Welcome to Mythical Kitchen where a man watches TikToks. So I recently turned 30 and as my responsibilities and existential dread grow, my understanding of the internet just continues to decline. So now we’re parking me in front of a bunch of TikToks just to try and figure out what’s going on here. Let’s get to it. My headphones are on. A Jellied Meatloaf from 1931. Oh, we got B Dylan Hollis. He does really good work. A pound of ground beef. You don’t want the sky beef, that would be scary. Sky beef, ground beef. He does good stuff. Time until you add a pack of gelatin to some water! Old recipes often have misplaced jello in them. You know what stings more than a knife, Mr. Onion? Rejection. It does, that is true rejection hurts. Time to boil! Now that this is thick we add in the beef, pimientos, and then we mix. This is revolting. Okay, so this is kind of like a, what the French would call an aspect. What a joy! Mmm, to the fridge! Good morning. Yeah, there we go! There we go, all right, cut! B Dylan Hollis does really good work. He recreates a lot of old-timey recipes and a lot of people, himself included, find them really frightening. However I will say we take packaged gelatin for granted. You’re going back to 1931 where packaged gelatin has only been around for maybe like 30, 40 years. That was a very exciting thing. So you have to like put yourself into their shoes, right? And I always try and take a great deal of empathy into recipes when I look at them and try and figure out the temporal context. Like if you took the stuff that we are eating today, I’m thinking about the Buzzfeed Tasty recipes, where it’s like, “Triple Bacon Cheese Bomb”! And they’re just like pulling apart nine-foot cheese pulls. Everything’s just saturated in cheese. Fricking unicorn grilled cheeses out there with all the food dye. People are going to look back at that stuff that we are eating today with the same amount of cringe that you are looking back on these depression-era recipes. And so we’re all really the same. We all eat gross things. We are all victims to the faddishness of our own current moment, and this is merely that. I’ve eaten savory jello things. They’re not personally for my taste. I think if I existed back then, I would certainly enjoy them. One box Devil’s Food cake. Whatever he is gonna add in there he is not gonna mix it, I’ll tell you that. Cream of Mushroom soup. Ah, getting a little funky fresh. Don’t mix it. Yeah, what’s up with that? Turkey stuffing mix. Okay. Eight tablespoons of butter. Two cans of sweet corn. There’s a lot. This is a lot, Don’t mix it. That’s happening right here. 2% Milk. Hot Chocolate pack. Don’t mix it. Don’t mix it. Bake at 350 for a half hour. God, that is horrifying. He likes it, he likes it, he’s having a good time. Who are we to tell him he is not? So this right here, this is actually a sort of meta commentary on this style of video that was already popular. We did something on YouTube where we talked about the Spaghetti-O pie lady. There’s this strange genre of video where people will combine several prepackaged food items. It is typically like a white lady in a very well-lit, white marble kitchen. She looks to be rich and she’s combining prepackaged food items in a very strange way. And for whatever reason, “don’t mix it” became a thing. You would add like canned peaches on the bottom of a thing and put a cake mix on top with butter and she’d go, “Don’t mix it!”, and she’d put it in the oven. She’d pull it out and it’d be like a perfectly baked cobbler. There’s actually one person, this is a real story, we’ll link to the article in the description. There is one person, he’s a freaking magician, this is true, who is behind the production of all these videos and they’ve become huge business on Facebook. I think they operate in what’s called the uncanny valley, which is the idea that like, you’ll see somebody with a humanoid shape, but something doesn’t look quite right and your body is instantly disgusted by it. I think we’re in the uncanny valley of food recipes here where you’re seeing these sort of like Sandra Lee-esque, boxed cake mix recipes, but something isn’t right. And the, “Don’t mix it”, is where that transports you into the uncanny valley. So this person right here, they’re taking that to the absolute extreme and parodying it by repeating, “Don’t mix it. Don’t mix it”. If we’re talking about flavors here, I’ll add mayonnaise to a chocolate cake to make it extra rich. Cream of mushroom soup, mayonnaise, not the craziest combination. Corn and cake is obviously a delicious thing. We see that in, you know, I mean, hell, look at a very sweet cornbread. The stuffing that’s really just bread. All in all, you mix all these ingredients together proper, it’s not gonna taste the worst. It’s not gonna be the worst tasting food. Got here a nice little sandwich. Ooh, brisket, cheese. Is that a slab of lasagna? Yes, Yes! Good show! Speaking of like types of things that have really become popular for whatever, we realize that you stack a bunch of stuff onto a burger, typically comfort foods that are loaded with cheese, people are really gonna enjoy that content. They’re probably really gonna enjoy that in their mouths. There is a huge moment where we were all putting mac and cheese on burgers, chicken sandwiches. We made it in an early TikTok where we made a Buffalo chicken sandwich with mac and cheese. Just a slab of lasagna probably works better than mac and cheese because that’s gonna stay together. Do I think that the lasagna will accent the brisket in a way that improves the total edibility of that dish? Not even a little bit. That said, I just think this is really fun. Food is meant to be played with, people have played with food for thousands upon thousands of years. You don’t have to get so serious about it. Lasagna, brisket, cheese, pickle, barbecue sauce sandwich. You’re a-okay with me. What’s going on? What? What is happening? Is he just, is he home-fermenting tofu? I don’t, I don’t understand. I don’t understand! What’s in the box, what’s in the box? I don’t know! Is it, is it soup? I feel like I have context for the other things that I’ve watched. This, okay, he’s making a dough. Whatever that was. I don’t like it, I don’t like it. I don’t like it, can I go home? Is it a pizza? I think that was sansho pepper ’cause I think I’ve bought that same brand of sansho pepper, that’s a delightful spice. Has anybody watched a lot of Japanese horror movies here? This reminds me of the movie called “The Audition”. Well, and he’s a cat, now he’s a cat. Now he is a cat, he’s eating the pizza. Was it? When you were a kid and you were scrolling through TV late at night and you’d end up on like a Japanese game show and you’d have absolutely no idea what’s going on but still you were kind of transfixed like you were looking at this hypno-wheel and you couldn’t tell if maybe this is indicative of a culture or this could even be an outlier in that culture that you’re watching. But either way you don’t actually know what’s happening. So you just keep watching and watching and watching there’s more stimulus and more stimulus and more stimulus. And then suddenly you’re just in this fugue state that you and the content are one. It appears that he let tofu, seaweed, and mushrooms, rot near his home aquarium and then turned it into a pizza. Okay, well, no, no, let’s think about this. Y’all like that Brad Leone he’s doing all these home fermentation techniques. This is just a little bit of amateur home fermentation. Can I advocate that any of you do this? Nah, nope, nope, sure can’t. Legally and morally, but you know what? If he’s happy, look, he’s a cat at the end. That’s pretty rad. I don’t know what the hell I just watched. I feel a little sick. Dinnertime. How do you scratch up a cast iron like that? Frozen Meat, there we go. Okay. Garlic. You can cook meat from frozen, you can do it. Taco seasoning! That’s a lot of taco seasoning. A little bit of pepper! That is a lot of taco seasoning. Half an onion. Okay. Now that it’s brown, Look, easy way to save time. Let’s add a whole thing of beef broth. She’s on her way to like a mom who’s trying her best making chili. This is a nice homey dish, this is basically a Rice A Roni at this point, you know. Little more taco seasoning. Okay, it’s a lot of taco seasoning, but listen, Bring to a boil and then let simmer until the rice is done. Who am I to judge? Gonna take about half a can of this nacho cheese. Hell yes! Pour it in here and stir it, Hell yes, add that nacho cheese, woman! Yeah, you get all that nacho cheese in there. I did the whole thing. Yeah, ooh, you did that whole thing, you’re bad. A spoon to taste test. That is a thick sludge of rice. Mm, it’s real good. All right, so she’s, oh, now she’s plating it up. I’d serve that in like a lettuce wrap. Cheese on top, some Doritos. And then you can eat like this or put a little bit of Salsa Verde on it. There it is, Salsa Verde, that’s what’s up! That’s a great product. If you learned anything from this, it’s that you can cook meat from frozen, especially if you’re making ground meat or you’re doing a long cook preparation on it. Great way to save time. Two, I don’t love store bought taco seasoning, but I know that growing up in Southern California, it’s because I know how to make a general seasoning blend that I enjoy. Also taco seasoning doesn’t make sense, ’cause like a taco is just a vessel and can be filled with literally anything. But you get what it is. It’s probably just a bunch of like cumin, salt, citric acid, cornstarch, stuff like that. I reckon a lot of people are disgusted by what she made. I know this went viral because of outrage and I saw a lot of people talking like, “This is what white people think Mexican food is”, all that. But like that’s the filling of 80% of Taco Bell burritos. You think about the beefy five-layer burrito or you know, all that. It’s just ground meat with, effectively, a bunch of taco seasoning and nacho cheese in it. So if you’re like viscerally disgusted by this video, you should be viscerally disgusted by the things that Taco Bell serves. I am neither, I see that and I’m like, I know exactly what that’s gonna taste like, I knew it was going to be a thick paste of ground beef, rice, nacho cheese, and taco seasoning, all flavors that are like all-in-all pretty pleasant, right? Like taco seasoning wouldn’t exist if there weren’t a market for it. And that’s the thing I think about a lot. Food simply wouldn’t exist if they weren’t good to a lot of people, right? The Ortega company, Lawry’s, McCormick, they have spent millions of dollars on R&D research and focus groups to figure out how to make their products taste good, it makes your food taste good. So I watch this, would I make that for myself for dinner? Probably not but if I came over to your house and you made that for me, I would slurp down. I would slop on that wap, that just absolutely delicious, dense taco casserole. Also, I’m not like a huge cheese guy. I think a lot of people think I would be, but I know a lot of people who just eat cheese in that quantity, you know? And listen, respect it. Calorie dense, it’s nice, comforting, good plate of food. Eight out of 10. That, I don’t, I have no idea. I have no idea what’s happening. Was that America, what’s the song? Oh no, I just realized what they’re doing! Oh my god, they just, wait, hold up! Hold on, can you do that? If I can be a bit pretentious for a second, I get weirded out when people use the term “hibachi” instead of “teppanyaki”. So hibachi is actually a small, Japanese, open-fire grill, where as teppanyaki is a style of cookery on a teppan. Yaki literally just kinda means barbecued, roasted, however you want to translate it. So teppanyaki is cooking on a flat top, ALA Benihana, and then hibachi is a small, Japanese grill. However, people got it wrong so much in America, that now the default is to call it hibachi. If you don’t believe me, go to Bennihana’s frequently asked questions page, and they will literally have, “Hey, isn’t this teppanyaki and not hibachi?” And they’re like, “Yeah, but so many people in America got it wrong that we just started saying hibachi”. So to me, this is teppanyaki. Why do I have the Bennihana FAQ page memorized? I don’t know. The cooktop gets very hot. It’s gonna sanitize anything, you know what I mean? I personally see nothing wrong with this. If this made good food, then that’s pretty freaking rad. Save money on an electric griddle, do that. I reckon it would just ruin your appliance. But to me, this is just super rad, I love this. Oh Jesus Christ! This is a level of chaos I aspire to. This is me in my final form. Living alone just being like, “Actually did you know that the Swedish version of schutz boller is not actually from Sweden, but actually from Denmark?” As I’m just living in a hovel, just a shanty, losing my mind. Oh, they’re pre-cooked shrimp! What is taco sauce? What is taco sauce- Whatever you say this person is a modern performance artist and you gotta give ’em props. The absolute horror and disgusting-ness of everything. I hope that he actually had to set decorate this and that it wasn’t just his normal living situation. ‘Cause otherwise that feted water right there, it’s gonna breed mosquitoes, it’s gonna breed malaria. You’re gonna get listeria and you will die. Would I still eat that shrimp? Yeah, maybe. I don’t know, again, heat kills bacteria. You’re frying it, whatever. It’s safer than eating bagged salad mix. Like 27 people died from a cantaloupe listeria outbreak 10 years ago, you know? Everything you eat, you’re taking a gamble in some way. I don’t like this, I don’t like this. This is not right, this is dark sided. It’s not Christian! That was a good show. No, well, okay. Now I think I do like it. Yep. I’m a little aroused, not sexually, but sensually, certainly. Oh this is just fun! This is fun! Oh yeah, you’re gonna blind bake that top crust. Aren’t you, sexy pie minx? Yes, do it! Add a little bit cornstarch to your filling next time and maybe your creepy pie-face demon won’t weep so hard at the end of the cook. You ever think about that, you big, old, pie head, huh? No, I bet you didn’t. Let it rest, let the juices settle, and it won’t bleed from the eyes like stigmata. That could have been avoided. Seriously what the- Good afternoon D&D TikTok and beyond and welcome to Roll for Sandwich, the series where I let fate decided my lunch, let’s go! I don’t know the rules of D&D enough. First up, rolling for bread. Oh, I see, he’s got a little, Three, waffles. The only waffles I have right now are these frozen chocolate chip waffles. What a fun concept, this is a nice, fun concept! Next up, roll for our main course. I like the, what is that, a lyre in the background? Three, salami. Well, salami’s not a typical breakfast meat. Salami actually is a breakfast meat at a lot of Jewish Deli’s. Get a plate of salami and eggs, it’s good stuff. And roll for cheese! Five, muenster. In my opinion, this is the best thing we could have rolled. I like this guy, I just feel like he and I can hang out. And now we come to the D20 sauce role. D20, I choose you! Nine, HP sauce. HP brown sauce! Well, this is a sauce I was sent by one of you. To explain it for my fellow Americans, it’s basically a steak sauce. It tastes like A1 or Hinez 57. It’s like if you did a combination of Sweet Baby Ray’s and A1. All right, let’s get it assembled! And let’s get it cut. Oh, what a sick knife! All right, not sure about this one, but let’s see. Okay. This is way better than I was expecting it to be. The waffles are perfectly toasted, still pretty soft. I didn’t expect this, but I’m gonna give it a nine. This has been a week of all good sandwiches so far, which makes me very worried about tomorrow. This video simply makes my heart so warm and full. It was so beautiful to watch. It was like watching like a, I don’t know, long form Nordic television or like the show Terrace House from Japan where it’s like, not much happens but it’s just very dulcet and it’s very wholesome and it’s very endearing. I was rooting for this man to succeed. I was rooting for the nice things to come up on the die. When the waffle with the chocolate chips came in, I was like, oh, a little bit worried. I feel like I followed a full emotional arc through this video and I believe you, sir! I believe you, that that sandwich tastes perfectly fine. I believe you that the HP sauce melds well with the chocolate. ‘Cause I think there’s like raisin concentrate in HP sauce. So you get like the raisin with the chocolate. You’re kinda hitting. I just, wow, this is art! I mean, this is like actually kind of beautiful to me. Oh yeah, what’s her name? What’s her name? One more, hi-ya! She calls herself something. She’s the scourge of Italians on TikTok. She does this, she puts Nerds in stuff! Is she gonna put Nerds in this one? I’ve seen her, she calls herself like Trudy or something. Getti Spaghetti. Getti, Getti, her name’s Getti! Here comes the fun part. Some bell peppers, onion, yellow bell peppers. Getti, you figured it out. You figured out how to game the algorithm. You are the chosen one who has figured out how to get inside the matrix and change the code for your own game. Every single decision that you have made here has been meant to bait and enrage Italians. And then even down to the commentary from the person behind you, as if it’s totally earnest, Getti, you know exactly what the hell you’re doing, Getti. You know this is perfectly engineered to get views. Your dead-pan humor, everything about it. No Getti there’s no way you believe that this is any sort of good food. Oh, and then everybody, oh, they take the bait like pigs feeding at the trough. They would rather simply feel enraged and self-righteous about something than ignore it. Every time you feel enraged by something, you feel the need to comment, “This is the most disgusting thing you do”. All that happens is that you are encouraging that content. You are creating the market. Whereas before you had to create a market with your dollars, now you are doing it with your eyeballs. You are physically making this video happen. Getti did not make this spaghetti, you did! That’s that’s my thoughts on that. How do I feel I compare with other food TikTok-ers? Here’s the weird thing, right? Whenever I do something that is like rage bait or something that I know people are gonna get worked up about. In my own mind, I’m like, “Oh, this is fun parody and meta commentary”. The Spokane pizza was like that exact thing, right? But then I realized outside of the context of my own mind, that’s not the way that people actually consume it. So I think anything I complain about on here, we are likely doing it ourselves. But that said, it’s like, you know, we also live in a society. We are competing in the free market for attention is all it is. And I like to think that what we’re doing is ultimately, not only harmless, but actually kind of, I don’t know, gives people cool information out there doing like our historical TikToks about all the narcotics in soda. I really love food history. I think I have good ideas about food that other people should watch. But then, you know, certain videos I’m like, “Yeah man, we just like threw chili at a wall”. I don’t know if we’ve done that, but hey, let’s make a chili wall video. Well here we are, a 30 year old man staring at a screen, trying his best to understand what’s going on with the world’s society and part of the world that he himself has built with the help of several accomplices that are here in this room. You are all guilty, the blood is all in your hands as well. But no, there was some really fun stuff on there. Man, that D&D sandwich, it just, it gave me all the warm fuzzies. Well hey, if you enjoyed this video, let me know if you wanna see me react to TikToks again. Also you know we got new episodes coming out every single week around here. We got new episodes of our podcast. If you love the insane rants, plenty more over there. Audio only. “A Hot Dog is a Sandwich”, that’s it. Every Wednesday, wherever podcasts are sold. Follow us on TikTok and Instagram at Mythical Kitchen. Tag us in pictures, your mythical dishes, with hashtag “Dreams become food”. I’m gonna go rethink my whole life. [Trevor] Hey, you! Cook up your own feast while wearing the Mythical Kitchen apron, available now at Mythical.com.