LA Department of Water’s finest please. Today we’re answering the age old question. Does it actually matter where you get your groceries? We’re making two nacho plates, one with ingredients from Walmart, one with ingredients from Dollar Tree. It’s the budget battle today. Times are tight. Inflation is on the rise. The uranium prices in Niger have skyrocketed, so the kitcheneers right now are at Dollar Tree and Walmart. Let’s see what they got. Well, well, well, we got all of our ingredients for the nachos from Walmart. Over here, we got all of our ingredients from Dollar Tree. Over here, we’re kind of doing like a Taco Bell homage. We got the liquidy nacho cheese, which is like one of my favorite things. We’re gonna be making a little spiced meat like a bolognese Mexicano, which I’m pretty excited about. Love me some spiced meat. Over at Walmart, our total receipt for all these groceries was $52, and at Dollar Tree, only $25. Full disclosure, I ain’t never been to a Dollar Tree. I grew up and still am a staunch 99 cent only person. That’s what we had on the west coast, but I know a ton of people love Dollar Tree and are using it for a lot of their groceries. The total dish price over here comes out to about $14. The total dish price over here, about $22. So you’re getting like a 46% markup over at Walmart, but we’ll see how the actual quality is. Some of the biggest differences that we found, Dollar Tree doesn’t have a lot of, like, fresh ingredients, right? It’s great for canned stuff, frozen stuff, a lot of like snacky type foods. But we did find these beef patties right here, which are really interesting. They’re only 20 cents per beef patty, which is really, really freaking affordable. It says MSG free on the box, and then when you go to the ingredients list, you find out the ingredients are beef, second ingredient, beef heart followed by water, textured soy protein, and disodium inosinate and guanylate, which I love AKA beef extract. So it’s funny, they go MSG free and then they got DSI and DSG, which are some of my favorite chemicals. I think those could taste very good. And then if you look at Walmart, we got a hundred percent pure beef burgers. That’s just straight beef in there. Again, I enjoy the taste of various extracts and chemicals, so we’ll see how that goes. Also, heart is like healthy, you know what I mean? I dig on heart. If we look at the guac, this is gonna be another big difference. So at Walmart, obviously they have with the superstore, like a really big fresh produce selection, lot of great prepackaged products. We got this very dark forest green home style guacamole over here, and then you go to Dollar Tree, you no longer get guacamole. You get guacamole style. This was the sequel to PSY’s Gangnam Style. It didn’t do as well. It only got 58 billion views as opposed to 900 billion views to the original, but excited to try that. We’re going liquid nacho cheese. That’s one of my favorite things to do. We got the Pace brand over Dollar Tree, bigger name brand than Ricos over at the Walmart. That’s gonna be interesting. We’re doing pre-made taco seasoning mix. You don’t got enough time. Throw some taco seasoning in there. The great value is actually less than half the price of the taco seasoning over at the Dollar Tree. Honestly, Walmart, you go there for like extracts and spices. They’re so cheap. It’s fantastic. Finally, we’re using flour tortillas. I’m ethically opposed to that. Nicole, she has to answer for it. She’s like, no, this is a thing. This is a thing people do. And I was like, no, why do I have the same voice ? This isn’t a thing that people do, you use corn tortillas. And she’s like, no, they use flour, I saw it on TikTok. I saw it on the TikTok. So, we’re doing that. We’re making our little TikTok flour tortilla nachos. These from Dollar Tree look like the best flower tortillas I’ve ever seen on the market, right? These look incredible. These look homemade. This is Tortillaria del Barrio. Really excited to try that. And then we got the great value flour tortillas, which let love a lot of stuff at Walmart. This is a product I personally would never buy. These are like the real thick cakey ones. Some people might call it Tex-Mex style. Probably got a little bit of sodium bicarbonate in there to give it some lift. That’s a pita pocket baby. That ain’t no tortilla. That’s a tortilla. What I’m saying is let’s get cooking. Beans. Huh? What are they good for? Well, I’ll tell you what they’re good for. They’re good for nachos. I am a big bean guy, specifically big, not even like refried bean guy, any sort of bean puree I’m really into. Again, we’re taking inspiration from Taco Bell, and if you notice their nachos el grande or nachos supreme sort of strategies, almost all of the ingredients on top are in liquid form. The beans are a liquid, the cheese is a liquid. The sour cream is a liquid, the red sauce is a liquid. And even Taco Bell’s beef is a liquid, maybe like a non-Newtonian fluid at best. And so we’re gonna make some mashed beans right here. We’re going pretty simple. Over here, we got Walmart. This is Walmart brand water, and then this, we just hooked a hose up to the main water line at the Dollar Tree to steal. No, I’m kidding. It’s Burbank’s finest. You ever go to a restaurant and they’re like trying to upsell you on bottled water and you’re like, LA Department of Water’s finest, please. Alright, so we’re taking the beans from Dollar Tree over here. When we went to Dollar Tree, we found that a lot of their shelves were indeed empty. You kind of never knew what you were gonna find there, but there were a lot of great things. We found this bag of black beans. They were very, very cheap. And honestly the people at Sporked put us on to Dollar Tree, ’cause like I said, I’d always gone to 99 cents only, but they were like, yo, there’s Dollar Trees in LA, you gotta go, check it out. And we found some really great stuff. I’m done cooking, that’s all I do. Putting ’em in water. You don’t actually have to soak beans, it’s a myth, you just boil ’em long enough. That takes care of the soaking. They just keep going. Some people say soaking beans prevents you from making boom boom in the downstairs. Is that a myth? Now we will be cutting our flour tortillas into smaller pieces, almost sort of chipping them off. And you know, if only there was a product that existed of, of sort of like a pre-chipped but also fried and crispy tortilla, maybe sold in like a, like a sack? No, like a bag, like a bag of chips. These are the Dollar Tree tortillas from Tortillaria del Barrio. They look really nice. I think these are gonna fry up pretty good. Cut it in half and then you can start working in triangles. I do want real big nacho chips here. That way these are uneven and that’s fine. And pop these in our oil. The oil we’re using here. Blend of soybean and extra virgin olive oils. This is actually born again extra virgin olive oil. Is that what they’re called? Born again virgins. Yeah, that’s what they’re called. Born again virgins. It does work that way. Cool, and then great value flour tortillas. Again, these are much bigger sort of cakier. You’re gonna get almost like a fluff factor to them, which I don’t know if I love that for nachos. But hey, we might learn something about ourselves today. We really are gonna have to work in batches here. I gotta go quick. I gotta go. I gotta go quick. Do that. Bingo bango. You could just stack ’em. And then do that, big old buckets. Let’s try a little, little raw flaccid chip. Yes, it’s pronounced flaccid. Super cakey, super sugary. Really kind of sticks to the teeth. Some people like that. Like these are the flour tortillas that I grew up eating. But now, oh they’re burnin’. Oh tortilla’s falling outta my mouth. Got ’em gross. Now fry these up. The original nachos were invented in, oh, I’m not gonna remember it. It was a border town in Mexico invented by a chef named Ignacio Ayala, and they were actually served on large tostadas, so the original nachos were much bigger. You go to Texas and still Texas style nachos are when you like build each individual nacho on a larger tortilla chip. And I kinda like doing a hybrid of that method where you get large tortilla chips but covered in slop of your choice. And again, all I want to eat are delicious slops. Fantastic. I’m gonna start pulling these, working in batches. I’m gonna do this about 80 to 90 times until we get enough to stir… All the salt then directly out of the fryer. That way the salt sticks to the oil, then the oil’s gonna sort of reabsorb in there, but it’s not gonna become greasy. Alright, chips are done. Let’s give these a try. I did not cut these very evenly and that’s fine. Liberal dusting of salt. Mmm. Yum. Okay, Dollar Tree. Dollar Tree tortillas definitely are better. I don’t know if they sell the Tortillaria del Barrio tortillas at every Dollar Tree, but that’s a really good flour tortilla. And some Walmart are perfectly fine, but they are a little bit thicker and cakier. This is shaping up to be a heck of a nacho battle. And now to make our bolognese Mexicana. Again, I really love just a nice soupy taco beef. You can just use seasoned ground beef, whatever, but we’re gonna really kind of make a halfway to a bolognese using our Ro-Tel tomatoes here. Both of them got name brand Ro-Tel. Ro-Tel has had a lion’s share of the fire roasted tomatoes with chilies market in the last 50 years. Shout out to them for making a good product. Gonna spray down some vegetable oil and we’re gonna get our beef sauteing in a pan here. Obviously you normally use loose ground beef to do it, but we wanted to go burger patty, beef burger patty, ’cause that was the only beef product they had at the old Dollar Tree. That spray is whoa. Dollar Tree spray. That is violent. Alright. We have our Walmart patties. Again, this is just pure ground beef. You go to backyard barbecue, someone doesn’t wanna make their own burger patties, you just pop that right in there. Yeah, toss a few, maybe like four in there. You’re making a nacho platter. You don’t wanna make it for friends, you know what I mean? You get a full pound of ground beef in there. And then we gotta talk about our dollar tree beef patties. So this is extra value. Beef patties meant to be quick cooked. It says not a cooked product. The color’s a little bit different, The color’s a little bit different. This tends to be a red, almost a pink because of the fat that it’s mixed with. This is a deep hearty brown, could be because of the beef heart in there. It could be the textured soy protein. But again, I’m not worried about the minutia like that. I’m worried about how it tastes, you know what I mean? A lot of burgers cut with soy protein and stuff like that. Nicole, you’ve heard of a slug, a slug burger? Of course. Depression era burger? Cut with cornmeal? Really delightful, right? Most sausages like you know, I’m thinking, British white pudding is cut with a lot of grains in there. Why not textured vegetable protein? We love some TVP in this house. We’re gonna let that sizzle away. We’re gonna break it up with our mythical kitchen smatula. Like spatula, but with our logo, which is the spork, which is the tattoo that I have. Alright, cool. We’re gonna break this up. We’re gonna add our taco seasoning to it. Once it gets a little bit browned, check back in a second. We’re just gonna double brown this up. Well, we’re gonna brown the tan. We’re gonna turn the tan to a darker tan. We’re gonna turn this red to a brown. I will say the crumble on the hundred percent beef from Walmart is more satisfying than what’s going on in this pan. But if you imagine this kind of as like a veggie burger with meat, it’s not bad. We see some key differences in the meats here. So the Walmart beef, which again, the only ingredients is beef. This looks like beef. Whereas the Dollar Tree beef, the ingredients are beef, heart disodium guanylate, disodium inosolate, water salt, textured vegetable protein, soy protein. It looks more like a crumbled breakfast sausage. It almost looks like beyond meat, but it smells really good. It tastes really good. Like it, I don’t know how to say this. It tastes like a French peasant dish, you know? If they were like, oh, in Provence we used to mix like the ground pork organs with various grains and legumes to create a sausage base for Cassole. Wait, this is Dollar Tree, right? Yeah, Dollar Tree one’s a little clumpy. We’re gonna add, oh, I love that color. That’s got anatto seed or paprika extract in there. Which one? I don’t know how to read. I’m gonna add some of the great value, which ooh, yeah, God that smells good. We’ll taste and adjust for it. We’re gonna mix that up. Anytime you’re adding spices to a pan, one that has animal fat in it especially, let it cook in the animal fat a little bit. That can of really blooms them. Make some nice and roasty toasty. Cook that up. Both of these have, so this one has emitted less water than that probably because you have various binders, starches, plant-based proteins in there, but again, it’s just really good. It reminds me a little, oh dude, no, no, no, I know exactly what this is and it’s a product I love. This is scrapple. Straight up. This tastes like scrapple. That’s what scrapple is like a, you know, eastern central Pennsylvanian, very like Amish, central European dish where they grind the organ meats with various starches and binders and then like fry crispy in a pan. These are scrapple patties, dude, and that rules. Gonna dump our tomatoes in. Boom boom. Fantastic. We’re gonna continue to smash down those tomatoes. It’s gonna release a lot of liquid. It’s gonna turn into a nice sauce. We’re gonna, hold on. I wanna taste these right now. Why does one can of tomatoes look different? Whatever. Hold on, hold on. I gotta taste it on camera. I’m really curious about this. I like these episodes. It’s like Josh does little science. I’m so stoked for these scrapple nachos. I never wanna eat pure meat again. Alright we’re gonna F these off and then we’re gonna doctor up some nacho cheese. So boom, boom, multitask ADHD brain. It’s all I know how to do. We’re gonna add Pace nacho cheese. So one great thing about 99 cent stores specifically is that is an interesting texture. This is like you ever see flubber? One great thing about 99 cent stores, you get a lot of name brands that came out with a product that maybe didn’t sell at other major grocery stores. For instance, I grew up on a lot of 99 cent store instant ramen and they had awesome flavors that nobody wanted except like nine year me was stoked to have like creamy shrimp alfredo cup of noodles. I don’t know, it really rolls. So like Pace nacho cheese. Never seen that in a major market grocery store, but Dollar Tree baby, they got it. And then this Ricos brand. Bleh. There you go. Fantastic. Also, cans of these were about twice as expensive per volume. Cans of those is about three bucks per cans is a $1.25 per cans of just smaller cans. Anytime you’re cooking with pre-made ingredients, taste them. Interesting. The Pace one is actually really well spiced. The Ricos nacho cheese from Walmart over here tastes a lot more of cheddar, which I don’t necessarily know if I need that in my nacho cheese, you know? I kinda want it to taste like nacho cheese. Gonna add a little bit of milk to thin it out, and we’re gonna add some spices to it that we got from each store. Again, you want your nachos kinda spicy. You doctor ’em up a little bit. So we got garlic powder going in. We got a little smoked paprika. We’re just do a little pinch of pepper right there. That’s good news. Garlic powder. Paprika. Get the pinch of pepper. Hey, Josh? What’s up? Would you like chili powder? Chili powder. Well paprika is just European chili powder. All right, let’s make some nachos. Supposed to add some jalapeno juices? Oh, okay. Nicole said add jalapeno juice. Ah. What is hot? Boom. What are these called? Slice. Ah. Fantastic. Little touch of jalapeno juice. Hey, welcome back to Supernormal Cooking Show, where I’m your host Supernormal Josh. We’re gonna go ahead and start layering our nachos. We’ve got all of our Dollar Tree tortilla chips here. We’re gonna do a little layer action. Do I have less tortilla chips there? Ah, screw it. Okay, so we’re gonna lay down one base layer. This is how I enjoy making my personal nachos. You’ve heard of your own personal Jesus, well. So we’re gonna take, we like half mashed our beans. I like my beans sort of half mashed and we’re just gonna like thwap some of them onto our nachos here. Somewhere in between like a refried, it kind of looks like an olive tamponade. Just like disregard that please. The beans from Walmart look a little bit silkier, look a little bit more luscious. I love that. Same ingredient, same amount of water, same amount of salt, same amount of time, same amount of emotional energy invested. Sprinkle of meat very scientific-like. You do not want to end up with bare nachos. That is one thing that I can guarantee you is that I will mansplain facts about wheat production in Northern Sonora, and you will never have a bare nacho with me. So it was really the Spaniards in about… Man. Okay, that is, I will say the nacho cheese at Dollar Tree. the Pace nacho cheese, you can see this like little wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, in there means there’s a lot of starch added to it. You can see like a meniscus forming, which like you know, you typically don’t want and it makes it droop real weird, I’ll tell you that. Cannot find a consistent flow, but whatever. It’s nachos, it gets sloppy, deal with that. Now if we look at the nacho cheese from ol’ Walmart, much better pour and flow probably means more cheese, less starch. Let’s see how it actually tastes. Fantastic. We’ll get a couple of jalapenos in there. Oh my God, this is, yo this is slopege. I am into it. Nope, I almost put it on the other one. Okay. Remember what you’re doing. There’s no wrong way to do it. It’s all going the same place. All right, now we’re gonna go another layer. If you’ll have noticed, we did not add the guacamole style dip nor the guacamole yet. That is because you only want to layer your hot ingredients on the bottom or the jalapenos, which as we know, are cold. Guacamole style dip. This is probably a lot. Yeah. Water, tomato puree, way to tick. Tomatoes are typically a red color, right? Listen, it’s mostly emulsified like oil and water and salt and citric acid, and it does taste really good. It ain’t pure guac. That’s fine. I’m not a food purist. I don’t know if anybody noticed that. And then we have home style guacamole. The thing when you’re using actual guac in these like very pre-made applications is you need to really overload it with salt and citric acid because both are preservatives. Yeah. Honestly, like, I would prefer this to pre-made guac despite the fact that this is real avocado, whatever that means. To me, I don’t love super limey guac, and that’s what all of these pre-made guacs end up being. It’s like I’m in with this lovely light green tomato paste. Damn, damn, damn. We got, whoa. If the Dollar Tree one doesn’t win. I’m gonna be so pissed because I love all the ingredients that are on there. Here we got our giant Dollar Tree nacho platter. It costs $14.95. We got a little bit of leftovers and toss some pasta in there, it’d be fine. Then here we got our Walmart nacho platter, costs $22.40. I know who I got my money’s on, but let’s see what our special guest judge has to say. It is rapper Flo Rida. Jordan, before you, you have two of Josh’s big-ass, extra wet, extra sloppy nacho platters. One made with ingredients from Dollar Tree. One made with ingredients from Walmart. The ingredients are freshly fried flour tortillas, guacamole, jalapenos, nacho cheese from a can that has been doctored up with similar ingredients, very wet beef, calling it bolognese Mexicano, and half mashed black beans. Okay, so my initial question is did you use ingredients you found at Dollar Tree or are they Dollar Tree brand? All ingredients that we found at Dollar Tree, not all were Dollar Tree brand, but they were also almost all brands that we’ve never seen before. Okay. And then Walmart is probably Great Value brand. A majority is Great Value, but some were not. Great. I’m gonna start with the pickled jalapenos first. I’m gonna kind of dissect these before I eat the whole thing. Can I join you? Mhm, please. Thanks. I’m hungry. Nice. Good crunch, not too soft. Much saltier on these pickled jalapenos. Makes me think, maybe a little cheaper, but I don’t know. Okay, next I gotta taste the guac. Hold on. You have spoons that were meant for the hot. Oh, then we have hot sauces here if you’d like. It’s already kinda spicy. This guac is paste, but in a way that I like. Lemme try this one though. This looks like actual guac, but I think it’s gonna taste worse. You good over there? Okay, great. Yeah. You can tell this is more like actually made with avocado instead of like avocado by-product. But I don’t know if it tastes as good. You okay? This beef is more flavorful. Wow. Okay. Lemme do one bite of everything and then I’m gonna guess. I got a jalapeno stem. Okay. That’s horrible. I’m so sorry. Are you gonna be okay? Yeah, it’s okay. I still ate it. It was like there was wood in my mouth for a second, and I was like I gotta spit it out, but that’d be gross. And people, you know, think of me in certain image. Are you having a rough day? Always. Do you have good days? Yeah. Oh. What are you gonna do? I think I know. I’m gonna take one last bite. Can I ask what you thought about the beefs? Yeah. This beef is so much more flavorful than this beef. From what I tasted. The Taco seasonings were from their respective like, you know, places too. We used to store bought taco seasoning, ’cause like that stuff, it is pretty good, you know? I mean, it’s what you’d mix together. Correct. Right? Correct. With a little bit of starch to absorb the fat. Okay. Okay, okay. Okay. Overall though, you’re enjoying the hell outta these, right? I mean, yeah. Yeah, same. This is awesome. I love soaking wet food, so this is perfect. And I mean the tortilla chips, they’re beautifully fried. I’m not a believer in the flour, and then we did it in like, listen, it’s, it’s a different experience. It just tastes good. I love it. It feels like Mexican restaurant meets state fair in kind of a beautiful way. Okay. I think these are Walmart. I think these are Dollar Tree. But let me ask you Jordan, now which ones do you prefer? You know, honestly, probably these, they’re a little saltier. The meat had a little more flavor but it’s very close. Like they taste really similar and they’re both delicious. Jordan, you are. Okay. No one else is doing it. That’s cool. Yeah, you’re right. No, you’re right. These are Dollar Tree. I’m so glad you said that about, you’re like, this is paste and you’re right. The first two ingredients are water and inexplicably tomato paste. Incredible. Sure. Why not? But like you said, store-bought guacamole, it’s never good ’cause you have to put so much acid and so much salt in there to preserve it. It might as well be paste. Also, if you’ve ever gone to a restaurant and gotten avocado crema, that’s also a guacamole style dip in essence. So this is, this is good. It’s delicious. This is practically authentic is what you’re saying. That’s what I’m saying. Also, there’s a lot of beef heart that was mixed in with the burger patties, with textured vegetable protein. It gave it flavor. I think that’s great. I think both are delicious and I love them. Yeah, I mean honestly, go out to Dollar Tree. Also check out Jordan’s articles about Dollar Tree. They pop off all the time. We’re really, we’re really proud of you. Oh my gosh, thank you. You do good work. Thank you. I’m proud of you. No problem. For what specifically? Just bringin’ such a good energy to set. I feel like a lot of times I get here and before we start shooting, you seem like deeply mentally and physically unwell. And then we start shooting and I feel like you really turn it on. I feel like you bring it, you make me feel safe on set. And I just like being around you. It’s like when the humans leave the room in Toy Story, they suddenly pop to life, but then, Absolutely, yeah, but much, much sour. Cameras turn off. I just go mmm. It’s really scary. But I love how you turn it on. Hey, you know we all do things we gotta do to get by. Get by with Walmart and Dollar Tree today. Support your local giant conglomerates. We’ll see you next time. He’s breaking down. It’s okay. We’re still on camera. Come on. Let’s go home. I need to go home. I wanna go home. Hey you! Cook up your own feast wearing in the Mythical Kitchen apron. Available now at mythical.com.