Yep, those are limes. All right. Hey, welcome to Mythical Kitchen. Today, we are answering the age-old question, does it actually matter where you buy your groceries? We’ll be making two identical plates of chicken fajitas? There’s no teleprompter. I don’t know why I did that. We’re making two identical plates of chicken fajitas using the exact same proportion. On one hand, we got Walmart. On the other hand, we got Whole Foods, AKA whole paycheck. Never heard that one before. Just like last episode, I will keep saying it, I swear to God, until you laugh. And we’re gonna see which one is better in a blind taste test. We’re trying to tell you where you can actually save money on your grocery budget and where it might be okay to splurge. Does that sound good? I wanna hear an enthusiastic, hell yeah! Hell yeah! I meant the audience, not you. Fajitas, what are they? How do they work? Is it like magnets where nobody knows, or the moon where nobody also knows? Etymologically speaking, fajita means little belts and comes from a Northern Mexican slang word that refers to the arrachera, or skirt steak, cut because it’s a long cut. Nobody cares about this, but I care about it, dang it! So anything not made with skirt steak is technically not a fajita, but I grew up making chicken fajitas at home, and it’s a great way to stretch your meat out ’cause you’re adding the onions, you’re adding the bell peppers, you’re getting fun little nutrition in there. So, on the left over here, we got all of our ingredients from Walmart. On the right, we got all our ingredients from Whole Foods. We spent a total of $66 at Whole Foods to buy all this stuff. A lot of that is going into spices. Spices at Whole Foods are super, super expensive, especially compared to Walmart over here where we spent a total of $39. Each of these spices right here, again, you’re adding a bunch of spices to fajitas. You could use a pre-packaged spice mix, but we ain’t wanna do that ’cause it’s so much better to make your own. But each spice here was only $1.18. Here, they’re ranging from, like, $2.79 to five bucks, which is a lot. Curious to see how that comes through in the meat. Other notable price differences, Whole Foods got the organic chicken. Look, I’m all for chickens havin’ room to run around and play but, you know, I don’t know. I’ve lived in studio apartments growin’ up so I didn’t really have that much room to run around and play. So at some point, I’m like, “Hey chicken, we gotta see each other eye to eye on this one.” But Whole Foods got the Mary’s Organic Chicken. That is generally very good. Got Foster Farms over here on the Walmart side. You can just see, listen, as a person in the amateur body building community, this is what I want my muscles to look like. I want them to be big, swollen Foster Farms chicken tiddies over here. But this chicken is double the price over at Whole Foods. So that’s gonna be a big drop there. And then avocados, of course, you go to Whole Foods, you’re paying about $2.20 per avocado. Walmart, they’re only $1. The produce, it looks pretty good over at Walmart. Walmart has, literally, become one of the biggest national retailers of fresh produce. And like, say what you want about big corporations and all that. It is actually giving people a lot of fresh food to choose from. I’m curious to see how this shakes out. Right now though, those tortillas. You got the Whole Foods tortillas lookin’ real artisanal, and then you got the Walmart tortillas, they’re lookin’ kinda pale and sad. We’re gonna toast ’em up. We’re gonna see how this here shakes out. Let us fajita! Ah, you know, sometimes you can’t think of somethin’ to say to open it, so you just yell, let us fajita. We’re gonna start choppin’ up some vegetables right here. We have the red onion and the green bell pepper already in the bowl, chicken kinda sliced up. We got all our spices here. We got cumin, we got oregano, we got garlic powder, we got salt, we got paprika, we got black pepper, we got chili powder. Let’s get to it. Oh, if you’re wondering why there’s another bowl of onion, this is weird. You would assume all the vegetables at Walmart are giant monstrously grown GMOed-out vegetables, but nah, actually, the Whole Foods onion was just massive. So we weighed exactly four ounces of onion out in each. And I just wanted show you, like, this is the leftover onion from Whole Foods. I don’t know what they’re doin’ there. I don’t know if they’re givin’ the echinacea powder or whatever, and that’s makin’ ’em all monstrous. Or what are other Whole Foods-ass supplements? Ashwaganda. Gonna start choppin’ up some red bell pepper. Again, we are weighing everything out. We’re using a pound of chicken to come up with about four servings. I have trouble portioning out foods, because I eat two pounds of animal flesh a day. All right, so we removed the stem from the bell pepper. I’m just gonna try and get some of those ribs out. There’s probably a better prep way to do this, but I don’t know, man. I don’t wanna use… Normally, I’d use a paring knife. I don’t wanna get another knife. So I’m just gonna like- Josh! What? You’re putting it in the bowl with the… Oh shoot, dude! I do that all the time. This is an overgrown bell pepper. This is a bell pepper that grew up drinkin’ the hormone milk, you know, that all the people from Europe are like, “Oh, American food is so bad for you. All the milk has hormones.” It’s like, check the Olympic medal count. That’s how we win. Just gonna go half a bell pepper each. We’re gonna save that for a nice little snack. You can make stuffed bell peppers. Kids love that. Two of the Rachael Ray-ass things. Oh my God, you know who loves bell peppers? My dog. My dog is so funny. He’ll bring in, he’ll go outside, and he’ll just bring in a frozen piece of . All right, bell pepper gettin’ cut. And boom, close enough. Again, it’s fajitas. It’s a very forgiving food. You just kinda chuck it all in a pan, season it up. Why am I? Put it in the big-ass bowl. Put it in a big-ass bowl. Now, that’s for a reason. That’s for a reason. Why is this onion so gigantic and purple? They taste the same. We’re gonna slice up the chicken. One time my friend Chad tried to break the world record for fastest time to eat an onion. And it was something like three minutes and eight seconds, and Chad’s, like, three quarters of the way through this onion after a minute 18, right? We’re like, he’s gonna shatter this world record, and then the pain hit. ‘Cause the pain will get you about three quarters of the way in, and then Chad was on the ground. Chad couldn’t move. But Chad, I want you to know that you tried your damnedest, and we’re still very proud of you. Chicken breast is actually one of those meats that if you don’t get a good quality one, can kind of suck. So if you see these striations right here, a lot of times this is just uneven fat distribution because if it’s a non-organic chicken, it tends to be raised quickly, which means they’re trying to overgrow the muscles as fast as possible. And there’s actually this really weird disease going around chickens. They’re calling it, like, woody tissue syndrome. You ever have a chicken breast that you bite into, and it kind of snaps really weirdly? And you’re like, what’s that texture? Yeah, good news is, literally, nobody knows, and it’s happening to somewhere between, like, 10 and 20% of chickens. And so, I found if I’m buying big ole commodity chicken breasts like this, sometimes you get one of those weird woody chicken breasts, and the texture is unsettling and terrible. But the good news is, you can’t tell by how it looks, and you never know when it’s gonna happen. Chicken’s sliced. So we got exactly one pound of chicken in each. Should yield roughly four portions for, like, normal people and, like, a half a portion for myself. Now we’re gonna season this up. Normally, I would like to season these and let them sit for a while. ‘Cause I think chicken breast, especially, does really well with marinades, with letting the salt actually sit in there, or a dry brine if you will. But ain’t nobody got time for that, so we’re gonna add our salt. We’re gonna add our garlic powder. The difference between the garlic powders is hefty. The Walmart garlic powder lookin’ all powder no garlic. No, this is Whole Foods. This is Whole Foods! The Whole Foods lookin’ all powder. Walmart. I’m gonna drive myself insane doing this. I’m gonna season both at the same time. All right, garlic goin’ in. That’s salt. We’re using an iodized salt ’cause that’s all we could find at Walmart. And then we got kosher salt goin’ in there. This looks real red. That looks unnaturally red. We’ll figure that out. I’m so sorry. I ate bell pepper on the side, and that gives me the burps. The pepper at Whole Foods, I got a finer ground at Whole Foods, coarser ground at Walmart. Edge, Walmart. Oregano. I once bought a bag of this stuff for 10 bucks at a park. And when I told ’em I was makin’ meatballs, they got real confused. So we got gloves. We can piss those right off. And then we’re just gonna go in, and we’re gonna mash all the spices and salt in with our vegetables and our chicken. Again, I’m gonna fry all this up, keepin’ it in the same bowl, one pan, one team, one dream. Thank you so much for ordering the tableside guacamole presentation. As a failed Broadway actor, this is the only time I get to actually perform for you. And so I’m just so glad you have come to El Toro Bar and Grill. We’re going pretty simple. The way that I make guac at home, again, guacamole is somethin’ where the recipe varies, literally, everywhere. Just don’t put peas in it, or everyone will hate you. That was, no, I can do better. I can do… Damn, dude! The avocados from Whole Foods are feelin’ a little under ripe, which, you know, again, that’s part of it. That’s part of it ’cause people at Whole Foods are probably buying more avocados than people at Walmart. Can we safely say that, or is that a harmful stereotype? But either way, that might be that all the avocados, all the good ones, are gettin’ taken, whereas Walmart got plentiful whole and ripe avocados. So, we’re droppin’ that in there. I fudged this up. Okay, get back in that bowl, you silly goose. We’re gonna drop in some red onion and a lot of jalapeno. I like a good chunky guac with some jalapeno in there. Eh, screw it, get it all in there. Then we’re gonna get some lime. I’m gonna go juice of about half a lime. I was told by by the college Spanish professor whose class I failed that prevented me from graduating college, and I do not begrudge her at all about that. But she said that the way her grandma made guacamole was just enough lime juice to make the avocado not turn brown but not enough to actually make it sour. And that kinda reframed the way that I thought about adding lime to guac. ‘Cause I don’t really love all the acid in it. Sometimes it can be an acid bomb. Drop a little pinch of salt in there. Salt and avocado love each other. Okay, we’ll toss that later, toss that later. This is a nice big ole honkin’ ripe, buttery Walmart avocado right here. Hot damn. I wanna go buy one of them NASCAR T-shirts from Walmart. For real though, this Walmart avocado is lookin’ really nice right here. Nice and buttery. I like to bash it up with a spoon before I scoop it all out. There you go. Actually, sometimes what I do is I take a knife, and I’ll show you. So I take a knife, and this is a big-ass knife, but I’ll take it like this, and this is dangerous, don’t do that. But I’ll cross hatch it, and then, no, this isn’t the worst part. What I then do, now I’ll do this, is I take the point of the blade, and I just do this. ‘Cause you’re, like, half mashing it in the skin. But that’s, you know, and then just do this, and you go. And then you got nice mashed avocado already, but I don’t advocate for that as policy. Yep, those are limes. All right. That is the thing I actually do though, is I taste all my citrus before I cook with it, similar with chilies, ’cause you can get some limes that are sweeter than others. Lemons, I feel like, vary even more. Yeah, this is good. We’ll leave half a lime. I’m just littering. This is hard to do. I didn’t add any of the stuff. I didn’t put any cilantro in. God, I’m so dumb. I typically am a big cilantro guy. I like to make my guacamole, like, dark forest green, the color of the Eagles. Shout out Jason Kelce, friend of the show. Best friend in the world. Jason, come back and hang out, man. Why haven’t you been returning my calls? Jason, I text you every night before I go to sleep. Where are you? We’re adding, God damn it. We’re adding limes. Let me take that one more time. Don’t you dare put that in the edit though, ’cause I’ll look foolish. And our audience, they know me as somebody who does not make mistakes. So we’re just gonna go all the way back to me doing that, and it’s gonna look super natural. So we’re adding lime zest to sour cream right here. Ugh, let’s just… Ugh, so fragrant! There it is. Stir it up. You know, it looks a little. Well, you know, could you skip this step? No! No, dinner’s ruined if you don’t put lime zest in the sour cream! Ah, guacamole’s smelling incredible. I’m gonna do the same to this one. Hey, Meggie. Are you gonna add those? Oh, I forgot to add all this stuff to this. Did anybody notice that? Literally, all the stuff that’s supposed to go. Okay, hit one more time. We’re gonna go back. Here, I’m gonna pick out each individual, no, we’ll pick it up from the onions. Okay, natural. These onions smell so lovely. I’m gonna do the same to this one. All right, so we got, the chicken’s been marinating. We’ve got Walmart? Yeah, Walmart, Whole foods. We’re gonna add a little bit of jarlic to it. This is just ’cause I wanted to test the jarlics against each other. A lot of people, they crap on jarred garlic all the time. I use it in my own home, ’cause I could just dump it into anything I want. Pans are gettin’ hot. We’ll figure that out. But jarred garlic, it is actually less potent than fresh garlic because it’s typically heat treated. This Whole Foods one smells mighty fresh though. I wanna huff the Walmart one. When I had Covid and lost my scent, this is how I’d wake up every morning. I’d go huff the jarlic. The Whole Foods one does smell better than the Walmart one. That might’ve been treated with less heat. You can actually see there’s less color on it. The jarlic tends to get brown because of the heat. It just makes it last longer. But yeah, it’s fine. Well… Damn it, damn it! Damn it, this is supposed to be for cooking. I don’t care, we’re cookin’ this side now. We’re gonna add a little bit of vegetable oil. About two tablespoons in there. You need more fat when you’re cooking with chicken breasts, ’cause you’re not gonna get any of that fat rendered out. Bingo bango. And now we’re just gonna toss. I don’t know what that was. I’m sorry, everybody. We’re just gonna toss some of this in here. Get it goin’, there we go. That’s nice. I didn’t toss the jarlic. That’s okay. Again, listen, they’re fajitas. It’s a forgiving food. It’s gonna be a nice dinner, and we’re gonna eat together as a happy family. It’s like it used to be. Jordan. Josh. Hi. Hi. How are you doing? I’m okay, how are you? I really like your sweater. Thank you! It’s my first time wearing it. Nice, well, it looks worn. Not, like, tattered. It looks like, like, you look natural. Jordan, before you, we have two plates of chicken fajitas, one made with Walmart ingredients, the other made with Whole Foods ingredients. Okay. Your job is to taste test each. Tell me which one is better, and then guess which one came from Whole Foods and Walmart. It’s like “The Price Is Right” except I don’t tell you to neuter your dogs. All right, I’m- Neuter your dogs! Sure. I’m nervous, but excited. We have really good luck with Walmart products at Sporked. We love Great Value. What if I told you it’s not luck, and they make a lot of good, cheap stuff? Okay. Yeah, I guess luck’s the wrong word. I didn’t really have anything to do with it, and neither, I don’t know. They just make a good product. I don’t know. Are you happy? Are any of us happy? I don’t know. What if you don’t know what happiness actually looks like? That’s fair So if you have feelings inside, you know, I go home every day, and I’m pretty glad to be sittin’ on the couch, but. Yeah, that’s happy, right? Contentment, you know? Don’t you have a beautiful fiancee? She is beautiful, but again, it’s, like, can happiness come from external sources, or does it need to be right inside there? Interesting. No, happiness can definitely come from external sources. Yeah, I like being on boats. Okay. Do you like fajitas? I love fajitas. I love the spectacle of it, and I love the taste of it. I wish we had more spectacle. Does anybody have any sparklers? Yeah, can someone set one of these plates on fire? No, I know. Fajitas take a long time to assemble. Hey, should we do, like, the zoom through thing in the edit? Sure. But, like, put some cool music on it? Sure. Ooh, like royalty-free dubstep. Sing, come on. I don’t wanna sing, Jordan. I’m not gonna eat until you sing. Don’t make me sing. Sing, come on. It’s like a . I wanna go home. Do you see any clues from these right now as, like, which one might be the more expensive, which one might be the cheaper? I think this is Whole Foods. Looking at these tortillas, they look a little more artisanal is my guess. Why did you put air quotes on it? ‘Cause they’re not, they’re Whole Foods. Yeah, it’s not, yeah. You know, it’s not really… It’s delicious so far. Really moist chicken. Lot of good flavor. I wanna taste the guac on its own. You made the guac with ingredients, it’s not store bought guac, right? Correct, yeah. So all this is made with fresh ingredients. The bell pepper, the onion, chicken breast was all purchased separately. The spices from each store are in these. Okay. Yeah, the tortillas, though, are indeed store bought. Okay. Hold on. Jordan, what did you get from the smell of that tortilla? I don’t know. You never know what’s gonna signal you. I smell all my food, and it creeps Julia out. I smell my food too. I also do this weird thing where, my girlfriend pointed out to me, every day before I put my deodorant on, I smell it. Yeah, same. Why do I do that? Because every single day you drop a spoon, it falls to the ground, but what happens the day when it floats to the sky? Give me the royalty-free dubstep again. This guac is much better than this guac. The avocados, these have a little bit of a stringiness to them. They taste not as ripe. This is, like, perfect. Interesting. I also think because this tortilla is bigger, it’s like Walmart. It’s Great Value being like, “We’ll give you a bigger tortilla. Why not?” This is like Whole Foods. They’re, you know. Stingy. Yeah, they’re withholding. They’re like, “No.” Withholding, suspicious. Bezos, Jeffrey Bezos. Wow! You sound like you’re having fun. This is the hardest thing I’ve maybe done since I started working here. They taste almost exactly the same. They’re both incredibly delicious. The biggest thing I’ve noticed is that this guac is so much better. I’m gonna say this is Walmart, and this is Whole Foods, I think. Which one did you prefer? This one, because the guac is so much better. That makes sense. You are correct. The one on the left is from Walmart. The one on the right is from Whole Foods. We paid $5.31 per portion of Walmart and $7.18 on Whole Foods, which, when we did this with spaghetti, I know we did 99 Cents Store, but there was a more drastic difference. But I mean, that’s still what, a shh, 28% difference? Somebody do the math. Can somebody do the math? Did you shush me when I wasn’t starting to talk? Shh. The tortillas are interesting. This is Romero’s brand. Okay. Which they make 14 inch tortillas, which are like the Dunkin’ 56 ounce coffees of the tortilla world. I love that. The chicken is really interesting. So this is Mary’s Organic fancy, and this is Foster Farms, which are, literally, double the size per breast. And you can, literally, see the muscle striations in this chicken meat. Okay. Because it’s grown so fast that they’re like, you know, their boobaloobs just expand so fast that the muscle tissue actually gets almost shredded and fall aparty inside the bird. Kind of a nightmare of science, but it tastes really good. Yeah. That makes me so sad, but it does taste good. Both taste good, you know? Both taste delicious. I’m gonna eat this, and then I’m gonna eat that. Jordan, thank you so much for being our expert food taster. Thanks for having me. Go to sporked.com, check out Jordan’s work, follow her on social media and all that good stuff. I hope y’all learned somethin’ today. Man, Walmart strikes and wins. They just, they got good products over there, good produce, bangin’ guacamole. Their tortillas, not nearly as artisanal, but hey, they’re still great. See y’all next time. Hey you, cook up your own feast while wearing the Mythical Kitchen apron, available now at mythical.com.