Today we’re putting two grocery stores to the test. It’s Dollar General vs. Dollar Tree. Today we’re attempting to answer the question, does it actually, is that thing new? Crazy, that was freaking me out there. Feels like it’s in the shot. There’s two of them now. Do you need me to raise it? No, it’s fine, but is there another, is there another person? Are you replacing me? Where is he? Where is he? Today we’re attempting to answer the question, does it actually matter where you get your groceries? Because listen, times out here, they are tight. Taco Bell’s Cheesy 5 Layer Burrito costs 3.89 now and when it came out It was only 69 cents. You ever seen that meme? On Twitter, it’s incredibly misleading, but the point is, do you actually have to pay more money for groceries, and will it taste better in your food? Because today, we are taking two different dishes, one made with ingredients from Dollar Tree, one made with ingredients from Dollar General. That’s right, it’s nature versus military power in the Dollar Store game. We’re gonna have a judge taste test the two dishes blind and see which actually tastes better and which store you should actually be spending your money at. The Kitcheneers went to Dollar Tree and Dollar General. Let’s see what those wacky kids got. Sorry, I don’t know where that came from. This is a very different episode today because before we’ve done like Dollar Tree versus Whole Foods, we had Dollar Tree versus Erewhon, the one where Hailey Bieber’s wife or sister or both, I can’t remember, has a $20 smoothie. We have the two biggest dollar stores in America competing against each other We have Dollar Tree over here, which we visited a lot. We have Dollar General over here. Now, there are hardly any Dollars General, it’s like attorneys general in, LA, but we did find one, but these are the two biggest in America. There’s like 16,000 locations with Dollar Tree combined with Family Dollar and then about 19,000 locations of Dollar General and because of economic recession and all that more people are cooking from dollar stores than ever before. I’m, really curious to see how this stacks up. Now, we spent $37 total at Dollar General, but as you see some of the quantities are bigger, we spent around $21 over at the Dollar Tree, when you average it out on a per dish price, we’re getting about $8.20 from Dollar General, $6.50 over here at the Dollar Tree. We’ve talked about this before. Dollar Tree doesn’t have the economies of scale to like really handle a lot of fresh produce or a lot of fridge space. More milk. It sits on the shelf. How does it work? Unclear, but that’s totally fine. We’re making tuna noodle casserole. Tuna noodle casserole. I grew up on it. I still absolutely love it Fish and cheese go really well together. You see that in many dishes the world over and then we’re gonna try and add some vegetables to it. We got some peas. We got some broccoli, some differences in the peas. You got the Birds Eye brand frozen vegetables over at Dollar General. They don’t have those over at Dollar Tree. Birds Eye is actually like, I think they basically invented the category of frozen food, like, well over a hundred years ago. So, this is a brand that I really trust. I think those frozen peas are really going to work better than the canned peas over here, but we got the name brand Velveeter. This is a brand I trust, man. I like it. So, we’re gonna have that cheese in there. Tuna. Our main protein coming here in the tuna noodle casserole. Tuna noodle, as we all know, is the Finnish pop comedy duo from their famous song “Trenel Tuus”. You know, “Trenel Tuus”, everybody, come on! Alright. So we got, tuna over here from Dollar General. Costs $2.35. This is a Dolores brand. This is chunk light yellowfin. Where have we got the pure solid albacore over here? A lot of people prioritize the solid albacore, but this only costs $1.25 This costs $2.35. You may also see one other difference. Funyuns! We was looking for crispy fried onions. This is actually where the whole battle is gonna come down to, because Dollar Tree only got Funyuns, and Funyuns are delicious. Dollar General, French’s crispy fried onions, which are very good. Problem with these, they were expired for over a year, sitting on the shelf just being sold, which is totally fine. These are fried, dried onions that are vacu-sealed. They don’t actually expire. This is a best by date. This is something for French’s to try and move more product, get people to buy more onions. Pasta for pasta. These are going to be about the same. We only got margarine over here. The Dollar Tree, we got real butter over here at the Dollar General. The shaky Parmesan cheese. Oh, my good old friend. My good old friend. The Dollar Tree powdered Parmesan that tastes like buttermilk just farted in your mouth. We’ll see how that goes. We got the cheaper minced garlic over at Dollar Tree. It’s about to be a dog fight today, but here’s the thing, we all win. Guys, we’re going to be eating tuna noodle casserole for a long time in this kitchen. And you’re welcome. Before we get to cooking these tuna noodle casseroodles, I want to acknowledge the fact that we wrote a cookbook, and that’s really cool, and y’all have cooked a bunch of things from it, and it’s been really awesome to see, all the stuff you guys have cooked, and all the feedback from it. And, orange chicken parmesan has been an early winner and honestly some of the versions you guys have made look even better than what we made in the book and a lot of people are making fun little substitutions to things. I’ve seen people make the PB& J chicken sandwich with every kind of jelly under the sun. The chunky strawberry, honestly, a revelation, look fantastic, but we’re really proud of this cookbook We got a bunch of incredible recipes in there. 100 to be exact, and so go check out the cookbook if you haven’t read it yet Do I throw it? Like, how hard do I throw it? But like hard under? Like what if I spin it? What if I, like Wilt Chamberlain shooting a free throw. Great catch. We are making some garlicky breadcrumbs. We got some white bread over here from the Dollar Tree. I can always tell it’s Dollar Tree because their parmesan, it’s like beautiful white powdered sand from a Waikiki beach. So, we’re gonna take the breadcrumbs. We’re gonna dump it in there. Funyuns. Funyuns. This is just gonna add some of that lovely, delicious fat from the oil that it’s fried in, with all that toasted corn flavor and that little bit of onion powder snap in there. The jarlic. The jarlic here is really interesting. Old jarlic is heat treated, which is why a lot of people say it doesn’t taste as good as fresh. This is more heat treated because it is browner garlic. You can literally smell the garlic from Dollar General. It has a lot more freshness to it than the jarlic from Dollar Tree, so you’re gonna get some more flavor there. But again, we’re adding so many different ingredients in this, and I can’t stress this enough, it really is gonna be tuna slop. Like, tuna slop’s exciting for me. I love me some tuna slop. We’re going to add all of this Parmesan cheese, which that is a vastly different texture than this over here from the Dollar General. This as we talked about before, it’s a lot of like buttermilk powder. There’s a little bit of Parmesan cut in there, but you’re not getting all that flavor. Speaking of brown, what the hell happened here, man? Like there’s, I looked at the ingredients list on this. The only ingredients are really Parmesan and Romano cheese. There’s no caramel coloring in there. And I don’t know why you would want caramel coloring in there, but my theory is that they’ve taken the brown parmesan rinds and ground them up. That’s what I think’s going on. I want to taste this. It’s like graham cracker crumbs. Yeah, no, straight up. I believe that’s what it is. Who knows, man? Let’s see. Parsley, green flakes. Green flakes, dignify your food. That’s where the money is made. We’re gonna grind this up. That’s gonna top our casserole. Let that run. Boom! Dollar General. The flavor on this is really incredible. Like, you take a parmesan rind, And you add it to soup and you still get all of that umami. Like, there is an incredible lingering umami flavor on my palate right now. That kinda rules. Shake it around, get that all dusted up. Gonna add some nice texture. Got, let’s try the expired French’s fried onions. I think you can move that best by date, friend. This is the best French’s fried onion I ever had. Green flakes, butter. We got margarine going on in the Dollar Tree as well. Margarine sometimes tastes more like butter than butter because it’ll actually add artificial butter extract to it. And so it gives you that like popcorn butter flavor, which is really good, man. You ever have the buttered popcorn Jelly Belly? That’s the best, that is the best jelly bean in the entire market, other than the Bertie Bott’s Beans that’s flavored like vomit. I like that one. What? The one with the more brown ingredients sure looks more brown. A little tasty taste. Dude, that’s really good. It’s, there’s, it’s, the parmesan rinds man, it’s really nice. Different, different, little sharper on here, a little toastier, we’ll see how that holds up in the oven. I’m so stoked to eat tuna slop, tuna slop! All the Italian pasta shapes, right? They got specific names that sort of correlate to what they are, farfalle, I believe means butterfly in Italian, and the pasta looks like a butterfly. Somehow, we’ve decided that egg noodle is a shape. And this is it. It’s a little corkscrewy thing, and that’s what we’re cooking with. This is like the universal casserole noodle out there. We got Dollar Tree. They’re much bigger, much thicker. They’re also whiter, which could mean, like, less semolina in there. So, I think these noodles might hold up better. We don’t know what’s actually gonna make a better dish. But we gotta get them boiling. Speaking of the cookbook that we wrote that you should totally buy, We did use a measurement called a toddler’s handful, and many people reached out saying they don’t know what that is, so I’m just gonna demonstrate it. It’s a toddler’s handful of salt. It’s like one of them medium sized, but belligerent toddlers in the Target that are crying because their parents, like, won’t buy them the Bluey interactive game. So, that’s what that looks like. We’re gonna boil off this pasta. Get the ol’ Dollar General pasta in there. Dollar Tree pasta, we’re using the equivalent amount of pasta. Now the other things, we’re gonna start building the, the slop base for our lovely tuna slop. So, cream of mushroom soup. We got Campbell’s over at the Dollar Tree. Dollar General, they have their own store brand and this looks a lot more sort of gelatinous than you see with the Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom. Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom, not a single person has eaten this as an actual soup since 1987. We actually interviewed Miriam who did that. Cue the clip. Fantastic. The ingredients, if you look at the back, are 98 percent the same, but the Dollar General one actually has more soybean oil in it, which like the extra fat could add something. Let’s try it. God, they put all the best flavors in it. There’s a ton of MSG, ton of salt, ton of fat, a little bit of earthiness in the mushrooms. I’m gonna try Campbell’s, but Campbell’s is so silky smooth. Oh, that’s the ticket. Interesting though. Texture’s so much better, more mushroom flavor. Over here though, you have more salt, more fat. But it’s gonna be fun. Now, tuna. Where’s my tuna fork? I normally keep a tuna fork in all my pockets. What happened? What happened to my tuna fork? Like I said, this is yellowfin. This is actually packed in oil. God, that’s good tuna. Man, that is a real good tuna. Here we have the solid albacore packed in water. Most people go for solid albacore packed in water because it’s like quote unquote healthier. But I don’t know man, you need calories, you need food, you need fat. That tastes way better. But this is typically the, God dang it! Sorry. What else we adding? A little bit of milk to thin it out. We got the fresh milk over at the Dollar General and the shelf stable milk at the Dollar Tree. We’re gonna add some cheese in there too. We got, this is freshly shredded. It’s gonna offer you a bit of a different texture. This is incredibly orange. I love that. Yum, orange. It’s a great, mid market sharp cheddar is what the American economy runs on. Velveeta cheddar going in there. More cellulose caking agent. Broccoli. Over here, this is Bird’s Eye broccoli. This is like industry standard frozen broccoli. It’s actually really good. Like it’s, it’s not overcooked. A lot of florets in there. And then the Dollar Tree broccoli, which we’ve used before. It makes me sad. Absolute indictment against America’s unwillingness to offer fresh vegetables and produce, and healthy options, to its most underserved. This is all stemmed. This sucks, but it’s vegetables. A lot of fiber. That’s gonna be nice. Peas! Frozen peas, better than fresh peas. Straight up. We’re gonna add the frozen peas there. I had a friend growing up that ate frozen peas, just like as a snack while they were frozen. And I was like, that’s pretty cool. But then I found out that friend also just peed his pants for fun sometimes. And then like one day we’re in his backyard and he pisses his jeans. He’s like 13. And then so it kind of reframed the frozen pea thing for me. At first I was like, pretty good idea. And then I was like, well, maybe let’s take everything this person says with a grain of salt. No, no, don’t clap for that. Don’t reward that kind of behavior. This is like buying the toddler Skittles. You ever watch two basketball teams come out on the floor and you look at one and you go, oh. Oh, they’re gonna win. I feel like that’s what happened here. That’s also what happened in South Carolina versus Iowa. Everyone’s like, Caitlin Clark, Caitlin Clark, which is fine. Greatest women’s basketball player, all the points. But then, South Carolina, very casually, led by Dawn Staley, undefeated through, four losses over three years. Cardoso, the freaking tower in the middle. Anyways, still hyped up on women’s basketball over here. Yeah, this looks way better. This is all gray, and I think the paprika has a really weird tinge to it here, which this gave this a nice red color. The breadcrumbs over here are definitely better. They have that real Parmesan, albeit possibly just the rinds over here. They got that powder in them. Even the noodles here look better. I think Dollar General really coming in hot right now. We’ll see though, you know? Cause Caitlin Clark goes on a heater from three! Comment below if the basketball analogies are working for you. And, we’re gonna delete them all if you say no. Cause I am not stopping. I’m gonna mix that together. There’s a boom up here, do you guys know that? Tally, Tally, Tally, do your job, put the headphones. I’m so sorry. All right, noodles in. These noodles definitely, they broke apart a lot more and that wasn’t even during the cooking process. Like you could see a lot of the noodles are shattered. I tried them, they don’t have quite as much bite as the Dollar General ones. Definitely higher quality over the Dollar General. Yeah, so this one’s gonna mass into like an amorphous blob, whereas this one’s actually gonna have some bite to the noodles, but we don’t know if that’s actually gonna make it better. Shove all Dollar Tree in there. We got some greased up casserole dishes right here. Hey, have you guys ever heard that opinions are like casseroles? Everyone’s got one and they smell like onions. Funyuns to be exact, in Dollar Tree’s case. And then you’re, it’s, so it doesn’t really, it doesn’t rhyme with. Can we say it? I don’t know if I’m. There’s a phrase, opinions are like, the term anus just means ring in Latin. So like, your anus rings. I think it’s pretty funny. Ring doorbell should’ve just been called anus. So we’re gonna go ahead, that would’ve gotten them the Shark Tank freaking investment. Mark you, my product’s called anus. It’s a precursor to a modern police state. Alright. Well, that doesn’t freak anybody out that everyone just sees everything you’re doing all the time. I don’t want people seeing what I’m doing in parked cars in residential neighborhoods in the Ring camera. This is what I like to do with casseroles. I like to do a bottom layer of cheese. Ooh, that’s supple. A bottom layer of cheese, and then the breadcrumbs on top of it. That way the breadcrumbs are the first thing to get in your mouth. When the cheese starts to seep oil out, it’s actually gonna like kind of toast the breadcrumbs in that oil from the bottom. That’s valid culinary technique to me. I’m gonna try and load the corners of cheese. I’m gonna get some of that little crustage or “croo-stage” if you’re French. Beautiful. Yeah, this is a much more finely ground cheese. This is a Velveeter. What happened? What machine do they run it through to even get it like that? Is that how they got the discount at Dollar Tree? It was like, hey, machine broke in the Velveeta factory. We just kept running it, though. Do you guys want it? Because this is wildly inconsistent. Great. Ooh, I do love Velveeta, though. Ooh, I do love Velveeta. Top it. Some breadcrumbs. We got the extra toasty boys over here. Yeah. Yeah, that’s nice. Yeah, and then sometimes the basketball game starts and then like South Carolina is up like 15, nothing and you’re like, oh, yeah, this is, God, this looks so much better. We’re gonna go ahead and pop these in the oven about 400 degrees for like 25 30 minutes. You just want this to heat up melt all that cheese get it nice and bubbly and we’re gonna eat it Jordan Myrick, esteemed judge of sporked.com, and reigning God emperor of Mythical Entertainment. Thank you. We’ve got two nuna cast, two, two nudas. Tuna noodle casseroles right in front of you. Wow, holy smokes. One is cooked with ingredients from Dollar Tree, the other cooked with ingredients from Dollar General. So today, we’ve got dollar on dollar violence going on. I don’t know anything about Dollar General. That’s not something we’ve really tapped into. I don’t think that’s super popular in Los Angeles It’s not, it is across America though, so they got like, I think 19,000 Dollar General stores. Wow, I’m just scared, I’m not going to be able to do as well. Okay. We like you for your general personality. Thank you. Fun, quirkiness, not just your judging abilities. The breadcrumbs taste like cigarettes. That was me, that was me. So, we got cigarettes from Dollar, I won’t say which, and was like. Get a big breadcrumby bite. Tastes a little like cigarettes. Like a cigarette, yeah. Yeah. Tastes a little cigarettey. This is depressing and I, my mom once ashed a cigarette in our Rice A Roni and we still ate it once. Sure. So, I’ve had it before. We’ve all eaten a cigarette. Am I relatable to you? Comment below. If you say no, we’ll delete them. This one doesn’t taste like cigarettes, so it’s better. My. God dang it, she’s good. What I think is hard is that. I don’t know Dollar General very well, but I’m gonna guess that it’s worse than Dollar Tree? Which one do you think is South Carolina and which one do you think is Iowa? Cause that’s what it really came down to for me. Oh, that’s so hard because South Carolina is cigarettes, but not in this way. Being from the South, I will say that. I think, because this is better, this is South Carolina, is my guess. But I don’t know. Casseroles are very Midwestern. Wait, no, you gotta actually name the grocery store. No, I’m not doing that anymore. I’m not doing that anymore. Perfect. No, okay. Also, this wasn’t only a women’s basketball reference, not like where they’re headquartered. Oh, okay, okay. Jordan didn’t see the rest of the episode. Yeah, I didn’t see the episode, but I do love women’s basketball. Okay, I think this is from Dollar General, and this is from Dollar Tree. And which one did you like better? The cigarettes one. I stopped smoking a long time ago, so this felt really nice to me. This is like nicotine in a dinner. Yeah, get yourself some patches or something. This sounds bad. Jordan, you are wrong! This is Dollar General, and this is this is Dollar Tree. Now, dish per dish, Dollar General is a little bit more expensive, $8.20 versus $6.50 Sure. Over here, the main thing we found out, they got like a fair amount more high quality frozen vegetables. I love that. It’s more actual like, fresh products, like milk and butter, stuff like that. Wow. Dollar Tree we were working with a lot more of those pre-packaged ingredients, shelf stable milk. But even the pasta on this was a much higher quality. You can see this is flaking and breaking. Yeah. They have their own store brand too. This is real Parmesan romano cheese, except we think it was just the rinds. Okay, i’m not mad at that. It’s still good. It tastes really good. You put the rind in soup. It’s delicious. That’s what i’m saying, and then this the cigarettes were a bulk of the cost for that. Wow. I’m trying to figure out what happened and I don’t know because the breads were toasted the same amount It might have been like, low quality spices. Like, the paprika was super dusty. Yeah, maybe that’s it. It’s really bad. Yeah, I think I was at a disadvantage for this one because I don’t know anything about Dollar General, and now I’m jealous. I wish there were more Dollar Generals in Los Angeles. Bring more Dollar Generals up, because that is fantastic. Jordan, thank you so much for providing your expertise and your absolute quirkiness and unrelenting support for women’s basketball, and thank you all so much for watching. Keep doing that. Thanks. Candace Parker, call me. The Mythical Cookbook is finally here! Order your copy now at mythicalcookbook.com and make any kitchen a Mythical Kitchen.