MK 1087: We Tested Dollar Tree vs. Every Other Grocery Store (Marathon)

Welcome to Mythical Kitchen, where we ask the question, does it actually matter where you buy your groceries? So in our recurring series, grocery Store Battle, we make two versions of the same dish. One cooked with ingredients from one grocery store, the other cooked with ingredients from another. But there’s one grocery store that seems to keep coming back time and time again. You know it, you love it. I love cooking with their ingredients. And that is the Dollar Tree. So without further ado, let’s watch Dollar Tree Square off against all the other grocery stores. Today we’re putting two grocery stores against each other. It’s Walmart versus Dollar Tree. Today we’re gonna answer the question, does it actually matter where you buy your groceries? Because listen, times are tight. Some of us not naming any names here, may have lost a lot of money trying to short Radio Shack stock. Thanks dog talk. So today we’re making two identical dishes. We’re doing fettuccine Alfredo and a veggie flatbread On one side. We got groceries from Walmart. On the other side, we got groceries from Dollar Tree. The mythical kitchen ears are out shopping right now. Let’s see what they got. For the first part of the meal, we got fettuccine Alfredo, AKA fettuccine Alfred. Uh, we have a rule in the kitchen if it’s a polysyllabic Italian word, we do not pronounce the final syllable that is canon. You may also be wondering if this is supposed to be fettuccine. Why do you have penne? Um, there’s enough Americans that don’t know that fettuccine refers to the pasta and Alfredo refers to the sauce, and there are a lot of Italian Americans that don’t know that Alfredo is not an Italian American dish. It actually came from aroma, a restaurant called Alfredo. So that’s what we’re making today. Here we have the groceries from Walmart. The total bill was about $43 over a dollar tree. It was only $28. If you average that out as a cost per dish, it’s $12 and 42 cents from Walmart and only 10 62 from Dollar Tree. This is probably the closest we’ve had, and there’s a very specific reason. When you go to Dollar Tree, all of the dairy is actually more expensive. It might be an economies of scale thing. Walmart’s moving a lot more dairy products. You gotta pay more to store them, and Walmart has more infrastructure. But either way, this is a very close battle when it comes to price. Now, when we look at quality pasta for pasta, they’re both made from Selina and Durham. Wheat flour, those are probably gonna be pretty similar. I think it’s in these like high quality items that we’re gonna see some difference. If you look at the Parmesan cheese, there was a big article that came out a while ago that was like, this has wood pulp in it. That’s the stuff termites eat. And I’m like, yum. I’m not better than no termite. Uh, it does. It has a product called Cellulose, which is an antica agent. But if you look at the first ingredient, it’s still just Parmesan cheese, which is milk salt, and then REIT cultures. Um, but when you go over to the Dollar Tree, this is the only dairy product that was cheaper. The ingredients get a little bit wonky, but stick with me. Number one, dairy way, two foods starch, three rice flour. You eventually get the Parmesan cheese at number 12 on the ingredients label. That said, I don’t really care what the ingredients label says, man. I’m gonna see how it actually tastes. Also, it’s probably gonna be a nice little thickener going in there. Then we’re gonna move on to our veggie flatbread. Dollar tree. Does not have a lot of fresh vegetables. We’ve talked about this, right? Your congressman get ’em to subsidize produce farming for the love of God. But we have canned mushrooms, which canned mushrooms are really good. If you’re gonna cook mushrooms anyway, throw ’em on a flatbread. Might as well use tough from a can. We got some frozen stir fry pepper blend, really easy, convenient product to use. A little bit of hunts, traditional pasta sauce over here. Uh, and then some green olives, ’cause Dollar Tree had green olives, and I get down on green olives, man. Also, some days for like vegetables. I’ll just eat a bunch of pickles. Did anybody else do that, Nicole? Yeah. And if it’s like, if it’s good enough for the pioneers. It’s good enough for me. You know, I think this is gonna be a pretty even battle. The pizza crust over at Great Value. Walmart I think looks a little better. It’s at least got green Flex in there. And Green Flex Equal flavor. This one’s a little bit thin. Um, but that said, Vieta Mexican style shreds versus great value Fiesta Blend. These are Mexican people that we’re having a party. These are Mexican people who are just chilling. I guess I got no takes right now. I’m 50 50 and I got a lot of money waged on this. We’ve officially started the mythical kitchen sports betting line. All right, call in place. Your bet. See you. Who’s gonna win later? Uh, we got a big parlay on how many times Josh accidentally picks his nose and or doesn’t wash his hands. Well, we’re starting off with a veggie flatbread. This is a great way to listen. Sometimes in life. You gotta trick people. Cooking is really all about lying to people. Uh, and if you’re trying to get people to eat vegetables, what a way to put ’em on they, again, I don’t really feel comfortable calling this pizza, but we’re calling ’em flatbread ’cause these are two pizza crusts that are sold, pre-made. Some of the main differences. You see this one from Dollar Tree? It’s like really thin and cracker. Shout out to St. Louis. We all know I love your pizza and love the entire city of St. Louis. And the Rams never should have left to come to much greener pastures in Los Angeles, California. Anyways, so we’re gonna start making this, uh, the sauces. So over on the dollar tree side, we got the hunts canned tomato sauce. At first I was like, I mean I like hunts canned tomato sauce and I was like, you’re paying for the jar over. Great value. That was significantly more expensive. However, looking at the ingredients, the hunts one is a majority just corn syrup, tomato paste and water. Put some spices in there, see how it tastes. Why did I dip the handle in? I’m done. Ain’t nothing wrong with that. My Italian roommates taught me to put sugar and tomato sauce to neutralize the acidity, which doesn’t really mean anything, but they were Italian and they were mean. So I do it. Not much of a difference. You do get more salt and more acidity in there and I think that’s because the sugar is god dang it, they were right. The sugar’s counteracting the acidity in that one. Uh, but that’s about a wash. Anyways, we are going to season up the sauce. Hold it. Anytime you get a jarred sauce, you’re probably skimping on stuff like spices. So we’re gonna take a whole lot of garlic powder. Listen, this is getting spread thin and just dumped all over a pizza thing. Pizza thing. Crust. Crust is what it’s called. Food flew outta my mouth. What did I even eat that would’ve had chunks. That was old chunk is what it was. It was a granola bar. I think we’re taking some garlic. Um, a lot of people taught crap on garlic because it’s not as potent as fresh garlic, which is absolutely true. Garlic is, garlic is a port monto, jarred, garlic. People couldn’t tell. Garlic is actually heat treated and then packed, which means that you’re losing some of those flavors, but. It’s like roasted garlic. You just gotta use five times as much. And good news is garlic is five times cheaper and creates five times less work. So dump in a bunch of garlic, it’s gonna make your food taste good. We got some Italian seasonings and herbs right there. I’m gonna save some for the top. Dump some of that in there. And then we got parsley. This is interesting. You look at the dollar tree, dried parsley over here and it’s a little bit brown, which is to say, what happens to green to chlorophyll when you heat it and dry it. This Walmart one is suspiciously green. We check the ingredients label. Look at that. That don’t look right. This looks like it’s, uh, it’s color corrected. It almost looks like it has. If you ever question something that’s green food dye in it, try and look for tinges of blue because green food ye is actually just blue food. Ye mixed with yellow food dye. Wow. Primary colors. Josh learned something in first grade. Um, but you tend to see a little bit of blue and egg and I can’t tell if that’s food. Ye, but either way you’re gonna dump a little bit a parsing of that sauce, save something to the top, boom, go over to the Walmart side and do that little bit of this. I, um, I feel like every homemade tomato sauce I’ve made has just been worse than the best stuff you can buy at the store. Does anyone feel, do you guys feel that or you’re the people who are like, I can make a better red sauce than any jar can sometimes. What’s, what’s limiting you in the other times when you can’t? I what? Hey, that’s a, that is a very valid reason to not make something from scratch is. I wanna spread some sauce. Get this here. What did I, I compared myself to both termites and pioneers. I kinda love that. Uh, do you guys ever see the clip where they’re talking about, it’s like during the holidays and they’re talking about towns that are named after, uh, like reindeer and there’ll be like vixen town. Ha ha. And then there’s like donville and it’s like that ain’t named after the reindeer. That’s named after the people who ate each other in effigy. I always think that’s funny. Not cannibalism, iss not funny only sometimes this is, this is tough. ’cause here’s the thing. Most cooking shows Megan making one thing. We gotta do two. That leaves me double the time to ramble. And you’re not gonna like where this goes. Santa should be a polar bear. Go on. Why is it a person Don’t make no sense. Also, if you look at it, if you really look at it, this is an upsetting idea. Santa is a Christian demigod, right? Sauce down. Some say cheese should be the next thing. I really want to try this Vel Vita. This is the Mexican style blend and this is the fiesta. If I don’t taste party in that cheese, so help me. God. I’m writing the Walton family a strongly worded letter and I already do that. The shreds on this one are a little thinner. It is harder. There’s more cellulose in there, which means it’s not gonna melt as well. I’m tasting a little, I’m tasting a little party. I’m tasting a little party. All right, we gotta speed things up. I’m gonna go two hand technique, try and spread this. Oh God, I’m gonna throw up. I just got vertigo doing that, so I’m a na I don’t know how to explain it. Listen, I’m a natural athlete. I get vertigo, sprinkling cheese. You guys ever get that on a plane? Like you drink a little too much before takeoff and then you just get vertigo. Should I go to a doctor more often than I do? Yes. That makes sense. All right, we’ll save it. A little cheese. Oh, I’m gonna eyeball this one a little bit. Cool. That’s a good amount of cheese. That’s a good amount of cheese. I don’t wanna overload with cheese. Now we’re going vegetables. Uh, green pepper bread, but not green. There’s many colored peppers. We got a pepper blend over here. This is the frozen stuff. We’re just gonna be torching this on a flatbread. You don’t need like the freshest bell peppers in the world. Freezing things was a valuable way to learn how to preserve food. Use technology to your advantage. Fresh isn’t always synonymous with bad or unhealthy. It’s actually a great way to preserve nutrients. So boom, peppers on. I never know what to do with my offhand. How does here cool. Um, I will say the cut on the Walmart peppers over this is Walmart. No. Ha ha ha. Cut on the Walmart. Pepper sucks. Eat it. Dollar Tree was cheaper. Uh, now we’re going can mushrooms over here. We’re gonna pop some of those bad boys on there. Perfect. Um, just if, listen, if this is dragging, just play like the, like Italian, you know, the Italian music. Big old stems on these guys. So why are we using a Mexican style cheese on an Italian style dish right here? I know this is authentic Italian food. Um, I grew up exclusively eating Mexican style cheese. The funny thing about it, um, absolutely nothing Mexican about it and you can tell because the first one is cheddar or in Spanish cheddar because that was a town in England and so there ain’t nothing Mexican about Mexican style blend. Um, that said, it’s just, listen, it’s cheese. The mozzarella you’re gonna get probably wouldn’t pass mustard for real. Italians, uh, being called mozzarella either. So like whatever, dude, it’s cheese. Just put it on your pizza. Uh, we’re throwing olives on here. Also, like so many different regional styles of pizza use different kinds of cheese, right? St. St. Louis, my favorite pizza style, they use a processed cheese called Prol. You go to Detroit, they’re using something called brick cheese that is most similar to cheddar. Not all pizza has to be Italian. Like it’s uh, it’s a very Americanized thing. I remember my dad telling me a story when he went to Rome for the first time and he asked a cab driver where he could get the best pizza. He just said New York. That was more Borat than Italian cabbie, but I’ll take it. Okay, one last thing to do. Parmesan cheese. This is gonna be really interesting. This, the stuff from the shaker bottle. Ain’t nothing wrong with it adds a lot of texture and it is real Parmesan cheese. I’m just going to pop that on there. Now this is interesting, this is fun for me because this looks like powdered laundry detergent. Um, and I’m really curious to see what it tastes like. This is mostly whey and food starch. Whoa. It’s like popcorn seasoning. Okay. It, what does it taste like? It tastes nothing like Parmesan cheese, which is fine. Right? This is just, I don’t know, it’s a little dust that’s gonna add some dairy flavor to your pizza. Wow. This is crazy. Um, it really does taste like white cheddar popcorn seasoning. Do you guys know they, what do they call ’em? They’re like sprinkle bowls or something. They added ’em to movie theaters sometime around like 2009. And it revolutionized the game, man. You can add like 19 different flavors to your popcorn. Um, I have no idea how that’s gonna bake up. ’cause you kinda, it’s mostly rice flour, but. I put some herbs on there. We’re gonna get this in an oven right now. We’re just gonna get it until the bottom’s nice and crispy. Cheese is melted, veggies are all hot. Boom. What a way to consume a fair amount of veggies. Now let’s make some fettuccine. We gotta go fast. So we got the fettuccine cooking over here, which is to say the penne pasta. I’m gonna take a fudge ton of butter. Oh god, this is actually margarine, but the feta fe, I just gotta start calling it Penna ’cause that’s what it is. The penne over here from uh, dollar Tree has for whatever reason cooked like three times faster than any penne possibly should. I don’t know if it was par boiled or if it’s just uh, smaller and thinner, but either way we’re gonna get some garlic saute with margarine. Margarine is just emulsified oils that they then put butter flavoring into. I grew up on margarine. I, it just tastes like movie theater popcorn to me. And so I don’t mind it. I know a lot of people bulk at it from a culinary perspective, but for me it’s like what ebbs And so we’re pulling this pasta al dente while the Walmart one has another like five minutes to cook. That is neither an endorsement nor an indictment. Simply a thing that has happened, uh, that I did not think would so great, right? This saw taking the butter. Anytime I’m building a cream sauce cream, if you’re not using a starch, thickener has a tendency to separate ’cause it’s dairy, protein, fat, those don’t emulsify whatever. I like to get my pasta in there before we’ll just cook that entirely separately. ’cause that’s still five minutes away from being done and I don’t know why we’re putting it at the same time. All right, cool. So we’re taking some half and half. Uh, we’re just vibing. We’re not measuring ’cause we’re working so many different variables here. Like we got this powdery Parmesan cheese that you can’t really measure against that. So we’re just gonna try and vibe this out. Get some Parmesan, we’ll finish with parm as they would do classic Italian cookery. If your pasta looks super watery like this, that’s totally fine. We pulled this aldente so it’s actually gonna soak up a lot of that milk. And as you continue to agitate it, the pasta will naturally thicken garlic powder. Why would you put fresh garlic and dried garlic in there? They’re different. It’s like eating a steak versus beep jerky. You can eat one more easily in your car. My high school girlfriend wouldn’t get in my car ’cause it smelled too much like beef jerky. Uh, I did love beef jerky more than her, uh, cream cheese. Great thing about cream cheese. I pasta sauce. Again, it’s a little bit of a cheat some people would say, but it adds a nice thickness as opposed to really trying to get the starchy pasta water in there. So we’re just gonna like, let that sit, chill. Let this sa up. Toss it around a little bit. Give it a taste. See where we’re at. See you about this pasta. Alright. I’d be so good at working at a waffle house, I’d just be screaming. Oh. But when one unruly customer comes in that waffle house, uh, hey, speaking of me being a calming presence. If you go over to sport.com, you can check out which jarred pasta sauce you are based on your zodiac sign. I’m a Taurus, so I would be Alfredo sauce, which is smooth, white and thick just like me. I had to say it. Uh, all right, that’s cooking. See, see about this here, pasta. Ow. No, this is still, it’s if you, I dunno if people know this. If you bite through pasta or pinch it and you still see a solid white ring in there, Winnie single got ’em. If you pinch pasta and you still see the like white ring inside generally means it’s not done. It’s all as a taste preference. I prefer my pasta a little bit more cooked than a lot of people. I just, I don’t know. I don’t think you’re cool for liking super l dhy pasta. Like get some pleasure in your life. You know, eat mush. Mush is good. The world survived a mush. The Donner party, they would’ve loved to have mush. All they had was people. Um, it’s looking pretty solid. Oh, I did not finish with Parmesan cheese. Let’s get a little more pasta water in there. I do understand how futile this is, but I also understand that I’m getting the amount of pasta water that I want so y’all can just zap it. That’s not even a term. Zap it. I’m tired. Pizza’s done. You gotta feed the damn kids. Pizza’s not done. All right, we’re gonna get some farm on here. Alexa, can you chill? Can you f and chill for once? Shut the F up, Josh. Can I do that? No. No. I shouldn’t do that. I shouldn’t do that. We should, we should teach people how to actually cook. Uh, all right. The man realizes four years into hosting a cooking show on YouTube. All right. Water. Boom. Take the pasta off the heat when it’s a little looser than you want it on the plate. That way it’s gonna set up. Set that over here. See if this pasta’s done. Nope. Why did that happen? This pasta cooked. Where’s the boxes? Bring five corns of water and wrap. Boil sausage. You want somebody cooked, cook up, cooked 10 to 12 minutes. This cooked in four minutes. Maybe that’s why this was discounted at the Dollar Tree. They’re just like, oh, Giuseppe didn’t do math right in the factory. Is that racist? Calling it Italian man? Giuseppe. It’s just a common Italian word. Fine. Uh, Alex Pasta saying, I’m gonna do the same thing that I did to that. You’ll, here, I’ll put this back. You guys can see I have, hold it. I’m so sorry. Don’t do what I do. Well, yeah, do it. Have you guys ever de glazed a pan with hot dog water? No. Kind of works. You just made like you just made stock, you know? All right. Uh, butter. Now this is also not butter, um, but I believe. This is proper margarine from the Walmart, whereas this was parquet artificially flavored emulsified canola oil spread, which again, I ain’t too mad about. The garlic at Walmart is a lot lighter color, which to me means less oxidization, which means less caramelization, uh, or at least my yard browning, which means it’s probably gonna taste a little bit more pungent and fresher. But we shall see butter, garlic going boom. Can’t cook left-handed. So we’re switching. Toss that in there. If you ever get water in a pan, the good news is it just comes out and then you put more back in and that’s cooking. God, I’m inspirational. All right. Butter water, boom. Again, we’re kind of eyeballing this ’cause a lot of this is, uh, it’s gonna be changed by the consistency of this. Parmesan cheese can add a fair amount of garlic powder, get some black pepper in there. I think white sauces and black pepper go really, really well together. I know in culinary school they teach you to use white pepper with a white sauce because no, you cannot see a single speck of black. I got South African instead of French. If you’re in South African culinary school, they also probably tell you that. Oh, nice. Thick ground, black pepper, south African, big hospitality industry. Actually saying a lot of big resorts in Cape Town. Yeah, a lot of great. Any who get that nice and sloppy. We’re gonna bring this up. So a little rapid simmer, and then we are going to toss. Well, let’s, let’s let it go. What do you wanna talk about? Does anybody need advice in this room? How do you know you found the one? How do you I found the one. No, you never know if you found the one. There is no one. It’s, there’s 8 billion people in the world. It’s just, it’s all a game of proximity, convenience, and timing. Right? If a butterfly flapped its wings, you probably wouldn’t have met your soulmate. You know, especially on the app. Think about that. If you met your partner online dating, like if you got distracted and scrolled through Instagram instead, you just probably never would’ve seen their profile. But that said, you could’ve ended up with somebody that you were terribly unhappy with. You could have also ended up with somebody else that you were happy with. Uh, life is all random. Then one day you die. But you find somebody that makes you happy every single day that you’re with them. And that’s enough. Man. Don’t question your instincts. You’re happy with someone. Let yourself be happy. You deserve it. Pasta’s done. All right, we’re getting the cream cheese in there. We’re gonna saute this up. Uh, these are pretty much done. I’m gonna keep rehydrating this, lemme give it as little seasoning taste. Okay. Found another spatula. See where we’re at. Why don’t you go Alfredo, pop the why not, man. Get some more of that. It’s more of that bad boy in there. It was a little under salted because that does just taste like rice flour and buttermilk powder, which is perfectly fine. We’re gonna season this up. We’re gonna pull our flatbreads, which are absolutely burnt. Let’s taste this. They’re not burnt. I was doing a a A Fib Jordan Meyer from pork.com. I’m so excited. Welcome to the Mythical Kitchen. Um, thanks. I just wanna say that I really appreciate when you judge the food that I’ve made more than other people because you know what you’re talking about and it’s a very unique skill to provide, um, both exposition and expertise. That’s so sweet. Yeah. This is also coming off the backs of having Lucas judge our food. So, um, oh, well anyways, he is very handsome, not the damp in the compliment. Uh, before you we have a little bit of fettuccine Al Alfred. Sorry. Okay. A little bit of Fettuccine Al Alfred breaking my own rules and a vegetable flatbread from two different grocery stores. Your job is two. Uh, taste them and guess which one is from the more expensive grocery store. And also tell us which one you like better. Okay. They both look very similar and they both look pretty good. The crust, did you make the crust? Are they like, what’s the deal with the crust? That’s a great question. So the crust were both pre-made, pre-cooked crusts. Okay. Um, neither boli. Okay. Oh, both representative of the stores themselves. Okay. Oh, that’s nice. We did not hand roll the penne. I figured. Hmm. It’s good. I love, it’s kind of turned into one gelatinous blob. Yeah. It tastes very delicious. It’s extremely salty, especially on the back end. My mouth is like continuing to salivate wrong, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. It’s peppery. It’s garlicky. I think it’s nice. I’m gonna taste it side by side. Oh, this one has stayed less gelatinous. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but it is just an observation. Hmm. Less salty. Less flavorful. Hmm. So the ingredients in both butter, garlic, black pepper, we use cream cheese, but there’s an in, I don’t wanna give away the goose too much, but there’s a commonly added ingredient that generally costs a lot of money that some places take weird little shortcuts on that you would add to an Alfredo sauce and it rhymes with dharma jean peas. Oh, okay. Let’s see. The pizza. This pizza looks more expensive than that pizza. Um, that’s what I’ll say. It’s a nice little crunch. Mm-hmm. Hmm. Do, do you need tea? But can I have a bite? Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. I’m had any breakfast. That’s nice. I mean, I wanna choose the sauce by itself. Hmm. Okay. Very acidic. It’s nice. One of the things on this looks like a pickle. I’m assuming that’s not what it is, but I don’t know. I don’t know what that means. It’s a pepper, green bell pepper. This pizza looks cheaper. The crust is thinner. But you know what, I’ll tell you sometimes that. It could mean it’s more expensive. Um, the mushrooms in this, is there Parmesan cheese on top of this? Why is, are some of these white? That is the Parmesan cheese? Yes. Okay. Uh, I will say another clue. One of these has Mexican blend cheese and the other has fiesta blend. I, I didn’t wanna put you on blast, but I was wondering why both of these were made with, um, like shredded cheddar cheese and not any kind of shredded mozzarella. One of the stores did not have that. Mm, okay. Hmm. Okay. Okay. I think I’m ready. Both of these are pretty good. I’d eat either one of these again. For some reason, I’m like the cheaper one might taste better with something like this, but. I’m gonna have to say this one is better. The vegetable quality seems better, so I’m gonna guess that this one is more expensive. Jordan, you are absolutely correct. Yay. Over here, coming in for a total of four portions, $12 and 42 cents. Okay, this is from Walmart. Okay, coming in at a total of $10 and 62 cents. This is from Dollar Tree. Very, very similar costs. Overall, we found that dairy was super expensive at Dollar Tree. The main difference you’re tasting. The reason that’s a lot saltier. That’s the, the green Parmesan cheese and the shaker bottle, which is a majority Parmesan cheese. Sure. Dollar cheese version. Parmesan cheese was a majority Buttermilk powder and rice flour, other dairy ingredients that don’t have that salt. Okay, so that explains that. And then like you said, the crustier thicker crustier thinner vegetables. Yeah. Sauce. More flavorful. But with the price difference, not that big. I’m like, why would you not just go to Walmart? You know, this almost tasted too, like the butter was nicer. The cream cheese in there. I see you got the Philadelphia cream cheese earrings. Shout out. You know, a lot of the rest of the world is called cream cheese Philadelphia. I think that’s great. I love stuff like that. I love a Kleenex. I love a Tupperware. I love something where it’s just like the brand has become the product. Mm-hmm. It’s, I, I don’t know why I think it’s funny. I think it’d be cool if people make dinner and they just call it making a mythical kitchen instead. I love that. I’ll start doing that. Jordan, thank you so much. And everybody out there, make sure you tell us what grocery stores you wanna see on this show. Next, tell us what dishes you wanna see us make. Uh, just give us compliments about ourselves please. What’s going on next time? Today we’re putting two grocery stores to the test. It’s all the versus Dollar Tree. Listen, I don’t know how money works, but I know that food costs too much of it. So we’re gonna see if the expensive stuff is actually worth it in the taste. We’ll be making two versions of burgers and fries. One cooked with ingredients from Aldi, one cooked with ingredients from Dollar Tree. Then a judge will come in and blind taste test them to see if they can figure out which is which. The kitchen years are off. Shopping at Aldi and Dollar Tree. Let’s see what they got. Look at this large bounty of ingredients. We have all of our stuff to make the patty melt and garlic fries over here from Dollar Tree. Nope. Yes, yes. Dollar Tree has this bread. Yo dollar tree’s got nature’s own perfect, crafted, fixed, sliced white. That is great bread. Wow. We’ve got all of our dollar tree ingredients here. We have all of our Aldi ingredients here. I had never stepped foot into an Aldi until like two years ago when they finally moved into la. Aldi is a German grocery store. We recently found out it is a port monteau of a discount. Uh, but it’s a German grocery store that they were kind of known for being like a smaller scale Costco. They cut out a lot of the frills. Um, I remember walking in there for the first time and there’s just like giant cereal bags laying on the ground, and I’m like, am I, were they supposed to be there? Do I just grab them and their cashiers sit down, which cashiers should be allowed to sit down? That should be very normal. Cashiers should be sitting everywhere. And then they also don’t have bags. And you have to pay like a nickel for a shopping cart. I don’t know if I’m being honest, Aldi freaks me out. Looking at the prices here, we spent $42 total at Aldi and we spent $27 total at Dollar Tree. However, when you look at the price of the dish, Aldi is $8 and 57 cents. Dollar Tree is $7 and 35 cents. Not that big of a difference here. Um, but there are some key differences in the ingredients. Beef patties, beef, beef, beef hearts, which I would say is just beef, right? That’s fair. You, you know, you, you, this is all me baby. This is like I the whole Anyways, uh, we got beef, beef hearts, water textured vegetable protein. We got some soy flour, soy protein concentrate. So there is going to be a lot of like fillers in this, but also it could taste good. You have d sodium ate and guanylate in here, which is also known as beef extract. So it’s gonna taste nice and beefy. And then you look over here from Aldi and this is just pure black uncles beef from ACH discount. And there’s only one ingredient and it’s just black Angus beef. I will stress Black Angus has been used as a marketing term by a lot of people. Black Angus is just the most common breed of cow in America, so that’s super cool. The burger patties at Aldi are 56% more expensive than the burger patties at Dollar Tree. At Dollar Tree they only cost 63 cents per patty over at Aldi, a dollar 42. And then we are going to be making a burger sauce to go along with that. Um, all of the condiments from Dollar Tree tended to be more expensive, especially the mustard was over 200% more expensive, uh, in price per ounce. ’cause they have name brand mustard over at Dollar Tree for some reason. But to me French is like the absolute gold standard yellow mustard. That’s what I grew up seeing at like my rich friend’s house when I was a kid. But stuff like this is a lot more expensive, whereas you get just the big old honking bottles. This is even a thinner plastic at Aldi. Uh, so you’re gonna be saving money on stuff like that when you can buy bigger quantities in bulk. Um, we got cheese somehow. Velv Vita must have the hookup with Dollar Tree. I tend to love Velv Vita. I also do tend to love craft when it comes to these single American cheese slices. Then we’re gonna be making some garlic fries. We’re gonna be using the pre-bagged fries here. I grew up on bagged fries. I absolutely love them. You can customize them any way you want. You can even throw ’em into a hash for breakfast if you want to. Um, but looking at these, I mean these are basically the same product, but we’re gonna be gussy them up. We’re gonna be making garlic fries, which is something in California. I grew up eating all the time. You go to a fair, they got garlic fries, they’re delicious. We’re gonna be using garlic, which I know a lot of chefs say Don’t use garlic. I say do use garlic. Uh, it is heat treated so it’s not gonna be as fresh. You can, it’s leaking. You look at the dollar tree garlic and it is a little bit browner, which means it’s probably not gonna be as fresh. It was probably, uh, treated with more heat and that’s packed in water. Then this looks pretty fresh. Uh, but we’re gonna put that with some herbs on the fries. It’s gonna be close, but man, I keep eyeing that, that dollar tree bread over there, that is maybe the gold standard white bread right here. I’m excited to see what shakes out. Let’s get cooking. It’s a great day. It’s a great day because we’re making. Orange mayonnaise, and that’s all I want to eat. That is my favorite food in the entire world. If I could eat, drink it with a Boba straw, I have. So we over here, we got all this stuff from Dollar Tree, and then over here we got all this stuff from Aldi. The funny thing about all these condiments is that Dollar Tree is, this is all name brand stuff. So we’re rocking Frenches mustard, we’re rocking Hunts. Ketchup. I actually really like hunts. I they can do a good job. And then craft mayo. If you look at the differences in Mayo’s craft mayo, it’s always been suspiciously white to me, right? Is that crazy? And it tastes white, it tastes whiter. And if you’re saying mayo tastes white, I mean, that tastes real white. You know what I mean? Uh, but like mayo has eggs in it. It shouldn’t be that white. And somehow this one is, um, we’ll see how that all shakes out. I wanna taste these individually. I wanna see what we’re rocking with. This is the, or this is the non-name brand mustard that was very, very cheap. That tastes like mustard. Man. I don’t know. Can you taste the differences in mustard? This is French’s mustard again. The gold standard. Yeah. French’s mustard is better. Like they do, they do good work. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. All right. Aldi ketchup over here. Generic brand. Very sweet. Very, very sweet. Hunts is also sweet though. Winner Hunts mayonnaise. This is the best day. It tastes so white. How do they get the white flavor in there? That’s a better man. I, this is a much better mayonnaise. Okay. We should describe dumping stuff. We got pickles over here. Pickles over Dollar Tree called Breckenridge Farms. That is a great pickle. Brand name second only to Lassek. You’re buying pickles. There’s someone named Blasik making them. Yeah, you’re gonna wanna buy from ek. You’re like, they’re just from a country. They’re from a country that needed to pickle things. You know what I mean? If you’re called Blasik, that’s, that’s where all this comes from, you know, you know, people are always like, why do you know? Okay, so like, I grew up on like, like Ashkenazi Jewish food, which is very just Eastern European. And everyone’s like, why are there so many beets and pickles? It’s like, well, pickles would just last forever. And beets are one of the only vegetables that physically grows in snow. All right, gimme like 10 minutes to cut these pickles. The pickles do look very different. The Dollar Tree, Breckenridge Farms, pickles. Um, they look like they’ve been pickled longer. ’cause you can see it’s like penetrated through and it’s actually got like a greener inside where this is a whiter inside try Pet. Pet Pickle peeve. My pickle. Pet peeve. My pet pickle peeve is when they’re not crunchy enough, and I don’t know if that’s a heat issue or how long they’ve been sitting. Could be a cucumber issue. Not crunchy enough. They’re soft. Don’t like a soft pickle. This pickle, this pickle looks hard. You know when you look at a pickle and you just go that pickle’s hard. That was a hard pickle. That’s what I’ve won. Fantastic. Yeah. Winner pickles. Have we been keeping score Aldi significantly better. Pickles and mayonnaise. Dollar Tree. Significantly better. Ketchup. And mustard. Mustard. I just love that we’ve given me a format to be just uh, yeah, utterly crazy. And all right, well we’re just gonna dump all this stuff in this stuff. Ketchup, mustard mayonnaise. Put all the three condiments that you enjoy, right? And they’re gonna dump in that onion powder for that little bit of savoriness. Black pepper. Like black pepper vaca because paprika a little bit of sugar just to round it out. Just to round it out. And vinegar, I always miss the clear ones. I miss the clear ones ’cause I think there’s nothing there. What if I had an incredibly convenient, aesthetically pleasing vessel to put my salt in home and now you can with the mythical kitchen salt. Well says season your damn food on it. As a little reminder, you should always season your damn food. Uh, but honestly, like if you wanna up your cooking game, just have this laying on the counter. That’s what I do at home. So every chef does at home. You need salt. You just go grab big old handful and go pow and throw it in your stuff. Um, I love salt wells. You need to get yourself a salt. Well, if you don’t got one, go to mythical.com to get it. Alright, other stuff. White mayonnaise. God, did he put white food dye in it? That’s the thing. People don’t know this. There’s white food dye. It just makes things whiter and it is weird. I don’t understand how it works. Don’t understand how it works. Most moot. In French, how do you say, mustard in German, something like that. I think. So. Vinegar, it’s clear so I don’t see it. All right. Let the record show. I’m keeping these bowls on the same side. I like the way that one looks better. The Dollar Tree one. I, dude, you know what it is? It’s the Frenches mustard. I swear to God the Frenches mustard has more turmeric in it. Turmeric’s what? Typically what gives mustard its color. If you see like a very fancy mustard that’s kind of a pale color, they’re probably is not putting turmeric in it. Yu Oh, this one’s way better. Oh that’s crazy. The Dollar Tree one. I think it is off the strength of that mustard. ’cause that’s doing a lot of that flavor driving, even though you got this incredibly white mayonnaise. If anything it gave it a better color palette to it. Um, dollar Tree taking an early lead, but we’re gonna see how it actually plays in the burger itself. Julia’s been trying to make me learn the choreography to the Beyonce country song for TikTok and I refuse. That is my hard limit in the relationship. We’re frying fries here. We got frozen fries from Aldi. These look quite palate. Uh, these, ooh, these look nice. They ain’t, or Ida, but they do look good. Crinkle cut. I’m ethically opposed to, but I’m doing this for you, not for me. So we’re doing that. The garlic cube looks so fresh and good from Aldi. The garlic over there quite dark. But before I get into it, let’s just drop things in the fryer. Um, what’s the safest way? I don’t, I don’t know. Just do it. There you go. Drop those fries and fryer. Make sure none of them are overlapping. You can obviously bake these fries, but boy does nothing make you feel alive. Like just dropping some already fried french fries right in the fryer. Any good fry is gonna be double fried. Ask the Belgians that. Am I right? Um, so like, this is honestly just a really good way to cook fries is fry them, freeze ’em, fry ’em again. That’s exactly what we’re doing. I think these are gonna take a little bit longer, but we’re gonna pull them out when they’re golden brown. Get ’em in there. Toss ’em with all of our seasonings. Check back in the sec. Okay. The Aldi fries are done. These are looking nice. They’re getting crispy. You’re gonna take them. You don’t wanna like, you wanna drain ’em a little bit, but you do want some of the oil to sort of bloom that garlic. And so we’re gonna take these out. Why does my offhand always just come here? I don’t know. I don’t know what to do because in basketball you garden someone, you have the offhand garden, the crossover. But when you’re cooking, nobody tells you what. Anyways, we’re gonna take that. We’re gonna dust it with a little bit of garlic powder again. Get the garlic powder on the hot oil. Yes sir. We’re gonna take some of the green flex here thing. Green flex. Make your stuff taste good. We all know that. And then we’re gonna take this garlic and just dump that garlic right in there. We’re gonna take a little bit of salt. Where’s the salt? I need to season my damn food. I need to season my damn food. It does some extra salt on there, even though the fries are already salted. These look freaking incredible. This, I mean, these look like the garlic fries that you would get at like the, the county fair. I don’t know if that’s a an experience that other people have. County fair garlic fries. But California Gilroy, California garlic capital of the world. They have a garlic festival every year you can get garlic ice cream. But now have you guys ever been to the Gilroy Garlic Festival? You guys have never been to the Gilroy Garlic Fest? I have you guys. Yeah, I know. V Here. Come on. I know he has. Of course these’s been with Gilroy garlic. All right. Dry like, ooh, that’s the brownest jar. Like that is not Gilroy approved. Garlic. I’m take like a little bit more oil. Boop that around. Damn, I’m so excited for this meal. We got the fries. Uh, hot oil. Aldi looking way better. Those fries are already like pretty golden going into the fry. They’re even more golden coming out. These, you see like some of them stayed palate and then some of them like got a little bit of extra browning on it. Inconsistency in the factory. I don’t even carry. Who wins man? I just want to jam on some garlic fries. Let’s make some burgers. Hello? Heart and textured vegetable protein burger. My old friend, we meet again. I like it. I think it’s good. Listen, Beefheart is good. You go to a Peruvian spot, you get Auntie Ccho, right? We’re on my Auntie Ccho fans. Rise up. Auntie Ccho hive. There we go. I don’t know. I think it’s Verybody are good. These guys are big old hunker. I will say this obviously made in a factory. You can tell because there’s weird little pockmarks in it and it’s perfectly cut into a circle. This also made in a factory, but that has pre-made settings to try and make it look hand formed. Look at this. The dimples in this are that of a father crafting it by hand at a barbecue, not washing his hands in between taking slugs of, uh, sun warm, Coors light, um, whatever. Uh, so we’re gonna start by toasting some bread. We’re making a patty melt. One of my favorite, uh, sandwiches. Yeah, it’s definitely a sandwich. It’s not a burger, uh, but we’re gonna take some margarine, pop that bread down, just get it nice and toasty. The toastiness of the bread, not only is that gonna add a little bit of flavor, but it’s actually going to prevent all of the burger juices in all of that. Switch some margarine knives. They’re not butter knives or margarine knives. Now I just only eat that. Marge. Yeah. Sizzle. Sizzle. I inhale, I breathe in and I inhaled margarine fumes. And it tasted like movie theater popcorn. That’s, oh, it’s still happening. Oh my, I’m drinking. I’m absorbing it like they absorb spice under rackets. I just watched a dune and I loved it. Oh, oh man. But they really left meat on the bone by not showing, uh, Austin Butler and sdu. Uh, now we’re just gonna get a little bit of oil down. We’re gonna start seeing off these bergs, and that’s just raw meat. So I’ll touch the, uh, we don’t know if this is raw. We’ve determined that We don’t know if that’s raw or cooked, but we know that there’s already a bunch of salt and textured soy protein in there. So we’re just gonna get these searing down and then I’m gonna just place these bad boys down. These are not seasoned. We’re gonna hit ’em with a little bit of salt. We’re cooking ’em from frozen. Just smash ’em on a burner. Uh, if you look at the bread though, we got the gold standard white bread over here. Not only is it a lot thicker, it seems a lot denser, but in a good way, in a way that would really hold up to a burger. This over here, they’re definitely using a lot of dough conditioners in it, which gives it, there’s almost artificial lightness to it. Gives it a lot of rise ’cause there’s supplemental proteins in there. And so this, I think might collapse under the weight of these gigantic ham-fisted hamburger patties. We’ll find out. This is it. Uh, if you look at the Dollar Tree burger patties, again, this has all that textured vegetable protein and the heart in there. It actually crisps up really well because of those fillers. You get some of that fat leaching out and then that sort of crisps up like the, the grain that’s inside there. So that’s looking fun. Uh, cooking these burger patties from frozen, it’s not the way that I would do it per se, but it looks like they’re getting done. You got some solid browning on ’em. So I don’t know. These have plumped up a little bit. I tried to smash ’em out a little bit and that, that, that just ain’t work at all. Don’t know the science behind why it’s so springy, but it is. So we’re just gonna add some cheese to it. We’re taking the nice vel vita right here, place that on. I don’t like to add the cheese too early because American cheese does not need any help melting. It’ll, it’ll melt just from the latent heat. You’re gonna pop that on there. Then we have the craft singles. I love craft singles for what they are. Uh, I don’t typically love them for burgers because they kind of do melt too fast and they do get a little wet. I would use something like a, like a deli deluxe on it. But for purposes of this, it’s gonna work. We’re gonna sandwiches on boom, pull that drain, a little bit of that grease, like a good fried cook. And then this had cheese on it so I can put it there. Yay. We’re actually gonna let it rest there ’cause I don’t want all that grease to absorb into the bread. Then we’re gonna build that burger. Oh, there’s just, there’s so much grease. And then we’re gonna plate it up. Look at that. Can I drink that? Anybody gonna drink this grease? It’s good for you. It helps your bms. Oh, that’s Stacey. Check back in a sec. Hamburgers. They’re done. Okay, we got our burger sauce here. I’m gonna, it’s still popping. It’s still popping, but it is not locking and dropping, which I do, I do find interesting. So we’re gonna put a little bit of that burger sauce. That’s gonna create a sort of membrane right there, like a prophylactic. And then we’re gonna put the burger patties around top, spread that sauce, edge to edge. Here’s the thing with the patty melt. When the burgers do not perfectly conform to the size of the bun, I’m gonna offset them slightly and we’re just gonna place that right there. Beautiful. And take the mythical kitchen. Apron great for wiping your hands on. When you can’t find a towel, go to mythical.com to find. All right. More burger sauce on there and crown it as the prince that was promised. Hell yeah. I, I immediately know which burger that I would prefer and it is this one right here. I do not think you need good quality beef to make a good hamburger. That’s my hot take. I think you need whatever the hell this is and I’m absolutely in, but it doesn’t matter what I think. It matters what our judge thinks. Hey, speaking of witch, let’s get to judging Jordan Meyer from spark.com. Welcome back to Mythical Kitchen. Thanks for having me. Your professionalism and astuteness always astound me. Thank you. Of course. Before you, we have two plates of garlic fries with a patty melt. No onions ’cause you couldn’t find onions. Oh, one is from Dollar Tree and one is from Aldi. Okay. Your job to suss out which is which, and also tell us which one you just like better. Wow. Okay. I’m very excited. I’m not an Aldi expert, so let’s see if I can get this one. Mm. Uh, would you like me to do the ceremonial cutting in half of the patts please. Okay. Somebody play the music. No, that’s, yeah, it’s actually the same as the, yeah, here comes the bride. This bread is very wet. Thank you. I tried my best two patties. Cheese. The cheese is pretty melted, which is nice. Tells you it’s fake and I love that. Very saucy. Um, why two patties instead of just one? Yes. It is delicious. It doesn’t taste cheap. The one thing that’s giving me an initial hint, this looks like actual garlic on these fries. This does not. Yeah. The garlic on this is worse. Hmm. Than the garlic on this. That’s my initial hint. Okay. I’m gonna do burger to burger and then fry to fry. Okay. Okay. I’m feeling good at this point. Let’s do both pickles. You’re double fist and pickles. How could you not be good? This pickle looks more pickled than this pickle. Very salty, less salty, and also not as good. Interesting. You and I maybe have different pickle ethics here. Tell me about yours. Well, I just, I all I want from a pickle. I just want it to be hard, right? I just want a hard pickle. I want a nice crunch. I want a nice refreshing bite. To me, some pickles are either over pickled or overly heat treated. I agree. They get a little soft, so I enjoy the hardness of that pickle. You think this is too soft? It’s too soft of a pickle for me. Interesting. I think that a lot of pickles can be too soft. I don’t think that’s too soft. Fair. Okay. I think this one is Dollar Tree because it’s cheaper. And this one is Aldi. I think it’s throwing me off that this patty is rare. Mm-hmm. And this one is not, but the meat quality on this does taste better. It’s a medium. Okay. Uh, the meat quality on this does taste better. And the, the garlic seems like real garlic and Miss Pickle is worse. I don’t feel as confident about this one as I do about a lot of the other ones. Both taste delicious. I would happily eat either again. Which one do you prefer? I think maybe this one because the meat quality is a little nicer and the cheese is maltier. But I would also eat this. Jordan, on the left side we have the burger from Dollar Tree on, on the right. Only the first time you’re wrong. That does not make you, we literally were just like, I’ve never been wrong at one of these. You psych, you psych yourself out. Uh, no. But that’s actually really incredible. You have eaten these same burger patties before in the nachos. These are the ones that are mixed with heart and textured vegetable protein di sodium ozonate d sodium guanylate. It’s delicious. I know. I agree. Heart is good. Auntie Cocho. You love Auntie Cocho, of course. The best. Uh, and then over here we have it from Aldi. Now this is pure beef. That’s why you chose to cook it a little bit more rare. And we did cook it from frozen. So if I’m being honest here, frozen, what are you do? Sure. Um, and then over here it’s interesting because the fries, you can see they’re a little bit more palate over here. They’re a little more golden here. Sure. They came outta the bag that way and we fried ’em at the same temp. Uh, the garlic over here I thought was going to be better, but I agree with you. It tastes worse. This one looked browner. Yeah. Wow. I’m really thrown for a loop on this one. I’m hungry so I’m gonna keep eating. Both. I, I am so jealous of watching you eat over here from Aldi. It costs $8 and 57 cents over here. $7 and 35 cents. So the price difference is a little bit negligible. Kind of negligible. Yeah. Yeah. Also better bread over here. Look at this is much better bread. This bread is So look at it. Yeah, this, this held up and this one’s like more. Okay. More stiff. Isn’t it good? This is so good. But also the Aldi total receipt is $42 Dollar tree, $27. You’re buying a lot more in bulk. Okay. That is a big difference. That’s a big difference. Alright. I guess it depends on if you have family or not. Comment below, do you have family? Can Dollar Tree measure up to Target? Today we’re answering the question. Does it actually matter where you buy your groceries? We’re gonna be making one lasagna with ingredients from the Dollar Tree. We are going to be making another lasagna with ingredients from the target. God, what happened to that dog? I hope he is. Okay. We are going to have a judge come in and taste, test these blind to see which lasagna is better. Buckle up. We’re about to go down a rabbit hole of, what was that one? Cashier Sean from Target. Alex from Target. We got Alex from Target coming in to guest judge today. Stick around. We booked him right. Um, to any Italians that are watching our show, one. Thank you for sticking around after we made Cajun chicken fettuccine Alfredo two. You must suspend what you believe lasagna to be because we’re making like a good old down home classic. Home ec in middle school asked lasagna right now we got our oven ready lasagna sheets. That means that the lasagna sheets have already been boiled and then dried. So all you got to do is stack everything with the sauce and the cheese and all that stuff and throw it in the oven. Uh, it was significantly more expensive at Target, obviously than Dollar Tree. We have used Columbia Brand Pasta Dollar Tree, and I think it’s perfectly fine. A great thing about lasagna, it’s a casserole, right? Or casserole an Italian, uh, which means that you’re not looking for the perfect aldente pasta, right? You can hide. A lot of flaws in that. A tough thing to hide here. Our good old friend Spar meal grated topping. We’ve used this product before. Uh, it’s tough. There is real Parmesan in it, but it’s all the things that are not Parmesan in here that, um, give it a little extra funk. It’s basically a bunch of dairy. Whe powder. Speaking of dairy whe powder, you might notice that there ain’t no ricotta cheese or ricotta, as ti would say. Uh, there’s none of that here because we’re gonna be making our own ricotta. It’s actually a really fun, easy technique to do at home, and we also couldn’t find it at the Dollar Tree. And Americans love to put ricotta cheese into lasagna, so we’re gonna be making that with some milk and lemon juice. Overall, the groceries at Target cost us $92 and like 86 cents or something. Uh, and then it costs about $43 over here at the Dollar Tree. However, in the words of Joe Pechi for my cousin Vinny, if you look at the actual per dish price, uh, over at Target, it’s only about $31. Versus just under $28 over at the Dollar Tree. So you’re working with a lot bigger quantities here at the Target than you are at the Dollar Tree. Certain key differences that we’re gonna find though, sausage Dollar Tree was more expensive ’cause they got Farmer. John, I grew up eating Farmer John Sausage. This is a great Southern California product. Big farmer John Guy. That was actually about 300% more expensive than original pork sausage. You might be used to this modern pork sausage. No, no, no. Not a target. They’re going back to the original recipe. We’ll see. God, I love the way sausage bounces, but overall, I think when you shove all of this stuff into lasagna, it’s gonna bake up and be pretty even. It’s going to take somebody with a very discerning palette to tell the difference, but I’m excited to get down to cooking. My favorite thing about the Italian language is the different dialects and the jota Deis dialect. What we’re making right now is called Kota and the James Gidel Feeny dialect. That is called Ragga. And I think that’s beautiful. We’re making ricotta cheese from scratch and I, we have oven ready noodles that are pre boiled to make everything as easy as possible. And we are making the cheese as difficult as possible. Uh, but hey, listen, every mythical kitchen video, it’s like a smorgasbord. It’s like a hometown buffet. You go, you choose what you want to learn from it and what you don’t. We’re gonna teach you how to make ricotta today ’cause you know, that’s what we’re doing. And also, again, they did not have it at the dodge tree. We’re gonna add a hefty pinch of salt to the milks. I am going to probe them like what the aliens are going to do to me when they land. We got 180 degrees here. We’re looking for 1 95. 1 95. Big number. Who’s got 1 95 outta here? 180 5. Over there. We are going to add acids, the most basic cheese in the world, which is ricotta, also known as farmer’s cheese or cottage cheese. ’cause farmers kinda live in cottages sometimes. You know what I mean? Uh, it is just made simply with an acid and dairy. You can add something like rent it, which is an enzyme that is found in a cal’s stomach, uh, to make more complex cheeses like that are in the Giada dealer. Rent. Italian mozzarella. James Gandolfini would say Zadel, but you can do that if you had rent it. Otherwise, we’re just making the most simple version. 180 3. 180 3. What I got here, what I got here. 180 9. We’re on it. Who has a question, Maggie? Oh, you are talking about Italians getting angry with food. We have a podcast episode about that. We have a podcast about why Italians get so mad about food. Featuring a real life Italian. He is a really nice man. QCP, you’re a good bloke as they see in Italy 1 93. We’re shutting it down. We’re shutting it down. We’re shutting it down. We’re gonna go ahead and we are going to add our lemon juice and our vinegar. We’re gonna let that set, we’re gonna take that off the heat. Well that’s pretty much off the heat. This what do we got? So right now the acids are curdling the milk into the curds and weigh and then you can strain off the curds and then you’re gonna save that way to drink four protein. Oh no. Yo, if I come in here and start drinking cheese discard, you guys can be weirded out. Yes. No, I’m gonna do it. Nicole’s not Nicole’s a trooper. Lemon and vinegar. The lemon juice from Target was a lot more expensive than the lemon juice from the dollar tree. I don’t think that’s gonna affect anything in terms of ricotta. If you were say making like a lemon curd, uh, there are differences in quality of lemon juice, but like bag your curdle and milk already. You guys ever have a a cement mixer shot? Yes, I have just like lime juice, vodka and milk. Bailey’s at or Bailey is it? Yeah, it’s Bailey’s. This lime juice vodka. There’s just lime juice and Bailey’s cheese’s. Just lime juice. Anyways, you’re getting drunk off cheese. We are gonna let this sentence strain it. There you have it. Our soup is done. Now we just gotta plate it up and look at that. You can see the curds forming in there. We’re gonna lale it through some cheese cloth. If you ever wondered why cheese cloth is called cheese cloth ’cause they actually make it from cheese. The only thing that will strain cheese is other cheese itself. So that’s where the name comes from. A couple littles. I wanna see this drain real quick. So I wanna see how the curds have set up and then I wanna give it a little taste, see if we can suss out any of the quality there. Oh that’s fun. You can hear it. The sound. Can you hear it? I’m gonna lean my mic to it. It sounds like someone peeing Who has prostatitis? Weak stream. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. You got it. Um, everyone gets your prostates checked. That’s how you know we’re the YouTube channel of old people. Scoop up a little bit of that fresh, hot ricotta. It’s honestly better than store-bought. It’s really nice. I mean store-bought is fine. Shadow iron and garden. I dunno man. Both just tastes like milk and lemon juice. No, you actually don’t taste lemon juice at all. ’cause the lemon juice is what separates everything. It’s just pure milk protein. What We’re gonna take our sack of wet curds and we’re just gonna let it sit there. Uh, now we’re gonna start making some lasagna. I only have one spoon here. Funny joke guys. Where’s the other spoon? Guys, come on. Bring at the other spoon. No, it’s fine. No guys. I know somebody has the other spoon. Where is it? Where is the spoon? Where is the other spoon? Oh, hey Nicole. You have the other spoon and you’re also wearing the incredible new mythical T-shirt and mythical scrunchies. Um, this t-shirt is available to buy on the website where we sell it. And the scrunchie, I don’t know what it does per se, it holds your hair up, but you can also wear it on your wrist. As you see, Nicole has hair and she is currently putting it into the scrunchie. And these things exist, uh, and we’d like you to buy them if that’s something that you think would improve your life. As you can see, the t-shirt comes in shirt variety. Uh, we have many colorful characters on it. Is that me? I’m sort of like a demon. Yeah, I’m like a, a voracious demon eating. One of the letters covered in slime. Uh, well that’s the t-shirt. And I think it’s, uh, really fun. See you. Do you lose your voice? We’re making a meat sauce is what we’re doing right here. We’re gonna crank these on. We’re going real rough and dirty. We’re starting with pre-seasoned sausage right here. The great thing about doing that is that you don’t have to add as many seasonings to your meat. You’re gonna infuse a lot of flavor throughout that. So first off, we’re gonna get some fat here. We got some oil, a bit of margarine. This is like doing the old oil butter combination, which is always a fun thing. I’m gonna lu up the handle that way. It’s gonna make my stirring so much faster. Lube up all your kitchen and clean. It’ll make you faster. Cook no friction. Lube up both handles now, uh, and then we’re gonna wait for the seed up we own to brown off some sausage. Um, speaking of brown and sausage, that’s a brown sausage. I scene most sausage, some mojay is supposed to look red on account of meat. Should be red. This might be old. However, sausage is literally a meat preservation technique and so we’re probably not gonna get sick. This is actually a valuable tip. I have a valuable tip for people. Incredible. Uh, smell your meat all the time. I do this all the time at home and it freaks Julia out ’cause I smell it and she goes, what’s wrong? What’s wrong with it? And I go, nothing. And the reason I know nothing is wrong with it is because I smelled it. If it repulses you, that means you shouldn’t be eating it. And it will be very clear when meat repulses you. This does not repulse me. It does smell a little like blue cheese, just like grassed dry age. It’s not the dollar. I don’t know. No, I know it’s not that. But this come here. Does this not smell like a dry aged steak? Does it not have that like blue cheese rindy tank to it? No. Oh, she’s, she’s lost her voice. She’s choosing not to speak. She’s giving the silent treatment, dumping in the meat, dumping in the sausage. Ah, okay. And now can use the lubed up ambidextrous technique. They call it the pepper grinder. So they go ahead and just smash up your sausage. Get as broken up as sauce. Well come back in a couple minutes, we’ll have it all smacked. Been doing this for about eight minutes. Just order takeout. Just do it. Go get some El Polio Loco. Yeah. Good family meal deals. No, we’re committed to Bella Lasagna. I wanna try the sauce. I wanna try the salsi. God I love sausage man. The fact that humans figured out that we can slaughter animals, make ’em with tasty things and stuff that animal back inside its own intestine and create that, wow, I don’t care about cathedrals, skyscrapers or cars care about shoving animals back inside themselves. This has more meat. The farmer drawing sausage. This is more expensive. It is higher quality in terms of this one definitely has more fillers in it. You can tell that because it’s snappier. It’s a little bit looser. This one definitely has more meaty too. The flavors though. Very similar. Bunch of garlic Johnson there. Garlic. A lot more expensive from the target. That one. You wanna toast the garlic in a little bit of those sausage, fat spices down there. Hale, yes, ditto. Which other spices? We got onion, garlic, we got black pepper, we got crushed red pepper. We got oregano and Italian seasoning. If you shave your mustache, you might be able to pass for an Italian. Anyone name that movie? Lemme pause for trivia. And we have a lower third popup. Can we do that? Can we do that? That is actually smelling super fragrant. I just want a notch on more sausage that was for nothing. Culinarily. I just wanted to eat it. Go ahead. Dump in tomato puree. And then we also want some chunks of tomatoes. I like getting some nice rustic chunks. We’re gonna add that in there. A little bit of sugar. They say, when I say they, I mean the Italians. Now, not every Italian says this, but some do. I dunno if I believe in it, but I also think it’s bad luck to buck thousands of years of cooking tradition, even though tomatoes didn’t get to Italy until it didn’t really have popular till the mid 17 hundreds. Uh, they thought they were poisoned for a while. But anyways, they say you add a little pinch of sugar and it neutralizes the acidity of tomatoes. Kind of doesn’t really work that way. It just adds sugar to your sauce, which is perfectly fine if you like that. But again, we do it because one old Italian lady told me to do it. And it’s bad luck if you don’t. And Italian curses among the worst kind of curses. You know what the worst one is? Lot being. Oh, oh. You ever been cursed by an old latian lady? Yes. Doesn’t leave. I want to taste it. The canned tomatoes were more expensive at Target. There’s a lot of fraud in the canned tomato industry. This is a real thing. Um, certain brands of canned tomatoes I like really trust. Josh, you do not add sugar stuff. Oh, shoot, dude. Oh my God. No. Thank you Nicole. Wait. Oh, I put a little drop of that in there. No, we gotta put a little drop of this and that. It’s gonna be fine. It’s gonna be fine. Everyone stop freaking out. This one looks way darker. What? I’m just gonna get different spoons. I don’t know what’s going on anymore, man. I’m going Korean soup, spoon. And this guy, let’s give the sauce little taste. Korean soup spoons. One of the top six soup spoons in the world. I love the length of Korean soup spoons, but I don’t love their soup holding capacity. I’m not asking for any of you to fix it if someone needs to. Damn. That is really good there. That’s a really high quality, uh, tomato puree in there. Just, you know, I think it is. I think there might be added sugar in the tomato puree that we use at the taller tree because it is the sweetness really is, it really is countering the acid. Um, they taste really similar. Getting some more spice off the sausage in there. A lot more meaty bite in there. I think this is a much more balanced sauce. I think dollar, I know I’m supposed to be an impartial judge here. Full on rooting for Dollar Tree at this point. We need to win, baby. This is a lot being soup. Spoon. Well, we’ve got all of our ingredients. HO. T-T-O-G-O Lasagna is sure to be a feminine start building lasagna. Um, should I do this Sterily? No. Too difficult. I run from challenges. That’s not what I wanna do first, but I did it. What we’re gonna do, we’re gonna prepare the ricotta. So we have the ricotta that we made here. We’re gonna add a little bit of cream cheese. I just, I let listen. Add cream cheese to your pastas. Lean in to the buzzfeed, tasty ification of all American cuisine. We’re gonna add a hefty pinch of Italian seasoning. We’re gonna add another hefty pinch, but leave half of it back in there. We’re gonna add tiny pinch of black pepper. We’re gonna do the same size pinch. My left should grab enough. Take another full pinch, drop half of that in there. Tiny pinch, black pepper. He’s gone insane. Okay, we’re gonna go ahead and take the rest of the cream cheese here and then we’re gonna schlop this around. Oh, there’s another thing we’re gonna do. Uh, the Parmesan cheese. This is a big factor. This could lead to the destruction of the dollar tree. ’cause as you can see, um, this, this is not cheese. This is a powder. This is meant to go on the popcorn at the movies. Boom, right in there. Ooh. The way that, you know, you can inhale cheese fumes and then we’re gonna take this, which is Parmesan cheese is the number one ingredient. That’s good. And then there’s a lot more corn starch, uh, just to protect caking powdered cellulose. AKA wood pulp. I dunno. I don’t know why I did that. I didn’t have any better way to do it. I don’t wanna lick my hands. It’s incredibly chewy. It is hard like you’re a termite, chewing through wood because that’s what cellulose is, but adds a nice texture. I’m gonna schlop this around. The ricotta over here did turn out a little bit creamier. I don’t think there’s any variables from that that we can actually take away from. This is looking lovely though. Isn’t be a good, good lasagna. What’s another chaperone, uh, song? What’s the Pink Pony Club? Um, I don’t have any way to work that phenomenon. Fina, I already said. Oh, did I say that already? Casual. It was a casual reference. Thank you. Good luck babe. Thank you. You too babe. This is tasting really freaking good though. That homemade t’s fun. Like, I don’t know. I’m somebody that enjoys cooking. If you enjoy cooking too, uh, maybe you do. It’s fun to take up little projects like making your own ricotta. I knew somebody that made ricotta in their college bathtub. Maybe they were lying and they were actually making drugs. I dunno. But I ate ’em. Just fast forward through all this. I don’t wanna talk anymore. I’m tired. Can we thrust word through it all? I won’t talk. I’m just gonna build this on you. You can see it’s just all this has to you understand. I am gonna do a, what do they call it? Foley for the asmr. I’m so sorry. Yeah, it’s just, listen, there’s a certain amount of time mistakes and I still dunno what to do with my left hand. I’m gonna give a cooking, uh, thing. The sauce absorbs into the noodles. That’s it. You guys ever see a zig rott, man that zig rod’s big. All right, so what we did is we’ve layered alternately sauce, cheese noodle sauce, cheese noodle sauce, cheese noodle, until we are now here. We’re gonna go ahead and we’re gonna bake this off. We’re gonna top it with cheese later ’cause we want these noodles to cook and we want all this sauce wet, the tomato wet to absorb into the noodle, dry the noodle, dry tomato, wet lasagna. You know what I’m saying? Made sense in my head. I’m gonna do it again. Don’t cut. Okay. Don’t you dare cut the cameras. Can we do the music? That one, you know. No. Are you picking Bunny Hill? Yeah. Oh, you’re so off. I’m not a musically inclined man. I need another spoon. The order of your lasagnas are now incorrect. No, they’re not. Are you sure? Positive. Okay. Why, why do you think they’re incorrect? I thought they were, I thought you didn’t put any sauce down. I put sauce down. You put sauce, noodle sauce, cheese. Mm-hmm. Okay. Okay. Nevermind. Good talk. I’m sorry to accuse you of being Cole never believes me. You’re you’re right. Cool. The accuser is what we call her. Who was the accuser before Nicole? The accuser. I know there’s probably some like Russian czar, Ivan the terrible, Kathryn, they had a lot of those. See Satan. That’s what I was thinking of. That’s in your reminding of Nicole Satan. There we go. Okay. It’s all coming together. You know what’s funny is I, I like doing this at home. It’s, there’s not nine people watching me all trying to get on with their days. You know what I mean? When I’m at home, you know, I’m more just, I’m listening to system my dad or something. Stop it, you know, it’s fun. And, uh, there’s a cat biting at my feet sometimes, but I feed him a little scraps of cheese and he is fine. Cats love cheese. Garfield loves lasagna. All right. Mondays, am I right? We got the, uh, we got lasagnas in. We should remember which one is which. Uh, the, the one on the right is Target that’s going in the oven. You bake that out. We should cover it. All right, we’re gonna put that No. Yep. Fly. What do you mean go? We got foil. Josh has to do everything. All right. This is the Josh show brought to you by Josh. Brand Wines. I wish. What? All right. The one with a little pinch of herbs on his target. This is labeled herbs. Our target and it’s on the right. It’s oven right? Not the real right. Uh, dollar tree. I have just a little cheese stamp on it. Dollar trees, cheese. Target is herbs. I labeled them. Nicole, are you happy you leave that in the oven? 40 minutes. Covered that. We’re gonna take it out. We’re gonna top it with some cheese. Hop it back in uncovered for about 15 minutes. You gotta let it rest about 15 minutes and you’re gonna need to rest or at least three, four hours after all this. You’re gonna wanna take a nap. You’re gonna wake up, you’re gonna forget that. Oh God. Lasagna’s in the oven. Then you go, oh no. Thankfully I took them out. Then you’re gonna have to heat it up for about. I don’t know, 30 minutes, 40 minutes. By about 11:35 PM you’ll be ready to eat. Gwinnett of the house. Stewart, that’s fake. The realm of the sport. Uh, welcome. We’ve made gigantic slabs of lasagna. What it lacks in aesthetic beauty, it makes up for in size. It’s gargantuan, but could really use some green stuff. Ain’t got no green stuff at the Dollar Tree. Speaking of which one of these is made with Dollar Tree ingredients, the others, you’ve done this before, they’ve watched this before. One of ’em made a target ingredients. Your job is to eat them. And guess which ones is which? Okay. You got any thoughts about the appearance? I, real honestly, the sheer size is intimidating, but. Arousing, frankly. Yep. I had a nickel for every time I read that I’d be broke that. Can I go down here? Yeah. Thank go. What are you getting? Oh, ranch. The ranch cannot be used to judge it. Okay. But this is the perfect ranch lasagna, you know what I mean? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Just like they make in, uh, bologna. Mm. Thank you so much. Okay. Now I’m gonna try the second one. I thought that this one tastes really good. Thanks. Oh. Oh, okay. I tasted different. What are you tasting? There’s something different about the meat in this one. Mm. That I’m actually not enjoying as much, I don’t think. Can you pinpoint, is it the flavor? Is it the texture? I think it’s a combination of the two. Did you use different meats in these? There are different meats. They had different brands of sausages, but both are pre-made Italian sausage, so there is gonna be a big difference. Okay. Listen, now I have to taste one of these meat also, also we made our own ricotta. You did? Yeah. They didn’t have ricotta at the dollar green, so we just got some lemon juice and milk and we just did it. I think that’s incredible, but also I’ve made my own ricotta before, so it’s not that impressive. Um, I turned the car into pizza once. I just want you to say you’re proud of me. Good job. Thanks. I think I like this one better. This is a tough one. Okay. Lasagna can hide a lot of flaws ’cause it’s just a bunch of layers of slop. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Bake into a brick, but I’m ready. Go in on a 3, 2, 1. You’re gonna put your hand over the dish that you think tastes better in 3, 2, 1. I think this one tastes better. I. And where do you think this one is from? I’m gonna guess this one’s from Target. That one is in fact from the Dollar Tree. Wow. And I’m shocked you didn’t get that from the absolute fine dusting of snow. Oh, what they call Farmer John Cheese. Oh, that’s so true. My gosh. Yeah, you’re totally, totally right. The difference is this is made with Farmer John pork sausage, which was more expensive, and this was made with target’s own original brand of pork sausage. We all agreed that the farmer John is significantly better. Right. That’s great. That’s so nice. See, you can get good quality items at Dollar Tree. You might have to make your own ricotta, but like I said, it’s not that hard. I’ll go make some ricotta right now. Honestly. How much bathtub ricotta are you making? Who said anything about bathtub? Ricotta? That sounds like a weird M that I know. No, I knew a girl in college that made ricotta in her bathtub, but Really? Yeah, she was. Wait, I have to know why? Why? Well, she’s Italian. Oh, okay. Gw, thank you so much for eating our giant slabs Lasagna. Thank you so much for watching Ena. Eat our giant slabs of lasagna and for watching Mythical Kitchen. We got more episodes. Coming up next, uh, tell us what grocery stores you want to see. Take on Dollar Tree next and what you wanna see us make. Yeah. Catch y’all next time. Today we’re putting two grocery stores to the test. It is Costco versus Dollar Tree. Today we’ll be answering the question, does it actually matter where you buy your groceries? Now I’m going to make two identical dishes of chicken enchiladas. The whole enchilada, not a partial enchilada despite the recession. That’s why we’re testing Dollar Tree versus Costco. Which one of them is recession proof? Big bulk versus small quantities? We’re about to find out. This is about as opposite as it gets. A judge is gonna come in, taste the two dishes, see if they can guess which grocery store it came from, and decide which one they like better. The kitchen ears are out shopping right now. Let’s see what they got. You might be looking at all the foods in front of you and you say, Josh. Why Costco? Dollar Tree. These are not contemporaries of each other. You’ve done Dollar Tree versus Dollar General. You’ve done Costco versus Suzanne’s Club. That makes sense. So does this, and let me explain why Cricket not now, but I hear you. Both Costco and Dollar Tree are valid ways to try and save money. Costco, you’re buying in bulk to try and drop the total price because you’re working with the companies of scale. Whereas Dollar Tree, you’re buying smaller quantities of items. So what we are going to do is we are going to make a plate of chicken enchiladas and then we’re gonna compare the actual price per dish between the two. Because right now this is the dividing line. All this is the stuff from Costco. You wanna buy beans at Costco, you’re buying capital B beans from Costco where it’s Dollar Tree. You got these little bitty beans. Our entire grocery run from Costco costs $218 and our entire grocery run from Dollar Tree costs $33. So Costco is 547% more expensive than Dollar Tree for the total grocery hall. But we’ll see how it nets out when it comes to a per dish basis. We’re making chicken enchiladas and since the Dollar Tree, they ain’t sell no fresh chicken breast. Normally you’d cook it and shred it and do all that. We are using canned chicken, which I grew up eating. There ain’t nothing wrong with canned chicken. If you’d eat canned tuna and fresh tuna, why not canned chicken and fresh chicken? Once you mix it with all the cheese and the enchilada sauce service and rice and beans, you don’t even notice that it’s canned chicken. Oh god. And then from Costco, we have just the giant packs over here. I’m actually really curious to see how this nets out in the end because I know so many people that have gone to Costco assuming that it’s cheaper buying 10 pound bags of spinach and watching eight pounds of that go to waste because they just don’t know how to cook 10 pounds of spinach. So this to means really interesting. I’ve long been a little bit skeptical of buying in bulk, but at the same time, dollar Tree, I mean we’ve seen some of their products, like the cheese that we’re using is this kind of block of cheddar Casa del Soul. We love that Spanish for Casa of Soul. We gotta make our enchiladas, our rice and beans and we gotta make 900 of ’em with all the Costco stuff. Who wants 50 pounds of rice to take home? Yeah, there we go. We know you do. We’re making rice and beans. ’cause ultimately this is an ode to the beautiful Mexican American invention that is the combination plate. When Mexican American restaurants started opening up in like, you know, the 1940s, 1950s, they’re like, what do Americans love more than anything in the world? And that is a value. So if you just put a giant heaping helping of rice and beans on a plate along the tacos, enc, gels, tamales, ano, whatever you got out there, then people are gonna think that you’re getting a really good deal. And you are, because rice and beans roll, if you’ve never made your own Mexican rice, just that like delicious kind of fatty orange, flavorful rice. It is my favorite thing in the world. I’m a big proponent of just adding flavor to every single part of your dish. And like the biggest sin that Chipotle committed was probably all the e coli they gave people. But the the other one was just putting like white rice in burritos. That was a weird tonal shift that happened in America. So we’re going back to orange rice thing and that’s what we’re doing right here. I’m gonna crank the heat on both of these pans. We got some vegetable oil. It’s gonna go in, we’re gonna get in some aromatics. Dollar tree don’t got no a max. They don’t got no fresh garlic. They don’t got no fresh onions. They ain’t got no fresh ginger. What they do have though, they have garlic. That’s some brown garlic. We got garlic over at the Costco. This is the place to get garlic because you get the biggest jars of garlic you’ve ever seen. You got the jumbo garlic jar out there. Woo. Oh god, that smells good. You can tell how garlic tastes by the smell. The Costco garlic does smell a lot stronger and a lot fresher, which means you’re probably just gonna get that. ’cause garlic, you’re really going forward. The smell, it’s a lot of those like, uh, volatile compounds and the garlic kind of that like sulfuric nature. You’re gonna get that in there. I’m actually gonna throw the rice in the oil. I love toasting up my rice a little bit. Like you see that technique a lot in like, I don’t know, like Spanish food, stuff like that. Get the rice kind of coated in the oil. That’s gonna give it like a really nice texture too when it actually cooks. Surely the rices are gonna be the same, right? Right. Rice everywhere. Kinda the same. Perfect. We’re gonna let that sit. So orange rice, how do you make orange? Check this out. I know what you’re saying. It’s not a color. Got red, green, blue. That’s it. Wait, red green, but no red, blue, yellow. What are the primary colors? Point is yellow and red. That’s how you do it. We’re getting some yellow from chicken bullon in here. That’s also gonna give you a lot of that delightful MSG. It’s perfect. We got a packed bullion cube here versus powdered chicken bullon. I’m just gonna give that little taste. Dude. If you’re hungry, you’re feeling peckish, but you don’t want like a full snack. Some chicken bullon on your tongue. You’re gonna have a good time. Try this bullion. Hmm. It tastes like it’s something. For like horses to keep ’em running longer. You know what I mean? Just a little salt tablet. That’s what I need. I’m ever running outta gas. I don’t need more coffee. Just hit me some chicken bouillon that’s got, ooh, that dollar sheet bouillon that got those good poly syllabic words in there. I’m a fan. Alright, get some tomato in there. Toast the tomato right into the rice. Get a little bit of burn on your tomato. We are developing layers of flavor and it does not matter what level of produce you are working with. You can develop levels of flavor with proper cooking techniques. So scorch some of that tomato right into the pan. Get it a little bit extra. Caramelized, dried onions. They’re just gonna rehydrate in the rice. It’s nice. You don’t need wet onions anymore. They figured out how to dry them. This is good. This is what I do at home. I just make like a giant pot of like some sort of orange baked rice dish with any different combination of spices in there. And then I just like add it to random stuff throughout the week. This is a great meal prep option. Well, this is toasting up. It’s etymology time with Josh. I know you missed it. I know you missed it. Okay, so check out the words like enchilada and empanada. Right. It’s like the same but sub in chill for bon fond means bread. So empanada literally means like two. And bread in like to bread something is, is like emp I think is, is the verb. Uh, and then like enchilada is the same thing. It’s just to add chili to something, two enc chili something. And so enchiladas literally just tortillas with a pure chili puree on it in the like, very like American lens. Like I grew up just like cheesy baked casserole ass enchiladas. And that’s kind of more what we’re going for here, rather than like a traditional, I don’t know, like oaxacan enchilada and Mulata. If you thought it was making Oaxacan food from the Dollar Tree, you’re mistaken. I wish I’m dropping the water into the rice. Putting the chicken boy on. Hold on, I’m getting you. Gimme a second buddy. There we go. Y’all ever talk to your food like it’s a living creature? No, just me. You gotta talk to your food, man. It’s like, so there’s a Japanese hammer thrower, right? Koji moi that believes that, um, you had to like treat your throwing implements with respect. So he used to like give his hammer the three foot ball on a wire, 7.26 kilos. He used to give it massages. He used to like brush it with oils because he believed if you treated your hammer well it would go far. And then he won gold in a four A four Olympics. Athens? Yeah. Koji Moore, Fuji. Like, like what? Like 82, 70? Look how Koji Moore FCI is winning Throw in 2004. Awesome. You thought it was oh five? You thought the Olympics in 2005. The odd year. Yeah. Yeah. All right. All right. Rice is coming to a boil. I’m shutting this down. Once this comes to a boil, you can just pop a lid on and you can throw this right in the oven. That’s gonna cook up and Nice. All right, we got coaching Moore FCIs winning throw. I’ll gonna pop these in the oven. Okay. Figure, figure it out. Woo. Alright. What’s that? No, I just gotta stay up. Josh, you got the 2004 gold for Yeah. What was the distance? Um, lemme tell you. All right, well, they’re looking up the distance of Ji Moi’s 2004 gold medal winning hammer throwing Athens remake beans. Do you actually have to soak your beans? Not necessarily. I have found that they do come out better if you also soak them in. Baking soda. Baking soda will actually help break down the skin of beans. Um, but we’re it gonna dump. Beans into the pot. These are the beans from the Costco. You see when you soak the beans, they kinda like hold some of the moisture. The beans over a dollar tree are interesting because they actually soaked up a lot more liquid, which makes me think that like maybe they was older beans that were drier, kinda ’em unclear. But either way we’ll see how it nets out when you actually finish cooking it. You could like sweat down garlic and onions, even some bay leaf, whatever in oil. Uh, but for me, ultimately these are kind of all going in the same place. He’s gonna cook for like hours. I got it. Well’s it 82, 78. That’s my guess. 82, 91. Oh, that was pretty close. Like good man. Koji gotta run. I’ve added chicken Bullon more. Bullon. Put all your bullon things, garlic, onions, all the classic and beans again, if we add bay leaf are my favorite. Little oja. A little avocado leaf in your beans, dude. That’s the best thing you’ll ever eat in your life. I tell you what, right back in McConaughey. So garlic on yawn, boo yawn. This is all gonna, the bot, we’re just gonna bring this to a boil. Let that drop to a simmer. Stir it up. Then we got beans. We’re gonna mash ’em up. ’cause I, I like, I like refried beans. I’m a refried bean over a whole bean guy pretty much any day of the week. But that is because I have a penchant for paste. The best enchiladas I’ve ever had in my life. We’re at a restaurant called La Di Los Moles by Chef Rocio Camacho in Bell Gardens, California. These will not be the best enchiladas I’ve ever had, but it’s gonna be really tasty. Like I said, we’re making like a very American version, right? The very like casserole style, baked cheesy. It’s delicious. It’s filling, it’s honestly tastes mor akin to a lasagna. You’ll see. I’ll just start making it and then if you have any questions you’ve just asked me and I’ll answer ’em, I, oh, there’s a lot of stuff. I’m getting the overwhelm. We’ll figure it out. All right, we got oil oil’s going in. We’re gonna start with Ru, then we’re gonna add. Our spices into the roo and kind of toast that. Uh, okay. If I don’t make eye contact with you, don’t, don’t be alarmed. Okay? We’re gonna dump that there spoons. Just keep rocking back and forth. I feel like I’m on a carnival. Cruise ship chili powder. These look wildly different. Weird. This chili powder is a lot redder over at the dollar tree. This one a lot. Kind of like darker, which I don’t exactly know what that would indicate. Um, ’cause paprika is also just chili powder ’cause it’s just dried ground up peppers. I don’t know. We’ll see how it tastes in the sauce and we’ll like taste and readjust our seasoning if we need to get some damn garlic in there. Man. Here’s the thing, people are like, garlic sucks because it loses all the potency of fresh garlic. All right, add 10 times more. That’s what I do. Cooking hacks. Josh, this is happening. I might switch to whisk when I add in. Do I need toast? Anything else up? Nah, this is going spilled most of that out of there. That’s great. How’s that one doing? You guys see Uhoh? Uhoh? She’s going uhoh. She’s going, nah, that’s just nice and toasty. All right, cool. We’re gonna get that over here. We’re gonna, pants are too tight today to do the splits. Grew up watching blood sport about four times a year. So Jean-Claude Van Dem splits. We’re over here and yeah, this is comfortable. And so, well, here’s the thing, doing the splits doesn’t increase my arm span, huh? Okay. Other things. We’re adding garlic powder, a little bit of cider vinegar for acid tea. We’re going to add oregano in there because oregano is delightful and it is a very common Mexican herb. And it’s just gonna like, add that little, uh, your dish. Look at me. It’s some French. God damnit. I’m smart. Can I, can I put a whisk into the non-stick pan? Don’t tell them. Just don’t tell them. I just, I I know, I know. We’re all getting cancer. What do you think the five G’s doing to you? Hey, do you like watching me flounder about in a kitchen? What if I told you for the first time ever you can do that? Live with Survive. The mythical kitchen. Mythical kitchen. First ever ticketed live stream. We’re really excited. We’re working really, really hard on it. Uh, putting all the kitchen ears through their toughest kitchen battle to get. Lily, you excited? I’m so excited. Are you gonna win? Yeah. How badly do you want it? I want, she wants a pretty bad See, listen to the passion or voice. Uh, check it out. Go to mythical kitchen live.com. We got tickets on sale right now. If they don’t buy that after that, they’re not gonna buy it after. Right? That’s what I’m saying. I think that was a great promo. Okay. This is whisking up somewhat smooth. That’s perfectly fine. I wanna salt this. We’ve decided I should probably measure out my salt these days enough with the old Josh toddler handful method. Okay. I wanna give this a taste because I wanna adjust the chili powder. This one’s looking a lot darker. We’re gonna get some tomato, tomato in there real quick. Hear me out. Lemme get. There we go. This looks like the soup with El Torito. Alright, you do get a lot of chili flavor. Not as strong as if you just like, you know, use actual blended chilies. But I’m just gonna do this real quick, man. Should I, do I measure it? Who wants me to actually measure my ingredients? Okay. All right, one more teaspoon. F it. Two teaspoons bang in there. I’m just, I’m just dumping. Yeah, buddy. Yeah. Crank it. All right. I need to go a whole can. We’ll start with half can, half can tomatoes again. Typically tomatoes aren’t in enchiladas, but like typically you don’t use canned chicken either. And here we are and it’s gonna taste good again. There is no wrong way to make food taste good when you are cooking at home for your family. Uh, unless you’re adding like lead-based paint to your food, don’t do that. Chicken. We gotta talk about chicken real quick because over at the Costco, this chicken claims that it is seven ounces of chicken. This chicken over at the Dollar Street claims, it is 4.5 ounces of chicken. Now I ain’t good at doing the quick maths, but that means this is like roughly, I don’t know, like 60%. Uh, this in volume. However, if you dream the chickens. The court will see that the Dollar Tree chicken drained this much liquid versus this much in the Costco chicken. So the total measurement of ounces, there are the contents of the can not the contents of the meat drink that later is a protein shake. This is seven cans of Dollar Tree Chicken versus only two cans of the Costco chicken. So you are getting so much more actual meat and it looks a lot better too. We’ll try it. This looks like big chunky flakes of pure chicken breasts. This one kinda looks a little bit gnarled. Wait, I, I know I say the things a lot, but I’ve never said this sentence In the mythical kitchen, that’s the best canned chicken I’ve ever had over the Dollar Tree. It’s really good. A lot of canned chicken can tend to get kinda like mushy. This is really retained. A lot of it’s like protein chew. Oh, the Costco’s not bad. This one’s actually more salted. This is like excellent. I would, I would shred this up. Put it in salsa, put it in burritos, a hundred percent home. Don’t mind the canned wet. We’re gonna mash this up. Oh God. Can I do it with my hands? Are people gonna judge me? I’m gonna go wash it. Check this out. Check this out now. Valid teaching moment here. Here. What to do. Wash your hands. You got a nice lather up the soap, warm water. Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday dear Josh. Sorry your dad flew to Philadelphia without telling you. So Josh, can I need to wash your hands? You so bit a chicken or put back in? Oh, did I really put it back in? Yeah. Come back with me to the sink, I think. Cool. Come back to you. Check it out. You gotta use your elbow for the soap. Boom. Did it touch all three knot? What? No. Check it out elbow. Come on. Come on you. Piece of shit. B God damnit guys, are all of these cans. Mine going, Winnie. Get all these cans. They are. Geez, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude. It. It’s not acceptable spot. Now punk. Saving the diet Coke for dessert. Okay. A little bit, just a little bit, little bit of enchilada sauce just to wet the chicken. Saving the rest for the top. Just a little bit of enchilada sauce to wet and flavor the chicken. But we are pouring all the enchilada sauce on top. There we go. Now cheese, we want this to bind the chicken, so we’re tossing that right in there. We’re gonna make a kind of chicken paste that we’re gonna put inside the tortillas. We are, they didn’t have corn tortillas at the dollar tree. We’re using flour tortillas. Again, we said very, very American. But this is kind of taken to a next level. Flour tortillas are not my preferred enchilada tortilla. But you know what, again, if you think about it, like lasagna or, um, oh my God, what’s the dish? It’s a Sardinian dish. Sardi. Come on Sardinia. It’s like, uh, I can’t remember the name. Um, it’s, they take like panza and they layer it with the Pecorino and the brodo and they bake it. Look up like Sard Zpa, zpa gre. Thanks for the help everybody Think of this like azua re it is actually one of the coolest dishes I’ve had. If you guys wanna just like Google something, you know, so many times I’ll like mention like, Hey, I’ve made this dish. People, you know, they’ll type out like, what’s that? Like? Instead of typing, what’s that to me? Type into the supercomputer in your pocket. That’ll tell you exactly what that is. You know, I know you wanna talk to me, but I’m very, I’m very tired. I’m very, I’m very tired. You know, someone’s like, yeah, this is chicken scarpa. And you’re like, what’s that? Nobody knows. That is asshole. Chicken fillings are made. It’s time to fill some chills. Feel enchiladas. That is, it’s short for I’m just, I’m gonna leave Quick show of hands. Who here wants me to wear gloves? 1, 2, 3. All the kitchen folks are very clear in their intentions. Uh, okay. I’m not wearing gloves. Sorry. You guys lose, uh, my hands are clean. I washed them. I’ll wear gloves. I’ll wear gloves. Damnit the gloves. I don’t even know where the gloves are. It smells like the bull. It smells like balloons. The whole food’s gonna smell like balloons now. Ugh. Are, this is small gloves. It feels terrible. I have, uh, I have sensory issues. Do you lube up your hand before you put it in? You don’t ever just dip it in vegetable oil. The slides in easier. All. Safety first kids. All right, we’re gonna, ugh, feels terrible. We’re gonna make some enchiladas. We have some tortillas that we have. No, no, no, no, no. My hands are clean. It’s fine. Here’s my preferred enchilada making technique where you’ll take the tortilla and you will just completely dip it into the enchilada sauce. I see why one would think that I should wear gloves for this, but I will not be doing so. And then what you’re gonna do is you’re just gonna pop it in the middle of the casserole dish and then you are going to take some of this here. Chicken. Pop that in, and I should do it that way. That makes way more sense. And then now take that boom, roll it up seam side down. Tuck that in the corner. We’re gonna stack six in here. Do the same on the other side. I’m like rooting around like a truffle pig. We’re gonna put some sauce on top of these enchiladas. We rolled them all up. Sauce. So the idea is we’re gonna bake these, get all of those inside, all the cheesiness, heat it up. Why am I using a spoon like a dummy? Just dump it. We want some extra sauce on top. That is because the sauce is going to evaporate in the oven and we want to give this a little bit of protection, especially at the ends. The ends, the tortilla can burn. So spread that out. Top it. Two kinds of cheese, not one, not three. We got two. The, the cheddar cheese at the dollar tree. It looked a little bit suss. It looks like it was in a snack and packet definitely processed, but it still tastes really good. I hope it melts properly. Same with the, the pepper Jack. Gonna give this nice sprinkling over the top pepper jack. Controversial here, but I, we caught controversy over it. Milk the kitchen. Uh, pretty useless cheese. You know what I’m talking about. I, I gimme a good jack cheese and I’m gonna add my own peppers if I want white first. Yeah, this one’s gonna definitely bake up and have that like cheese pull to it. This one, I don’t think so, but I don’t actually know what’s gonna make a better product. The enchilada sauce over here I think tastes a lot more like chilies, uh, which is generally what you want. Uh, great. I, I feel pretty good about this. I get a wipe on the, hold on, gimme a sec. Here’s the thing, here’s what happens. You bake a casserole with schmitz on the outside, that’s just gonna burn into it. It’s gonna be hard to clean. You guys wanna watch me wipe it? They should probably watch. Well, it’s valuable ’cause it’s valuable cooking technique here, Annise. Hold on. I’m really just smearing a lot of it. Did we just watch me develop OCD in real time? That was pretty cool. We’re gonna pop this in a 370 degree oven. Our oven. That means it’s probably about 240 degrees. Let’s see. Melt the cheese, evaporate. Some of that sauce we’ll remember which is which? I don’t care. The one that looks like it has real cheese on it is from Costco. Check back in about two hours. Go Stewart of spark.com. You’re a noted food eater, are you not? That’s so true. You have plates of food in front of you. A funny thing about me is that I see we have enchiladas here. Um, you’re right. That is so funny. Everyone laugh. She’s so quirky. Um, a funny thing about me is that I can identify foods properly, but also that I recently did an enchilada frozen enchilada taste test for sparked, and it really, really put me off enchiladas. So we’ll see how this goes. What if I told you that both of these are filled with canned chicken? Oh my god. Even better. It’s good if you eat canned tuna. Why not canned chicken? One of these is from the Costco, the other is from the Dollar Tree. They look like almost identical. Thank you. Isn’t that crazy? Yeah, we try. How are the beans vote? The same color black. They’re like black beans. They’re the blackest black beans I’ve ever seen. And they’re beautiful. We tried. Um mm. Nice. Well seasoned. Oh, they are made with flour tortillas on account of we could only find flour tortillas at the dollar tree and not corn. Okay. I wonder why that would be. Hmm. Someone should investigate. Hmm. Honestly, if you go to the dollar chase, it’s hard to find a lot of things. So we get what we can and we cook what we can, which is, you know? Mm-hmm. I like, I like flower tortillas, so it’s fine for me. Um, so Florida, I know, um, it’s embarrassing when they ask you if you want corner flower tortillas at the Mexican restaurant and you say flour and you’re like, have you ever had Zpa Ree? No. I have no idea what you’re talking about. Well, me tell, present that conversation. Oh, I don’t know. You didn’t ask any follow ups? I thought you just wanted me to shut up. Oh, come on. No, it’s an Italian dish. It’s kind of just like wet flatbread cheese and broth. That sounds good. Mind bakes into a delicious, cheesy mush, kinda like this. Yeah, that sounds incredibly good. How far do you think Fie threw the hammer to win the 2004 Olympics? I actually, I would love to answer this. I don’t have any frame of reference on like how far hammer throws are, um, but I wanna guess anyway. Yeah, you should a hundred feet, uh, meters, please. Um, international competition. What, what country are we in? More’s Japanese. But he, he accomplished this feat in Athens, but everyone uses the metric system except us. I know. 150 meters. You thought it was a hundred feet, but 150 meters. Yeah. Okay. 82, 91. 82. 91 82 meters. 91 centimeters. Yeah. Oh, okay. Okay. Well, I was initially close. You initially guessed about 30 meters, 50 centimeters, so you were actually closer with your guests of a hundred. How do you like these enchiladas? They’re, I think they’re good. The sauce on this one tastes more like the enchilada sauce, you know, and love from going to a Mexican restaurant. Hold on, let me taste the acc. Ma, we were talking too much about hammer throws and how, I don’t know how to do math. Okay. Can you believe Primos Cosmos beat the two Belarusians in 2008? I forgot about that. No, I know. I was so ready to say that this was Costco because I, I like the sauce. Mm. More the rice is like really identical almost, I think. Right? I don’t know. Can I, can I eat on hunger? I mean, I, I really can’t taste the difference between the rice, but I think these beans are much better. What do you think? But nice. Right? I mean, they’re both really good. I didn’t chew enough of that one until I put that one in my mouth. Yeah, I know. I, God forgot what I was doing. I’m just very hungry. Okay. My decision that I made is that this one’s from Costco and then this one’s from Dollar Tree. But which one do you prefer? I prefer these enchiladas and those beans. Well, it’s never me. Gwynna. You are correct. Those are the Costco enchiladas. And I think you’re, you’re dead on right? That the sauce was the tell. Mm-hmm. There was a much darker chili powder. Mm-hmm. Which was like the base flavor for the end enchiladas. Yes. Um, and then this one just didn’t really come through super red. Interesting about the beans though. I think because they were drier. They cooked up like more whole. Yeah. Yeah. They have more bite. And honestly I think they just have a better overall flavor. And I know the thing you’ve all been waiting for is how much did each of these cost? So full disclosure, we spent like $240 or something over the Costco for the groceries and then like. 30 bucks over here ’cause they sell giant things. But on a dish per dish basis, Costco was actually cheaper than Dollar Tree. Again, you’re buying a ton in bulk, so we have to make a hundred of these. This costs $2 and 95 cents to make this costs $3 and 97 cents to make. But again, you’re using a lot of product. There might be a lot of waste to nose. Yeah, that’s crazy though. Wow. Yeah. That means that dollar sheet was 33% more expensive. But also it means that Costco was 26% cheaper. We’re doing math. The point is Costco is cheaper and there’s a lot, if anybody knows how to do math, comment below say, I know how to do math. And Josh, you failed math in 10th grade and never went back. And if you know the metric system, you can pri message me privately. Yeah. Well Gwen, thank you. So don’t, don’t private, don’t private message pointed with your metrics. 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 stores more successful younger brother who like really superseded everything they did and then watch 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 Kitchener 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 a 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 U ffc won all. They kind of just like fell down and someone would start hammer fishy 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 and 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, trip polyphosphate. 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 pumped full of food dye. Those farm 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 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 certified noodle, which again is something I make at least once a week at home because I always have soy sauce and shelf table in my pantry. What reason? Spaghetti, if you look at the actual ingredients between like a Chinese Manan 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 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’m going to add oil to heat. We’re gonna try and get this up to 3 75 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 yield. 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. All right, we got our oil to exactly 375 degrees. If you’re a little bit over, a little bit under, 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 know 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. ’cause 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 pan express and you’re like, I wanna go buggy board. And you jump in immediately, it legitimately just tastes like the mad amount of salt water in a little bit of soy sauce. And so 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 malty 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 oh, 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, that is 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 the 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, noodles 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@overtosport.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 Spark and I’m also biased ’cause I consider them well. FFF Friends at this point. Guys, you good? Who the how? They’re my F 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 diet. We know that. Like that’s how you create that pink color in farm salmon. You feed it things that will effectively diets flesh. They 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 because 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. A 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 ay, 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. I’m gonna crank these pans back on. You want a real quick sear on the salmon? Then you wanna get that glaze in there and just like really get those 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 her 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 bare 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. We 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 birth 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. Its time to reduce. Oh, looks like murky pond water. All right. In the pots, go, dude. Oh, the salmon is just falling apart. I’m 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, you. 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 different sides of my mouth to get that. I am an ambit. 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 three 50. 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 walk. 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 future recipes. Just a nice green bean tinted oil for my fried fluffer nutters. And now we’re gonna get a whole lot of fresh garlic into that and keep going. Okay. There’s oil work fest 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. Wanna get to that soy sauce? Nice and dark in there. Ah, go, go, go, go, go. Ah. Played for my damn life over here. Alright. I’m just gonna add a little bit of finishing bullon, you know, get that incorporated. What are you gonna stir? Fried chicken bullon. I don’t care. All right. Weren’t nice. Silent. Ah. Ah, there we go. Oh, that boon 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 pronounced? Roadie? Just road. What does it mean? What’s her name? What do you mean? It’s her name? Her name is Hailey Bieber. 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 stuff for Gwyn? Go here to spark.com. Welcome bill. 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 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 Vander Pump 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. Mm-hmm. 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. I love garlic. So we actually of sort of, we tried to, you ever been to Tai fun? 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 Gwyn? Yes. Yeah. Okay. Who hands up do you hate Gwynedd? No, 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, I 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 grocer here. I know. Well, and I work at Spark 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 more sensitive. Get up in the comment. I’ll say the salmons, they were intended to look the same. They had the same cooking method the same time 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. B 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, I’m just so flaky Denver. It’s like, yeah, but look at how 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 WeCh. 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’s Sam’s Club. You are correct. That is the Dollar Tree one. We tried our best with the salmon and the interesting thing. But 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 I know is crazy if they’re the same brand. Doesn’t make sense. Well, so the, the, the quality of garlic and soy sauce were actually crazy. The soy sauce at Dollar Tree 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 actually 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. That’s, you knows. 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 sparked 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. Mm-hmm. Canned green beans. Great way to get some nutrition in. Mm-hmm. Quin, thank you so much for stopping by. You got you. Got anything to plug? Um, go to spark.com and we’ll 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 Bucky’s run. Listen man, don’t underestimate the quality of Dollar Tree ingredients. They got some great stuff in there. Leave a comment below and tell us what your favorite grocery store battle moment was and who you’d wanna see on the show. We’ll see y’all next time. And as always, thanks for this support. I’ve never said that. What do you mean as always? Anyways, thanks for the support. Our new Mythical Kitchen staff collection is here. Grab yours today at mythical.com. Become a part of the MK team. No culinary skills required.