ve had some like good Dollar Tree battles in here and I like am an advocate for anywhere where people can get low cost groceries. Um, and think dollar stores especially are like very necessary, which is a little bit upsetting that they’re necessary, but also that, uh, is the case, right? Groceries are more expensive than ever. This is not dollar tree’s best showing in terms of making salmon with chili oil noodles. Here I’m holding out hope though, and I think ultimately, like good cookery and technique can supersede a lot. Oh crap. Hold on. I’m gonna thin this out with a little bit of water. Yeah. There we go. Come on man. A yikes. Aye. Yikes. It looks like melted jelly Ranchers black pepper light honey, nothing wrong with that. Real honey over there that’s gonna taste so much better. Dammit. What’s that? Together Gonna crank these pans back on. You want a real quick Sierra on the salmon? Then you wanna get that glaze in there and just like really get their sugars caramelizing. You can tell the pan hot when it doesn’t feel cold. No more. Now what you really wanna look for is the oil running like water. That’s at least what I always do. Um, there is though an old grandma tip. Literally one of my best friend’s grandmas, she showed me this when I started showing an interest in cooking. And she goes, check this out and goes, and then flicks your own spit in the pan and it sizzles. And I still think that’s a valid technique that I would do at home. I’m just not gonna do that here because I already get enough criticism for various disgusting acts. So we’re not gonna do that. Lemme just take the salmon. I’m just gonna bear hand it. We have this fish spatula, which is what you would use to press the fish down to make sure it gets evenly coated. But I just use my hands. Use the back of your hand. ’cause if you palm it down, you are gonna burn your wrist, but use the back of your hand like that. Bingo bango. Nice little sear. Then you gotta sprint over to the sink to wash your hands. Nice one. Mississippi, two. Mississippi three Mississippi, four. Perfect run moves. Look alive. Happy bird. Lemon juice. I might as well add lemon juice to that. They say, here’s the thing, they say don’t put lemon juice until the end in a dish, but that does not apply for bottled lemon juice because acidity does not actually reduce, uh, over cooking time. Heat doesn’t denature acidity. What heat does with fresh lemon juice is whenever you squeeze lemon, some of those essential oils are coming out. Of the actual skin and you’re perfuming it with lemon zest with bottled lemon juice. You don’t have that, so there’s no point. Just put the lemon juice in now. It’ll taste literally the exact same boom. Science. A real scientist told me that too. So shout out Ariel Johnson, little fish flipper. Look at that. Oh shoot. Dude. The gray turned to a darker gray. That’s all right. That just seared up so much nicer. This salmon’s actually really beautiful from Sam’s Club. You wanna get a little bit of sear on that, but I don’t wanna super overcook the salmon before this glaze has a time to reduce. Oh, it looks like murky pond water. All right, in the pots, go, dude. Oh Sam, this is falling apart. Take that. Spoon it over the top. Ah, it looks like the pancakes here from the IHOP rats. That’s good enough. Go, go, go. Ah, yeah. You can literally tell even the soy sauce difference. The soy is actually getting nice and dark here. Here it’s ticked so much time for that water to even evaporate from the soy. These look different. The thing about honey is like it will eventually kind of caramelize and turn like dried corn syrup just sort of stays like a weird liquid. That’s why it’s using candy making so much. And so this, uh, nice candied salmon. It is still just kind of gray and pancakey. This one, you’re getting all one from the nice natural soy sauce. You’re getting a lot of that dark flavor and then the honey actually caramelized, creating the glaze that we want. Hey man, dollar tree’s in a fight for its life. But you know, who was also in a fight for their life? The sumo wrestler who fought in the first ever UFC won in the first fight. He was up against the cage. Did he give up? No, he got kicked in the face and got knocked out. But. I have no butts. This is gonna be rough. We got green beans. Now these green beans are from a can. These green beans. Were the same brand in the can, but they do look wildly different. These from the Dollar Tree, very short green beans. These slightly longer green beans, as you can tell. One is bigger. Check it out. Check out the, both, both Del Monte, but wildly different shaped sizes. I’m chew on on different sides of my mouth to get that. I am an ambichewer. Um, we’re gonna do the impossible, which is to try and make canned green beans, not taste like canned green beans. And we’re taking a little bit of inspiration from a fantastic Taiwanese based restaurant called Din Tai Fun that makes like the best green beans you’ve ever had. And what they do is they oil blanch them until they’re nice and blistery then get a lot of like garlic and chicken stock and a little bit of soy in there. So we’ve dried off the green beans on paper towels to try and make sure that they don’t explode when we add them to hot oil, oil’s about 350. I’m gonna go ahead and drop the green beans. There we go. We’re gonna try and get little blister on it. Try and work two walks at the same time. Alright. You can see the skin blistering up a little bit. Is this going to change how they actually taste? Find out on this episode of Mythical Kitchen. It’s beautiful in a wok. You always wanna keep stuff moving. That’s gonna add some nice air flow. Well, I’m pulling. We are getting nice and fragrant. You do see the blisters that you would get at like a restaurant of like a nice wok cooked green bean. All the green beans out there and pull these guys, and then I’m gonna get that oil out. Those aren’t looking particularly blistered yet. I’m gonna dump the oil and then I’m going to add a little bit of fresh oil. We’re gonna strain the green bean liquid out of that and, and, and use it in piece the recipes. Just nice green bean tinted oil for my fried fluffer nutters. And now we’re gonna get a whole lot of fresh garlic into that pan, keep going. Okay. There’s oil work fast. I can’t do with two hands. Okay. All right. More fresh oil in there. We’re gonna try and work really quick with this garlic. This seems like a ton of garlic. That’s only ’cause it is. We gotta work it really, really fast. Soy sauce, I wanna get to that soy sauce. Nice and dark in there. Ah, go, go, go, go, go. Ah, ah. Played for my damn life over here. All. I’m just gonna add a little bit of finishing bullion. You get that incorporated? What are you? Stir? Fried chicken bullion care. Alright, more Nice. Silent. Ah, there we go. All that bullion, incorporated that nice hot oil. They’re not greasy, they’re shiny and that’s different. They’re glistening. They’re luscious. It’s like a pair of lips with roadie lip gloss on it. Is that how it’s surrounds roadie? Just road. What does it mean? What’s her name? What do you mean? It’s her name? Her name is Hailey Bieber. Hailey Rose. Feed me. I was already going to, but now I don’t want to after that. All right, I’ll leave. Yeah. Thank you. Can we get a sub for Gwynedd. Gwynedd’s here from Sporked.com, welcome back. Hi. We made food again. Yay. Can you guess what this is called? Because I, we, I have words that I said about it, but I kind of want you to, um, peanut spaghetti with garlic, green beans and salmon planks. That is exactly what it is. We were calling it, uh, chili oil, spaghetti, trying to make chili oil from the best we could with the ingredients from the source. Oh. But I will say one of these is from Sam’s Club. Okay. And one of them is from the Dollar Tree. They look very different. I also. Do you guys feel like these are normal portion sizes? I’m very hungry. You’re, you’re a growing young last training for a Vanderpump Rules marathon. You gotta, you gotta go ahead and carve up, okay, I’m gonna start with these green beans. I will say both green beans were from a can and both were the same brand. In fact, however, they do look different. Yeah, that’s weird. Uhhuh, these are. Shorter, and these are longer. That’s what I said. There’s the ends of the green beans here and they’ve been trimmed off of there. So I’m wondering what are the green bean ends used for? Yeah, weird. The American people deserve to know. Makes you think this is garlic right in here? Yes. Okay. Yes. So we actually sort of, we tried to, you ever been to Din Tai Fung? Mm, mm-hmm. We tried to to do their green beans, but with canned green beans, we had the same reaction. It didn’t quite work. But no, I think trying to make your own chili oil is so ambitious and cool. I love you guys. Aw, we love you too. Well, I can’t speak for everybody. Do you all love Gwynedd? Yeah. Okay. Who hands up, do you hate Gwynedd? No one. I wasn’t saying my hands up. I was just demonstrating what hand up looks like. I’m trying to eat this politely ’cause I already didn’t eat that one. Politely. I bite spaghetti and then I let the rest of it fall on the plate. Which isn’t a problem if you’re the only one eating it. Mm-hmm. But I assume you want to eat this too, right? Yeah, do, but also I do the same thing so we can both just kind of like eat each other’s spaghetti remnants. It sounds gross, but mm-hmm. We’ve done grosser here. I know. Well, and I work at Sporked and we’re just always like licking ice cream cones after one another and stuff like that. So. Mmm. The pasta came out great. It’s really good. I mean, it’s all like very shelf stable, commonly used ingredients. Yeah. Literally the only spice in there is straight crushed red pepper. It’s like, it’s a really nice heat. I actually don’t like, I think crushed red pepper can be too spicy sometimes. I really do. I think some people are get split, get up in the comment. So I’ll say the salmons, they were intended to look the same, they had the same cooking method, the same in the pan. But because of, um, certain differences in the product, they ended up looking wildly different. It’s like a real big, big, big difference. Big difference. This one doesn’t appear to have sauce on it at all. There’s a lot. And this one really, it just sort of absorbed back into the salmon skin. I think the fish tastes good. Mm-hmm. But I don’t understand where the sauce went. It’s baffling to me. Bling. And I do love, I like the look of this. Mm-hmm. It’s like, nice. Oops, I was gonna pick that up, but, oh, it won’t let me, it’s just so flaky and tender. It’s like, yeah, but look at Nice. That looks. Mm-hmm. I mean, come on. Yeah. So, I mean, I think that’s the winner for me, based on the fact that it, it’s, it’s saucy and it, it looks good. And it feels good. I think I know which is wedge. Okay. On 3, 2, 1, say it now. I do believe that this one is from Dollar Tree, and I do believe that This one’s from Sam’s Club. Sam’s Club? Yeah. Sam. Sam Sam’s Sam’s Club. You are correct. That is the Dollar Tree one. We tried our best with the salmon. The interesting thing with the salmon is that that has salt water like injecting to it and you can kind of taste it. Mm-hmm. Which almost makes it a little bit more tender. The salmon’s not bad. I don’t think the salmon’s bad at all. Which one of these do you prefer? Mm, I preferred that one. Yeah, I think the taste of the pasta is really good, and I don’t know why those, the green beans taste a little better too, which know is crazy if they’re the same brand. Doesn’t make sense. So the, the, the quality of garlic and soy sauce were actually crazy. The soy sauce at Dollar Tree. It literally was soy sauce mixed with water and salt. Yeah. And so also the honey was not honey, it was corn syrup, which is why the glazed didn’t match the set. Oh. So literally the water from the soy sauce kind of prevented it from like getting that nice like burnt caramelization, um, and the corn syrup as well. So that was a tough showing. This was an uphill battle from day one. We said that the prices were actually really similar. It cost $7 and 96 cents per portion Sam’s Club versus $7 and 65 cents over from Dollar Tree. Wow. That said you have to buy like giant drums of everything at Sam’s Club. So we did spend. Well over a hundred dollars at Sam’s Club and only about 25 bucks a dollar tree. But the salmon comes frozen, so it’s just like, put it in the freezer and you’re fine. That’s what I’m saying. But then things get buried in the bottom of the freezer, you know? That’s true. And that causes like a rift in your relationship. ’cause you just like eat the dumplings. You bought the dumplings two years ago. Just eat the dumplings, have you, one day we gotta eat the dumplings. Have you ever looked in the Sporked freezer? No, but I’d like to. It’s like a black hole in there. I saw you have protein ice cream. Can I eat it? Yes. Yeah. I’m so glad you asked. Oh, it’s, oh, I’m so excited. It’s a good day. This is good. This is good. I love it. This is great. Sam’s Club, dollar Tree. Good. Showing, I think they’ve shined more in the like, uh, baked casserole departments when you’re leaving a bare piece of fish like that. Yeah, I think it is a little bit tough. The noodles are good. Canned green beans. Great way to get some nutrition in. Mm-hmm. Gwynedd, thank you so much for stopping by. You got you. Got anything to plug? Um, go to Sporked.com and I’m gonna go eat the rest of the spaghetti. Go carve up for that Vander Bump Rules Marathon. Yeah. Thank you so much for stopping by Mythical Kitchen. We got new episodes out all the time. Leave a comment of what grocery store you want to see us cook from next and why it’s Bucky’s. Guys, we gotta make a Buckies Run. Sporked is your guide through the grocery aisle. Head over to Sporked YouTube channel to watch the Sporked team’s live, taste tests, food rankings, food reviews, and more.