Today we’re putting two grocery stores to the test. It’s Dollar Tree versus Target. Today we’re attempting to answer the question, does it actually matter where you buy your groceries? We will be making two identical dishes, one with ingredients from the Dollar Tree, one with ingredients from Le Tarjay. It’s a fancy French store, you probably haven’t heard of it. Then a judge will do a blind taste test to see which grocery store has the better ingredients. The Mythical Kitcheners are out shopping at Dollar Tree and Target right now. Let’s see what they got. Now we’ve made a lot of different things from Dollar Tree and we have put Steak-umms in a lot of inappropriate places. Not like that, but I mean in dishes that you probably shouldn’t use Steak-umms for. Against all odds, today we have found the king of kings, the ribeye steak at the Dollar Tree. Walking into a Dollar Tree, you never know what you’re going to get. It’s like Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium I’ve never seen the movie, I don’t know the reference. But that’s how I feel like it is. Boneless beef, ribeye steak, mechanically tenderized, which is huge. I don’t know if they’re taking like the old sad cows that were like once used to till the fields and just chopping them up and putting them in here. I don’t know why they would have to mechanically tenderize it. It’s also tenderized with bromelain, which is interesting. That’s an enzyme you find in pineapple and it’s also cheese and rice, contains up to a 35 solution of water with seasoning including sugar dextrose and soy protein This is probably going to taste pretty good though, because it is chemically and mechanically tenderized and just basically brined. Injected with salt water just means it’s brined. So, that is going to be fascinating. This cost about $7 a pound, which like, if you’re, you’re basically paying $2 a pound for water at that point. But whatever, we’ll see how that works out. Versus, this looks more like a, like a steak you’d find. We got this at the Target, but this was $15 a pound, more than double the price. If you look at the total price of both groceries. Over here at Target we got about $73 and then over here at the Dollar Tree $27. The price of the final dish It’s more than double at Target at about 14.50, and then just about $7 at the Dollar Tree. So, we got the steaks. That’s our turf. Now we got to get the surf because we are making a surf and turf here. We got some shrimpies over from the Target. This is 41 to 50 per pound over at Dollar Tree It’s only 40 to 50 shrimp per pound. I don’t know where that extra one shrimp is coming from, but we actually find the shrimp at Dollar Tree are more expensive, probably because, oh, the shrimp industry is so depressing. Look up the Associated Press’s reporting on slavery in the shrimp industry. Let’s, we’ll just, anyways, point is, prices on shrimp vary a lot for a lot of different conditions. So I don’t think there’ll be any difference in quality. Also, you got to peel those shrimp, which sucks. The most fascinating price difference that we see here, Against all odds, chives. 700 percent more expensive at Target than they are at Dollar Tree. These better be the best dried chives I have ever had. These dried chives better make me see God. I better hallucinate from these dried chives. I do not. Understand where that’s coming from. We’re going to make a lovely little rice pilaf adjacent thing, as well. Rice was somewhat equal in price. We’re going to make a lovely mushroom cream sauce. We’re going to use a little bit of margarine. I love margarine. It is effectively like plant based butter. If they had that terminology in the 1800s, they may have used it. But we got proper Parkay margarine vegetable oil spread over here. Then we have Miyoko’s Creamery Plant Milk Butter, which I initially was like, that’s just fancy margarine, but you look at the ingredients. Coconut oil, cultured cashew milk. This is really fascinating. It’s all sort of bound together with sunflower. Let’s then, curious to see how that tastes. I’m just excited to have a nice, fancy, romantic meal from the Dollar Tree and see if it holds up, man. Also, I want to be mechanically tenderized. Sometimes I use the old Theragun, but then I can’t hear the TV while I’m using the Theragun, so I don’t use the Theragun as much as I could. Can I start Theragunning in the office? Does that distract anyone? Go for it! Can I do it naked? No. Oh. Let’s get cooking. Now, before we get to cooking, I actually have a very important topic to discuss, and that topic is democracy. Democracy dies in darkness, and if you do not exercise your right to vote, you will lose it. So head over to sporked.com and vote for your favorite popsicle character. That’s right, we got Spongebob, we got Spider-Man, we got sponge man. All your favorite characters. Head over to sporked.com and vote. I’ve never seen an episode of Spongebob. I think parents from my high school were actually the ones that got it cancelled because he lived an alternative lifestyle. Anyways, that’s a real story, you should look that up, it’s pretty wild. We’re gonna start making a rice pilaf-y situation. I got some margarine over here, this is, ooh. It tastes so good. It tastes like if you congealed movie theater popcorn into a paste. We’re gonna get our rice toasting up into that. This is the Miyoko’s vegan butter, which is crumbly and strange. I’ll tell you what, you give this, you give this little man some hydrogenated oils and salt, and he’s a happy little camper. You know, that’s a fun time. That’s a fascinating texture in there. I do have a lot of nostalgia for straight up margarine. I grew up, I don’t think I knew the taste of real butter until I was like 16 years old. We ate so much freaking margarine in our house because it is incredibly cheap. Rice pilaf. What is it? What’s like Uzbekistani? Or pulao, pilaf. Pilau, it’s all related. It’s just a delicious cooked rice dish, cooked in some sort of stock and aromatics. So, we’re going to toast up our rice. This is actually a really important step. There’s just, if you are one of the few people that come here for actual cooking tips and tricks, this is a fun one. Toast up your rice in some fat and you get this like really lovely flavor. Take the rice a little farther than you think you need to as well. We’re going to drop in some jarlic into there. This jarlic is incredibly brown. Brown jarlic brought to you by Dollar Tree. We got. Ooh, this one smells a lot sharper. Let’s see how that comes through in the teeth. That’s nice. Here we go. Sorry, I’ve been thinking about, the Billy Madison passed the third grade song for a long time, so I might speak in Adam Sandlerisms for a while. Billy passed the third grade! Oh, what a glorious day! You guys don’t remember that? It’s been stuck in my head, which is good because that means, ojo Papa by Joost Klein from Eurovision isn’t stuck in my head. But I have exclusively been listening to Dutch hardstyle. And it’s literally driving me crazy. Shout out to Nati Vistik. Anyone? Dimitri K? Visa Asbach? Oh, yeah! Okay, okay, okay. They did a great collab with, it seems like Polska Man, I don’t know. Salt. Salt. Yeah! Chicken stock, chicken stock. We got Swanson chicken stock. That’s nice, you wanna hear that sizzle. Doing a one to one ratio. Swanson chicken stock. The chicken stock industry is a fantastic article by our own Noah Galuten, who co-wrote the cookbook, on the opacity of the chicken stock industry. Because if you look here, the only ingredient of chicken stock says chicken stock. It’s like when you look up the definition of like, alacrity, and they’re like, the containment of alacritousness. And you’re like, yeah, I just need to know what it means. I don’t know. Why does that smell bad? Chicken broth from Dollar Tree over here. It’s actually water mixed with chicken bouillon, which is kind of dehydrated stock, but there’s actually celery juice and stuff in here. Smells like bleach. Oh, it tastes like bleach. This is actually really interesting. This, this tastes like, if like lemon juice is to lemonade is as Swanson is to this. This is like a chicken broth flavored cocktail. I’m gonna give this one quick little stir. Like making a witch’s brew. Okay. We’re gonna take this, we’re gonna put it off. Slow boil that over there. And then we’re gonna start slaying some shrimpies. Boom. Big ol’ hunks of this vegan butter. Slap that in there. I love cooking shrimp in just like an obnoxious amount of butter. On the account of that’s the way it tastes good. And so we’re gonna get some garlic. Why did I just finger it? I had utensils, but like, these are the original utensils, you know? That’s weird. That melts weird. This melts weird too. This is violently yellow. This is suspiciously white. I feel like if we just combined these, it’d be the appropriate color of butter, but we’re not gonna do that. We got some spices here. We’re gonna add a little bit of chili flake. That’s nice. Add dried parsley. I’m gonna add a little bit of black pepper. We got some nice coarse ground black pepper, Dollar Tree. I see you. I’m just gonna try and get this sort of like foaming up. Do a little like garlic and herb shrimp. What is preventing this from melting? What science have you done, Miyoko? You guys know what Miyoko? They’re a vegan cream cheese giant, right? Too good. I don’t like though when places try and make the vegetables into fish. You guys have had the vegetable fish? What? Remember the vegetable fish? They’re like, we made carrot lox. And it’s like, no, you just put mushy carrots on my bagel. I don’t like this. We’re going to add a couple shimp in there. We want a nice sauce to use for this rice, but they’ll make like vegan, like a veggie burger. I understand you don’t need a vegan bagel and lox. And if it has made you happy, that’s great. But it’s made me incredibly mad. Your happiness has made me furious. Beautiful, got some lovely green garlicky shrimp. This foams like actual butter, whereas this doesn’t. Dang it, Miyoko, you done did it again! You do good work. A great trick for shrimp that probably doesn’t actually work, but I have used it to inform the way that I cook shrimp, is that you want it to be a J shape, not a C shape. If it’s a C shape, you’ve gone too far. Also, always pull your shrimp a little bit earlier than you think you should, because then the carryover cooking is going to actually get it to temperature. Oh, so much foamy butter! Oh my God! Okay, shrimp’s done, rice is cooking! There’s something wrong here. I don’t like the foam now. I was initially entranced by the foam. Now I’m very confused. Got the rice cooking. We got our shrimp cooking. Now we gotta get to our steak and our sauce. You ain’t from around these parts. Are you, partner? Give me them nips. I’m so sorry. Do you, did you, men, did you grow up with getting nurples? A nurple of course is a portmanteau of nipple and purple where someone would just come up to you and squeeze your nipple and go, nurple! And it’s not right. No, they would just say nurple. Purple nurple is redundant. The urp in nurple is purple. Children of the world, be better than your ancestors. Don’t give people nurples. This steak is incredibly thin, incredibly mechanically tenderized. I do love really thin steaks sometimes. They’ll call them like bistro style steaks. It’s nice. You can sear it super hot, still get a little bit of that medium rare center. So I’m gonna take this nice ribeye and pound it out just gently, that’s pounding nice, these are both 5.5 ounce steaks, but again, this steak, because it’s not just injected with salt water and it didn’t come from a depressed old work cow, as I can only surmise, was double the price. We’re gonna sear off the steak, we’re gonna, hold on, salt. Salt and pepper. Gonna push it real good. Perfect. I’m like, a little bit of salt on there, cause this steak is already salted. A little bit of black pepper on that steak. Yum, yum, yum. A lot of people are like, don’t put pepper on your steak because the pepper will burn. And when I say someone, I mean me, as of like three weeks ago. I’ve recently decided to stop saying that because I don’t think it’s true. Because I’ve eaten some really burnt black pepper on a steak and I was like, that’s great. We should be doing more of that. People can change. For the most part, no. Oil in the pans. Nice rip roaring hot. Get your nurple grabbers. It’s smoking. That’s what we want. Crank that heat to high. I mean, we’re going quick on this. We’re going like 30 seconds each side. There we go. This is strange. I don’t know how I feel. About lab grown meat, but all I know is that’s what it’s going to look like. This looks like cow pieces. This does not. This is already incredibly brown. Maybe they created a hybrid animal? Because here’s the thing. Alright, so check this out, right? I’m a pretty smart guy. Land is sort of a fixed resource. 75 percent of the Earth’s surface is water. If we create a sort of hybrid salmon cow, And we just farm them in the ocean. I think that solves a lot of our problem. And then also, raccoons eat garbage. There’s a lot of garbage floating in the ocean. We train raccoons to swim, make a raccoon Navy, send them out there. They eat up all the ocean trash. Okay. So, this is fascinating. You’re seeing something come out of this steak. That’s called albumin, which basically means that the emulsification inside this meat has broken. And also, that is sticking to the pan like nothing I’ve ever seen before. There we go, beautiful little sear there. That, yeah, there’s like an unmistakable beef scum that’s coming off of that. And I hate it. Another 30 seconds. Do you guys have any ideas on how to save the environment? I mean this steak was done 10 minutes ago, so let’s just crank that off. Wild. Gotta really scrape it like gum off the sidewalk that’s going right there. This, probably looking like a nice medium rare, we’re gonna get that rested a little bit. Now, build a sauce, don’t got time to talk. We’re just gonna go ahead and add the mushrooms in there. We’re gonna get a little color on them. These have been cooked to death because they’ve been sitting in a can. But just get them toasted up in some fat. Bang, bang. Flavor gang. More margarine! Hell yeah. We got some of that Miyoko’s delicious foamy butter over there. We’re gonna just season this up with a little bit of garlic, a little bit of black pepper. Now I want to do everything with two hands because I don’t know what to do with my offhand. Normally with my offhand I’d be guarding the passing lane, but there we go. And then we’re gonna add some stock. So, we’re taking beef stock. Sláinte. Get out of here. This doesn’t look like beef stock, but what it is is beef bouillon mixed with water. And it tastes way more beefy despite having absolutely no color to it. That, dude, this, man, Miyoko, you done did it again! What an incredible product this vegan butter is. It foams like real butter. It’s already looking so much more luscious than the other sauce. It’s just great work. I’m never gonna clown on vegans again, except for, I get one. I get one, and it’s the Natalie Portman PETA ad. Natalie Portman PETA ad, her underneath a urinal, saying, I’d rather be drenched in piss than wear fur. Nobody saw this ad? Yo, look it up. It’s utterly, it seems like something that’s fake. It is not. Nobody has ever been faced with that choice before. The chives, the chives, the chives. These chives on the right, 700 percent more expensive than these chives on the left. Like, I don’t know if you like, hydroponically grown some VC money behind those chives. Dried chives taste like literally nothing. I don’t even know who’s using dried chives. We kind of just did it because it’s like, well, green looks good in your food. Yeah, these dried, these ones are better because they’re crispy. Don’t, if you’re out there wasting your whole budget. Listen, I spend about $1,800 to $2,000 on candles per month, so I understand how to budget. But if you’re out there blowing your budget on the dried chives over at Target, stop it. You can be getting them at Dollar Tree. Yeah, very funny. Like, this looks like an incredible pan sauce over here. I might actually bring up the heat and bring it down. Just a little bit. But this is like broken from the margarine. Still gonna taste good, of course. But dude, that Miyoko, I think it might be the binding and the lecithin in there? This is incredible. Well, we’re gonna plate up. We got our rice cooked. We got our shrimp cooked. We got our steak cooked and resting. And we got this lovely mushroom cream sauce. I can’t wait to see who wins. I gotta plate it. The great Anthony Bourdain once said that if you want to make any dish look fancier, stack it all on top of itself. He actually did say that, so that’s what we’re gonna do. Do you have to do this at home? No. You don’t need a ring mold. But, I wanna do it, and I’ve decided this is what I’m doing, and once I’ve decided something, this is not a cute tendency of mine, I have to do it, despite how many people it hurts and or confuses. Alright, we’re gonna start with a ring mold of rice. Screw it. Put that down. This rice actually came together really, really nicely. Scoop it. Beautiful, nice little bed. That rice. So dumb. I love it! Where else would you rather be? Alright. This rice is significantly less yellower. The yellower the rice, the better it tastes. That is something I freaking know. This one? The rice granules seemed to stay more separately in this one, which I don’t love. Pull it, pull it, pull it, great. Now we’re gonna stack our steak right on top. This Miyoko sauce thickens so much in like a really beautiful way actually. Yeah. There you go. This sauce did not get nearly as thick, but it should still have pretty good flavor. Take some of your mushrooms. Yeah, if you ever don’t have a super high quality steak, you’ve heard the phrase like dazzling with BS. You won’t dazzle, you won’t dazzle anyone with this BS, but like you will cover it with BS. And I think that’s like the next step. Perfect. I’m gonna go on top, with the shrimp. Yeah, nice little surf and turf tower over here. This is high quality cooking. I think Gordon Ramsay would be proud of this one. Now what I’m gonna do, I’m gonna take this little like, sort of like emulsification. Look at her, she’s glowing! God, she could be Miss South Carolina. She has like the elegance and the range of a pageant winner. Not from like a big market state, but from a state where pageants are still quite important. Little bit more of that juice on top. There we have it, your elegant Dollar Store surf and turf dinner. Perfect for a date night or to celebrate. The anniversary of you winning partial custody of your kids. Gwynedd Stuart of sporked.com and owner of horse pants. Welcome to the Mythical Kitchen. Horse pants. I actually don’t own them. I rented them from The Runway. Did you actually? Yeah. You’re renting your clothes? Are you okay financially? No. Pay me more! We’re eating surf and turf today. We got a lovely rice pilaf, bistro ribeye steak, some garlic and herb shrimp in a creamy mushroom sauce. One was made with ingredients from the Dollar Tree. The other was made with ingredients from Le Tarjay. It’s a beautiful little boutique. They had, they used to have a weird like albino dog as a mascot. And what happened to that dog? It must be dead by now, right? They killed it. They killed that dog. Anyways, please dig in. You are going to tell me which one you think is from Dollar Tree, which one you think is from Target, and then which one you like better. I have to say, I really love the plating. Stop, stop it. Come on. He told me to say that. Just kidding. I’m going to take a bite of the steak first. I like that it’s crispy on the edges. Thank you. It’s kind of nice, right? And then. Like a Pringle. And then here’s the shrimp. It’s good. They taste better than I thought they would based on how they look. I made a whole thing about J shape over C shape and this is closing right to an O. Oh, yeah, totally. Ooh, mushrooms. I didn’t even notice the mushrooms. Well, I stacked everything on top of itself. Okay, this steak is not crispy on the edges, but, oh, okay. I don’t, it tastes different, too. It’s interesting, huh? Sure is cow. Okay. Are you tasting any quality difference in, say, the steak or the shrimp? Okay, I think I am tasting a quality difference in the steak. Okay, maybe also the shrimp, too. It’s weird because I think these shrimp look better. I think that this, this steak, I guess this whole dish tastes better to me. So, I don’t know. I’m gonna guess that this one came from Target. And that this one came from Dollar Tree. And you prefer this dish? I prefer this dish, yes. Gwynedd, what if I told you you have impeccable taste and you’re very erudite because this is from Le Tarjay, this is a Target steak over here, and then here we have Dollar Tree. In fairness, we have never seen Dollar Tree steak before. Our process here is Nicole just wanders over to every Dollar Tree in Los Angeles trying to find stuff that we can cook. And she found a steak for the first time ever. So, this is mechanically tenderized and chemically tenderized with bromelain. And it’s also soaked in a salt water solution, which is why it tastes a little bit like a Slim Jim. It’s really quite weird. It’s very, there’s like a, there’s a jerky-ish quality to it. Ironically, incredibly tough, despite all of the tenderization efforts. Yeah. And then this one over here was an actual ribeye, but more than double the price. This here costs about $14 for the entire plate. This is only $7 for steak and shrimp. Do you think that’s doubly good as that? I actually, I do. I do, yes. That’s twice as good. The steak, it’s like a dramatic, it’s a dramatic flavor difference in the steak. But, look, those shrimp look good. I would love to look at them all day long. They don’t taste bad either. They don’t, they actually don’t taste bad. What if I told you the chives there are 700 percent more expensive than the chives there? Does that influence your decision? Yeah, that makes me sick. Inflation is a con job. Gwynedd, thank you so much for your brutal honesty and for complimenting my plating. That means the world to me. It really is beautiful. And I meant every word I said. And thank you so much for stopping by the Mythical Kitchen. We got new episodes out every week. We got new, we got like podcasts, videos. What do you sell? Pants? Horse pants. Buy more horse pants so she can own her horse pants. Visit sporked.com That’s what I meant to say. Oh, that’s a better one. You ever want to kiss Spongebob on the mouth? Now you can, because it’s a popsicle, you dummy. Go over to sporked.com to vote for your favorite character ice cream popsicle and then see which one they thought tasted the best.