You add a little nutmeg at the end, just a little bit. Not enough to kill anyone. I would never kill anyone with nutmeg. Though nutmeg is very poisonous in the wrong amounts. Hey, welcome to Mythical Kitchen, where dreams become food. Hi. Did I nail that? I like that. Is that your new thing? No, that’s… Just kidding, I watch your content. I watch your content. You don’t have to lie to me. I don’t watch anything you do, so. I leave it on for the cats. Today, cats are our main audience actually. Today, we are playing a little game of Catch the Imposter Chef. And if you didn’t notice, one of these people is an imposter. It’s Damien Haas from Smosh. Okay, don’t give it away, spoilers. All right, so Damien, you today will be making a taco showcasing your own personal style and putting your whole chefussy into the dish. Hate that last part, but yes. Me too. I don’t even know what you said. It oozed outta my mouth and I don’t like it. But here it is and we’re not doing another take. Don’t say ooze on a food show. Don’t say ooze on a food show. Damien, Vee and I obviously, we have a lot more experience than you. Do you think you can run with us today? Do you think you can fool our judge into thinking that you are a chef who’s earned your chef coat? Well as a voice actor, Twitch streamer, and Smosh haha funny boy, I’m used to lying all the time on camera for entertainment. So can I pass mustard with y’all? Probably not, but I can definitely lie my way into at least maybe giving the judge a challenge. I’m kind of a foodie, right? Like I love food, I love complex flavors. If there’s anything new I haven’t tried before that’s on a menu, I will order that thing. So hopefully I at least know enough about flavor to like put that into practice. Damien, I think you can hang with us, but to actually determine that our judge will be taste testing all of our signature tacos without knowing who made what and seeing if they can sniff out the rat in the kitchen. That’s already a show on TBS, hosted by Natasha Leggero and Ludo Lefebvre. I don’t know who that is, but yeah. So now you just called me a rat. I didn’t call any of us a rat. I didn’t call any us a rat. Nah, he called you a rat. I’ve never felt closer to Disney’s Aladdin, but in a bad way. No, Ratatouille. You gotta think Ratatouille, man. That’s true. Let’s get cooking. All right, so I am not a competitive person is something that I say until I actually start competing and then I just get this feral desire to crush all my opponents around me. And so, that’s what I’m gonna do today and I’m gonna do it by not only winning with the best taco, but also tricking the judge because I’m making simple, straightforward vegetable cookery. Something, I don’t think anyone’s seen me do on this show. So, I don’t think our judge is gonna think of me doing a vegan carnitas taco. So, right now we’re slicing some garlic in half that’s going into the pot. We’re trying to perfume some oil right now. I’m gonna do that with a shallot as well. I’m gonna shred these lovely maitake mushrooms and we’re basically doing like a mushroom confit, which is the same cooking technique. Also, some people are probably out there like you can’t make vegan carnitas ’cause carnitas literally means little bits of meat. Watch me! Oh, maitake mushrooms are really good. You should start buying these. They have a really incredible texture. They get super, super crispy, especially if you break ’em into small bits. ‘Cause they got these nice little like floret things you can kinda just give a little tickle. I’m gonna add some salt to this oil. We’re starting it at a low temperature, adding a couple of chile de arbol just to spice things up. Now I’m breaking down these mushrooms, getting ’em into nice little shreddy pieces that’s going right in the oil and they’re gonna get deep fried ’til nice and crispy and all that moisture’s lost. Even if your pot’s crowded on this, we’re gonna start at a low temp, bring it all the way up and so then all this steam from the mushroom’s gonna evaporate and they’re gonna get nice and crispy like carnitas. Again, I’m really trying to fool the judge here. Trying to make a nice vegan dish. Like vegan, that’s not Josh. All he does is deep fry things and Flaming Hot Cheetos and I’m like, yeah ’cause people watch it. We’re making a salsa verde. We’re making a salsa de calabacitas. LA Taco wrote this incredible piece about how taqueros in Southern California will save money by not using avocado, but it’s actually made with squash. I’m peeling some tomatillos. Those are gonna get broiled and a little bit of zucchini just to add body to the entire salsa. Now I’m just trimming off the ends of these green onions. Those are getting roasted for the salsa verde. You’re gonna oil up the vegetables a little bit, get a little bit of salt on ’em and start drying out some of that moisture. Just gotta massage it in ’cause I wanna, when I blend this, the oil is actually gonna emulsify into the squash. That’s just, listen, this is just a culinary technique. Don’t make it weird. This is the best way to cover oil on long, tube-shaped vegetables. Just be cool. And now we’re just gonna broil that all the way on the bottom rack. Check back in a couple minutes. Hey, speaking of simple vegetable-based cookery, the midterm elections are coming up on November 8th and that means Vote like a Beast is back. Vote or die, no, that was Diddy. But if you go to votelikeabeast.com, you can check your registration status, you can stay informed so you can make the most educated vote and really go out there and make some change. We also got stickers available with 100% percent of the proceeds going to our friends over at vote.org. Check out votelikeabeast.com. Now, back to the cooking. All right, cool. So, we have this beautiful mushroom confit carnitas here. You see how nice and crispy and brown all that is. We wanna make this salsa first. We’re tossing some tomatillos into a blender right here. I’m just gonna toss in one of the zucchini right now. Why am I, why do I insist on ripping? The blender does that for you. I just, I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m gonna start with half this onion. This is something that I haven’t like made like per se. And so I’m just gonna start eyeballing it real quick. I’m adding a fresh serrano for a little bit of extra kick right there. Gonna hit it with a little bit of fresh toasted cumin ’cause I think it’s gonna really help with the earthiness and then mushroom’s there and some vinegar. It’s a little bit acid to brighten it up and then you’re gonna take a dirty pot you found in the sink, just gonna dump a bit of water in there. I’m blending all that up and hey, look at that, we got a salsa. Grab a little taco plate. Thumbs up, no thumbprints on the plate and smile. Make the guests feel warm. All right, great. So, I’m draining off this mushroom carnita right here. It’s like a nice brown and crispy, just how I want it. I love whenever I make carnitas, I mean honestly anything fatty, dude, if I have a rib eye I’ll just hit it with like fresh lemon. ‘Cause I don’t know, I think that works. A little bit salt too, fresh lime. The acid just really cuts through the fat and like lime on carnitas is fan-freakin-tastic. Give it a little taste. Mm, shoot. Oh man, I don’t know if I didn’t expect that. I’m just gonna griddle up that tortilla a little bit. I’m griddling it off in the same perfumed oil. We’re trying to just really get all the flavor to be combined in the same place. That’s like goal of cooking, right? Just layer flavors everywhere. Those who watch every episode might notice that I’ve made carnitas in like three of the last five episodes using either mushroom, lamb, or pork. I’m fine being a one trick pony. You know why? ‘Cause the one trick that that pony probably does is pretty rad. If you even have a pony that can do a trick, that’s pretty cool. You know how many tricks most ponies can do? None. What if it has hip dysplasia? Well if it has hip dysplasia then that pony’s getting turned into carnitas on Mythical Kitchen. There you go. Beautiful. Lay that tortilla down, topping that with some of that mushroom carnitas confit. A little bit of that salsa verde de calabacitas. It’s getting a little bit onion on there. Couple sprigs of cilantro just to round it out. Boom, there you got it. Vegan caritas taco. Simple vegetable-based cookery from Josh. Eat that judge. Literally, please, that’s what you’re here for. Hi everyone, I’m Damien and just a reminder, I’m the impostor but I’ve got a little bit of kitchen experience and I’ve made something like this before. So, what I’m going to do, I was born in Germany but on an American army base and Germans don’t have a whole lot to be proud of, but my grandma made some good leeks and my dad always made really good pork loin. So I decided to make German fusion tacos. So we’ve got a pork loin here that I’m gonna start calling it, this is my salt bae and this is the right amount of salt that I’m using right now. You’re looking great, Damien. Thanks Josh. Back at you. I almost wore the same glasses to be a pallet swap of you. What I’m gonna do is I’m gonna add some German mustard to make sure that the spices also stick. Ingelhoffer translates roughly to Ingle hope. English was my first language. I only speak basic high school German and college German. And then I dropped outta college. Woo! I’m gonna be a famous internet boy. Thank you to the people who sent me this. My voice acting character in Fire Emblem, this is the uniform. And so, I have an apron of that and that’s pretty sick. All right, so I’m gonna massage this mustard in, which is in my bottom 10 tactile feelings I felt today. I’m gonna use my porky little hands to open up the mustard again. And that’s everyone else’s fault and problem. I’m gonna somehow wipe this off my hands. I’m gonna go wash my hands. I can’t the tactile feeling I’m gonna, I’m just gonna do it. So, now that we’ve rubbed down this pork a little bit, I’m gonna add some cayenne pepper. So here’s the thing, I’m gonna do some German spices like some sage here. We’re gonna be using apple, some yellow onion. It’s a little bit more mild. So we’re gonna get that sort of that German classic flavor between that and the mustard. But I want us to add some spice, I wanna add some kick. This is fusion. This is what makes it $20 in a restaurant that you didn’t want to go to with your friends or that they didn’t invite you to. I’m mixing up paprika, Chipotle powder, ground sage and cayenne pepper. That’s where you we’re gonna get some of that fusion that we talk about that makes these tacos so expensive. All right, so we got our yellow onion here. I think I’m gonna, I’m gonna think I’m gonna slice it this way here. No, don’t tuck your fingers. Oh god, tuck your fingers. Well, dog, what? Listen, I’ve only sliced clear through my thumb once, okay and that was during pandemic, which was a really hard time for specifically me. I chose yellow onion because it’s a little bit more mild while still having that kick. But it doesn’t have that you know ah, onion kind of flavor. It’s more like ah onion. Now I am slicing up my Fuji apple, which is definitely like chemically engineered to be super sweet. Apples aren’t supposed to be this sweet, but have you had a Fuji? They’re so good. We’re gonna make a little bed of onions, which is what I call my roommate’s room in college. Okay, so I’m gonna make this little bed of apples. That’s what I called my room in college ’cause I’m cottage core baby. I think I’m gonna fool some chefs today, you guys, by having them make me be on their show. We are all the fools. Now it’s time to sprinkle all of these spices upon my little pork baby. Should I, I should probably coat both sides, right, everyone? That’s right Damien. I’m now gonna rub that all around the pork because now it’s going to stick things to the mustard. ♪ If you are bad you will be told. ♪ So I’m gonna plop this down, okay into that. But I’m also covering the rest of the pork loin with the residual apples and onions. My great-aunt Concheta Gail Armino would hit about 300 RPMs in her grave if I forgot all the garlic. Now I’m gonna be using a German lager to add some German lager flavor to the pork meat. I think we’re gonna keep it at 350 degrees for about an hour. As that cooks up, that’s gonna be like my carnitas sort of situation, right Josh? That’s right, Damien. Cool. But mine isn’t made out of mushrooms because I learned from Josh and also linguistics that carnitas means little meats. So mine will be schweinitas. There we go. That’s German fusion. All right, now the most emotionally connected thing for me, my grandma’s leeks. Now, leeks if you don’t know are kind of an onion thing. If you’re a nerd like myself, you probably know them from the game Pokemon. It’s what Farfetch’d the duck carries in its mouth and it’s the only thing that distinguishes it from a normal ass duck. All right, time for me to chop up these leeks pretty thin. They come out in perfect little circles, but they’re gonna get broken up as soon as I put them in the pot a little bit later. So when I’m streaming on Twitch Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays, God, I’m always thinking about cutting leeks. No, we gotta renegade, stop him. Also, they’ll be mad if I don’t plug this if you like more things that I do, I’m on the channel Smosh, which is part of the Mythical family. You can see me playing video games or producing and writing sketch content, okay? All right, so we’re gonna grab all these onions, these leeks, that one can go. I wanted it to go. There’s a reason these taste good, leeks have a very mild, mild oniony flavor. So in order to add deliciousness to it, you have to make a roux first, which is mixing butter and flour. Usually I do them in equal parts, but today it’s all about the butter baby. All right, that roux is bubbling up right quick and my god, it smells good. Okay, I’m gonna put these little onion boys in their little flour and butter bath. So I’m gonna stir this up a bit and make sure everything gets a little bit of that buttery love. As we go, I’m gonna continuously add milk and let things cook down. My goal with this is to have it sort of take the place of like a sour cream. So I’m gonna add a little bit of cream now, let that cook down. This will be the most fattening thing you’ll ever eat, but it tastes damn good and that’s the point, am I right, haters? We’ve got this on simmer and I’m gonna let it do just that while I Kristoff waltz on over to make myself some slaw. Now this is something I needed some help with with the Mythical crew, but I wanted to make something that had a little bit more of like a Mexican flavor to it and also added in some vinegar, some acid. We got a half a cup of red cabbage, we got a quarter cup of radishes, we got a quarter cup of fennel, we’ve got some Fresno peppers. I feel bad ’cause Josh keeps dropping facts about peppers. These are peppers that come from a part of California that I do not live in. And then I’m just gonna add it in just a little bit more salt. I’m gonna mix these all up here. I’m also gonna add a little bit of oil to make sure it’s not too dry here. All right, I’m gonna add a little bit of vinegar here. Swoop, swoop swoop swoop. Gonna scoot this on around. That looks like a good slaw to me. It’s a little bit wetter than I expected it to be, but you know what? I’m the imposter chef. I’m not supposed to do a good job. The leeks are gonna take a while to cook down, but once they cook down a little bit more, that’s when you add a little bit of salt, a little bit of pepper to taste. And here’s the family secret, you ready? Nutmeg. You add a little nutmeg at the end, just a little bit. Not enough to kill anyone. I would never kill anyone with nutmeg. Though nutmeg is very poisonous in the wrong amounts. The thing about leeks is they have a very tough consistency until you cook them down just right. So that’s why often when I make this at home I’m like I’m gonna set aside 45 minutes and constantly cover and stir. But we don’t have that time today. So it’s time to add the nutmeg. What’s that, ancestors? Stop now because I’ve run out? First, I’m gonna try the slaw, see how that tastes. Gotta make sure I get a little fennel and a little Fresno chile. I washed my hands before this. It’s fine that I touched it. Show off. It’s good. The chile adds a lot of kick. It does need more vinegar though. Wow, it’s got a lot of kick to that Fresno chili, woo. Can I get my water please? I’m not a lefty. All right, y’all. So I’ve got a tortilla warming up over there so they can’t tell that I took it straight out of a package ’cause that’d be a dead giveaway. The loin turned out perfectly. We’re shredding it up. I’m gonna actually, let me take one of these forks here and taste, ugh. Sorry, I’m a guest here. I shouldn’t kick the cabinets closed like I do at my own home, which can be found at . That’s stupid good. Not to toot my own horn, but a root-a-toot toot. So, I’m gonna make sure I get a good scoop that involves the juices, the meats and the apples here. I’m going to now add in the leeks. Taking the place of like a sour cream situation. Plop is a sound that good food makes usually. You really want it to make a sickening smack like clam chowder hitting a sidewalk. And finally the ridiculous amount of spice with this slaw. Thank you again to the Mythical team for helping me figure out how to do this gosh dang slaw. There we go. And ta-da, German fusion taco. JoJo pose. What’s up, y’all? It’s your favorite cafeteria food lady. My name is Vee and what’s on our menu today is not one fish, not three fish, not a bluefish or a redfish, but two fish fire taco, yeah. So, in front of me I have catfish and I have shrimp. So, I’m gonna start by soaking some catfish in the buttermilk first so I can let it soak. Now this is normally like a southern kind of style catfish and a lot of people in my family make it, which is why I wanted to like low key dedicate it to them. And I just wanted to get both sides of my family in this taco, which is the fried catfish and the beautiful chili powdered shrimp that we been making in a second. I have some garlic powder, some paprika, some cayenne, some Old Bay, some celery seeds if I remember correctly, and some black pepper. And we’re gonna combine it with our corn meal and our flour. I am adding my catfish that’s been soaking into the cornmeal mix and I’m going to then drop it in the fryer until it’s golden brown. All right, we’re gonna move on to the shrimp in one second. I need to wash my hands. I have these beautiful jumbo shrimp. They are butterfly which basically means they are cut in half so they’re kind of like thin, which is what I like because I like when they curl up in the pan, right? We have some seizing over here, some onion powder, some garlic powder, some ancho chile powder and I’m just gonna mix it with my hand ’cause I’m gangsta like that. Okay, I’m probably gonna take that out. But I’m gonna use my left hand since I have shrimp on this hand. So let’s see how this is gonna go. Ooh, oh yeah, that looks nice and pretty. So you can actually, obviously use different kind of fish to fry. Using this type of fry style, I tend to not use like salmon and other kind of thick pieces of fish. You know it doesn’t cook all the way inside and we don’t like that. So that looks nice. We got our nice catfish pieces over there. Back to our shrimp on this side. We’re gonna throw some oil in our pan, and we’re gonna kind of just let those sizzle until it’s time to flip them. Right now, I’m making the avocado creme. I am putting avocado, mayo, sour cream, cilantro, chives. And then I have Tony Chachere’s pepper sauce that I just discovered yesterday. Damien knows about it. He loves Tony. We also have Tony right there if you didn’t see him. Hey Tony, how you doing? Anyway, we’re just gonna put a whole bunch of this in there ’cause we are making a fire taco. So we want our creme to be a little bit tangy and a little bit of red food dye so we can get the color popping and I’m gonna mix it all up in the blender. All right, so we’re gonna start with our red tortilla. You’re probably like, “Vee, how the hell did you do that?” Red food dye, duh. We’re gonna start with our catfish. And I like to take like a little bit of a thinner piece. We have our grilled shrimp here on the side. It kind of like made these like weird curlies, but I like that. I have some pickled onions that are also red. We’re gonna add those to the top of our taco. This is queso fresco, it’s actually my favorite Mexican cheese and my mom pretty much uses it for everything. We have our beautiful red fire sauce and we’re just gonna make some pretty little dots on our tortilla. Then we have some micro cilantro that I’m just gonna add little sprigs for over the sauce actually. I have some radishes here that I cut ’em a little slit like this and it’s really just so I could kind of like twist them and make ’em nice. And then we’re just gonna just place those on the top. All right, we’ll fix that later, but bam. There you go, the two fish fire taco, baby. Chase, before you, you have three tacos that have been made by three people. Two of them real chefs, at least for the purpose of this show. One of them an imposter chef. Awesome. Hi, hi Josh. It’s Josh, right? Yeah, we figured like, I can talk. Okay, cool. You know I’m here. I won’t touch you. I really appreciate that. All right Chase. The first dish is a German fusion taco with a mustard rubbed pork roasted in German beer with creamed leeks and a cabbage slaw. Do you know what this garnish is? That’s a dill garnish. Awesome. It’s a fennel frond. It’s a fennel frond garnish. I like a German Mexican fusion. It’s me. Mmm. Okay. Very creamy. Starting to fall apart a little bit, but the best tacos do. I like this. This is good. Got a good amount of spice to it and I do feel like it would go great with a little extra of that German beer. We’ll get you one to take home, you lush. The second taco right before you is a vegan carnitas taco with maitake mushrooms and a zucchini salsa verde. Do you want your take mushrooms back? Chase, that’s a great joke. Oh, thank you, thank you. No problem. I now require people to tell me when they think a joke is great. I didn’t squeeze the dill frond thing on that one. I feel bad if that was something I was supposed to do. All right. I love mushrooms but there’s no denying that mushrooms just kind of have like a foot essence to them. And I’m getting a little bit of that but it’s not bad ’cause like I said, I like mushrooms. Sorry, that was just the first thought that came to my brain. I feel like I need to say something better about this one ’cause it is good, but I’m just thinking about foot taste now. And finally, the third taco is a fiery fish taco with corn meal fried catfish, spicy shrimp, avocado creme, and pickled red onions. Let’s see, gonna move in a little closer to this one. I’m getting like very fancy Taco Bell vibes with the red taco shell. Also loving the shaved radish thing, that’s really cool. Impressive. Man. They’re all tacos but it’s so hard to compare. Like a fish taco to this like vegan mushroom thing, mush masterpiece to something that just German. Ger-Mexican. I don’t know. This is a hard game. Now I just want to kind of stall by eating more of these tacos. Chase, what was your favorite taco today? Ooh, that’s real tough. I think I’m gonna say that my favorite taco was this spicy fish guy. And Chase, which taco do you believe was made by the imposter? I think something about this dill frond and this whole presentation is kind of saying like, just trying to hide a little bit that I’m an imposter. Just that, just a touch. Chase, you are correct. That is the imposter taco. It’s not dill, it’s fennel. Hi, Chase! Oh, hi Damien from Smosh. Hi Chase from Mythical. I like when you almost get hit by the darts on the show. So, this is a lot of family recipe stuff that I sort of jammed together in taco mode. This is actually like the recipe for my grandma’s leeks. So yeah, I mean maybe my tortilla choice wasn’t, I mean like what gave me away the most, Chase? It was amazing. I really did like it. I thought all of, you could tell that a lot of these came from kind of home cooked recipes. Okay. That kind were passed down. Cool, that’s pretty cool. I mean the tortilla was a big giveaway that these two looked like things– I knew it. That were made. I knew it. By professionals. I bought those in the grocery store. Really? They’re nice. Damien, thank you so much. Of course. For coming out. You made an incredible dish. Thank you for having me. Chase, thank you so much for letting us feed you just a whole lunch for free. Yeah. You’re welcome. And a foot. And a foot. Yeah, get me back into it. Vee, congratulations on the win. Hell yeah. I’m happy for you. Me, I got nothing. Chase said my taco tastes like feet and that’s okay ’cause I had a great time. Damien. I did too. Thank you so much. Where can people find you? I’m a voice actor, Twitch streamer, and you can also find me on the YouTube channel Smosh and Smash Games. I voice the protagonist in the newest Fire Emblem game, “Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes.” And also. I Stream Tuesdays, Thursdays, Sundays on Twitch.tv/DamienHaas, so there’s all kinds of places. And thank you all for subscribing to Mythical Kitchen. If you haven’t subscribed yet, click the what is it, the bell? That thing down there. Bell’s notifications. Punch that bell, comment on that Subscribe button. And hey. Spank that comment section. I have a homework assignment for you. Tell one stranger on the street about Mythical Kitchen, but make sure it’s like a cool one. Like not, I’m saying like don’t, no, don’t put yourself in any risky situations, you know? But I’m saying like if ’cause that’s something how like word of, maybe you’ll make a friend. Close it out, bro. Maybe you’ll make a friend. The Mythical Kitchen’s favorite way to obliterate garlic immortalized in t-shirt form. Get the Palm Heel Strike Tee now at mythical.com.