Today we’re putting two grocery stores to the test. It’s Aldi versus Dollar Tree. Today we’re attempting to answer the question, does it actually, stop yelling at me! I’m sensitive! Hi. Today, we’re attempting to answer the question, does it actually matter where you buy your groceries? We will be making two identical dishes with ingredients bought from two different grocery stores. On one side, we got Aldi, that’s right, Albrecht Discount out of Germany recently made its way to the States. And on the other side, we got Dollar Tree, the tried and true budget staple. We will then have a judge taste test both of them blind, not knowing where they’re from, to see which grocery store did it better. We got the kitcheneers shopping right now. See what they got. Today we’re making broiled lemon pepper salmon with ravioli and a little bit of a primavera cream sauce. We’re trying to make like a very balanced meal here. We always strive to cook balanced meals in the Mythical Kitchen, except for the days where we just, yesterday I think I think I ate about 16 eggs. You’ll see why. But, we’re making a lovely pasta primavera and broiled salmon here. We got salmon from Dollar Tree, which is very rare. It’s an incredibly rare find. It’s like finding a leprechaun’s pot of gold when you find fresh meat at the Dollar Tree. That’s what we got over here. We have Sea Best, quality since 1979. I mean, this is a legacy brand. They’ve been out there in the salmon game for damn near 50 years. Shout out to Sea Best. This was about $1.25 per portion of salmon, which is incredible. But even at Aldi, it’s about $1.85 per portion, so it’s a little bit more expensive. But this is both some cheap fish. Also, I love using frozen fish at home. I always have a sack of frozen fish, and that’s the, like, Friday meal when you’ve sort of eaten all your fresh meat, and then you’re sort of digging through the freezer. Which is really cool. A lot of people, when we did the first Dollar Tree vs. Aldi episode, were very confused because they were like, I am from Europe and Aldi basically is our Dollar Tree over there. If anyone can do things bigger and cheaper than anybody else, it’s America, baby. Welcome. We got Dollar Tree. So Aldi is $39 for all these groceries and then over at the Dollar Tree it’s $27. It is still pretty comparable. It’s almost twice as expensive on a dish per dish basis. Some of the interesting things we find, we couldn’t get quality frozen sweet peas over at Dollar Tree. So we’re using canned peas over here. We got frozen peas. Frozen peas are actually better than, well, one, you’re not getting fresh peas. Nobody’s shucking their own peas, but they pick them at peak season. They steam them. They put them in when they’re ultra green. I think that could give an advantage over here. We got Blue Bonnet versus Imperial margarine spread. Oh, it’s a dogfight, baby. It’s gonna be incredible. And then we’re using some pre-made ravioli, which obviously is really delicious. We got Pede Brothers! Pede Brothers jumbo round cheese ravioli here. What kind of cheese? They’re using ricotta. Okay, lovely. Any real parm in there? Ooh, I’m not seeing any real parm. We’ll see if this actually comes with the flavor. And then this. Ooh, the nice vacuum sealed package. Number one ingredient, ricotta cheese. And then fresh parm. We got mozzarella. We got provolone. We got romano. Five cheeses in this ravioli. One cheese in that. Let’s see if they can come back from that deficit. I’m excited though. I could eat just a bunch of creamy vegetabley pasta with some hammered fish right now. Let’s get cooking. Salmon, often known as one of the top three smartest fish in all of the fish kingdom. We have two fillets here. This one, if you’ll notice, is soft to the touch, whereas this one, is a solid brick, and there’s a very specific reason why. The Dollar Tree salmon says that, quote, due to the specific nature of this fish, it performs best when cooked from frozen. I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what happens if you thaw it out. All I know is I’m not interested in finding out today, because I will listen to the packaging. And over here at Aldi, which again, this is about a $1.85, this is about $1.25, so like, roughly about 45, 50 percent more expensive? This has a sustainable seafood label on it that says it was wild caught and this is just a puck frozen in ice. So, we’ll see how that goes. But, anytime you have protein of suspect provenance, which I buy a lot of suspect things, put a bunch of spices on it, man. It just makes your food taste good. Spices exist for a reason. Also, though, it’s likely a myth that the spice trade was so important because everyone in the medieval times had rotting meat and needed to obscure from that that kind of makes no sense because like if you had the money to afford spices at the time, you would have also had the money to afford fresh meat, and so anyways, point is, people have always put spice on their food simply for the fact that they taste good and they make your food fun. So, we’re adding garlic, we’re adding, the vegetable oil, we’re adding lemon juice to this, and then we’re just gonna add some more spices. We’re gonna brush this all over, we got garlic powder, we got a little Italian seasoning, green flecks make your food taste good. We have lemon pepper seasoning, and I know what you’re saying, you’re adding lemon, and you’re adding pepper, and you’re adding lemon pepper? Lemon pepper is different! G.D. it! I’m sorry for cursing, that was wildly inappropriate. But lemon pepper, the thing that really makes it taste like lemon pepper, is dehydrated lemon peel. So, that’s a fun little thing there, and then we’re gonna drop a little bit of paprika in there. And then, load it up with salt. That’s actually gonna make it taste good. Do you guys think paprika is a good baby name? No. No? It’s from Blue’s Clues? Oh, now it’s gauche. Okay, we’re gonna make, I’ve never seen Blue’s Clues. I don’t know, I don’t, I don’t like the dog. He’s smug. He thinks he’s better than me. Blue’s a girl! Oh my God, sorry for misgendering Blue’s Clues. Everyone calm down. I’ve never seen it. I don’t like the guy either. Joe? Joe? Steve. Steve, oh my God, I’m sorry. I didn’t grow up with cable. Wait, really? Yeah. There’s a? I don’t know. I don’t like, I don’t like how Steve makes vlogs from his car while still dressed like his character. I, and I know I’m making no friends, right? I know everybody loved that show and it meant a lot to them. But that’s my bad. If we, yeah, just cut, cut all my Blue’s Clues slander. Why don’t you sit down in your thinking chair, and think! Is that a reference to the show? I don’t know! We’re gonna brush this over our salmon, we’re gonna get it under the broiler. Broiled salmon is a great way to cook it. You just hammer it hot and fast, super hard heat. You don’t have to dirty pans, you don’t get all the like, gross fish smoke, up in your house. I just don’t know what to do with this. Give me a second. I’m gonna rinse this up. Okay. Because right now this is just, it’s just an ice block. It’s just an ice block. We are gonna cook it from frozen, but if there’s ever ice encrusting your protein. Give it a rinse, pat it off in paper towels, cause you don’t want that steam from the oven. We will rinse off the salmon, as they say, blue skidoo, We can too. I watched Reading Rainbow and then I read the books. Shoutout LeVar Burton. He’s my, he’s the real Blue. In my book. Alright. Salmon. Pat it dry. Brush it down. Why? What is the nature of this fish that makes it only cook from frozen? I don’t know. Brush it down. That’s nice. Look at that lovely little spice paste there, just, oh, wicking off of it like a waterfall on hard granite. Like a limestone deposit. Beautiful. Salmon don’t have the capacity to love. I believe that. They are better than me though, because they know how to get home, and I never do. All right, now we’re gonna brush this fresh salmon. We’re gonna cook the fresh salmon for a significantly shorter period of time, on account of it’s fresh. But we’re gonna monitor it to make sure. Yeah, I think I see, this probably would have been better from frozen too, because you do see the flesh falling apart. This isn’t like that fatty Atlantic salmon that you’d see. This is, they say this is wild caught. I don’t know if it’s like a, a coho or a, what’s that other one? Sockeye. The fish that I don’t love nearly as much as Atlantic salmon. But, making do here. This fish also did come frozen, but it said to thaw it out, but it does appear to be the exact same fish. So one of these places knows something the other doesn’t. I love that they’re not sharing the information. We’re going to broil these real quick. Do unilateral cooking method. Don’t even need to flip it. We’re gonna pop it in the oven. Alright, I’ll do it. I was just gonna say it, but now you’ll see me do it. Fish is in. I think I remember which one’s which. Do you feel empty inside sometimes? Are you looking to bring meaning to your life? Well, head on over to Sporked.com to check out their latest article, which Gatorade flavor are you based on your zodiac sign? Now as a Taurus, which I can’t stress this enough, means nothing to me. Your, when you were born certainly does not influence your personality. And no, it’s not magnetism of the stars. I am Fierce Grape. Alright. It’s fun. They do great work at Sporked. It’s not a zodiac. And, like, anybody who’s ever dated in L.A. has just had to memorize their entire star chart. And I hate, I can’t stress enough how much I hate that. We’re going to make a sort of, like, vegetable cream sauce right here. We’re gonna add margarine to this pan. That pan’s quite hot. I’m gonna take that pan off the heat real quick, let that margarine go. The melting rate of margarine is very funny to me. It doesn’t do it. And then we’re gonna add some margarine over here we Bot blue Bonnet versus Imperial butter sticks. Alright, cool. Margarine’s melting. We gotta work fast. We’re working hot here. We don’t want our garlic to burn. Why does margarine pop like that? Those chemical bonds are simply so strong. We’re gonna, and margarine fumes. Why does margarine fume? We’re gonna add in a little bit of garlic in there, at least some. We’re just gonna start dumping vegetables. I’ll explain later. As soon as I sauté these both hands. Garlic’s burning, gotta get the veg in. The corn will stop the garlic from burning. Oh, God. I’m gonna start dumping carrots. I’ll explain later. The carrots are both frozen. The carrots are both frozen. The broccoli’s both frozen. We got that Dollar Tree broccoli that is all, literally all stem. There we go. Okay, now we’re working. Perfect. It’s getting a little color, a little toast on those veg. The thing where we really see the difference, we got like peppers and onions going. And this is just mixed veg, throw all the veg. All the vegetables taste good. I eat all of them at any given time. Smells nice. Hold on, a little sauté. The big difference we got here in the vegetables. This green, this is more like a brown. This is like the color of clothes that’s really in right now that I don’t understand, you know, where everything’s just seems like it has some shade of brown mixed into it and I don’t get it, like it’s earth tones. Like dog, you paid $600 for a tracksuit, that’s weird. Anyways, these peas are canned. I grew up eating a lot of canned peas. These peas are frozen, you see the difference there. Both are good, these are gonna be a little bit mushier. Same with the green beans over here. I think it’s honestly gonna be like a huge difference in this dish. We’ll see how it actually nets out when everything’s just sautéed with a bunch of cream. We’re gonna dump that in there. Lovely. Give it one more little toss. Ambidextrous cooking. Wow, this is so vibrant and green. And this is, oh man. No, not Dollar Tree again. Alright. We’re adding half and half to the pan. We’re gonna bring that up to like a little boil. Let that sort of reduce and thicken. The parmesan cheese will also help thicken this. We’re gonna season this up with a little bit of salt. We’re gonna drop our pasta a couple minutes before we want to add it to the sauce. Ooh, we should salt the water down. We have pans over here, I don’t know if you can see it. Love it, love it. Add some spices to your stuff. We got a little bit of black pepper going in. We got a little bit of Italian seasoning. We got just a little bit of crushed red pepper, just to liven it up a little bit. And then we got some straight oregano. All right. Got a crab walk. We’re putting in Italian seasoning. God dang it. Adding all the same things here. Chili flake, parsley, get some green flecks in your food. And black pepper, the black pepper, I’ll tell you, it’s a lot more coarsely ground. Shout out to Dollar Tree for having great black pepper. We also have some parmesan cheese. So over here we got the green shaker bottle of parm. Oh, it went right to the back of my throat. It’s super chewy because it’s got that cellulose, that anticaking agent, AKA wood pulp in there. But it’s still parmesan cheese, it still tastes good. And then, oh, this is the parmesan, like a fine white sandy beach in the Bahamas. This is mostly buttermilk powder. It tastes like popcorn seasoning, I love it. It literally tastes exactly like the white cheddar popcorn seasoning that I just like, load up on. I, my popcorn at the movies, if they have little seasoning packets, it becomes 80 percent dust and that’s how I like it. I’m gonna open the package, I’m gonna get the raviolis cooking. Gonna use my favorite knife. Cut this open. Again, this is that five cheese ravioli. This looks really nice, if you’re seeing yellow in the pasta, it probably means that it was made with egg yolks, which I would say is like pretty traditional and I think probably gonna give it a bit of an edge versus a very pallid pasta, like we see, guys don’t forget where this knife is because it’s gonna get lost and i’m gonna probably swallow it somehow. I’m like a baby. You see this pasta? This only has ricotta in it. This was significantly cheaper. I mean, it still looks good. Not very yellow. Not very pleasing to the eye, but both these are going to cook for about three minutes and we’re going to toss it in the sauce. Finish it with a little sauté. Get out of here. All right, give it a second. What the hell? The pasta is finished cooking and in one fell swoop. I shall remove all of the ravioli and dump them in here continue to cook and then I will gracefully pivot to do the other one and I will backhand it These are giant. Holy smokes, I’m gonna keep two for snacking. All right, so now we gotta. Almost finished, I scalded my crotch again. We have not had a crotch scalding in this kitchen in what, what does the sign say? 17 days, and so now we gotta remove it. We’re gonna finish this in the sauce, let that cream really thicken. Parmesan cheese will also help to thicken this sauce. This one will, I don’t know what the sand is gonna do. It should thicken it. There’s got to be, it tastes like maltodextrin. So let’s see how that goes. Give it a nice little flippy dip. Let that reduce, let that thicken. Need about two minutes to sauté this and then we’re gonna plate up. Wait, can I LeBron James this? It just looks like we turned up the saturation on the Instagram photo editing tool. For this, everything is so much brighter over here. Well, we’re going to plate up, we got our pastas. I think I’m just going to shove the salmon right on top of that pasta. This actually, this looks really lovely, man. Pasta in a cream sauce, what could go wrong? Waits to be smoten by God. Get some extra veggies. Some happy little broccoli trees right there. Lovely. We’re going to take our salmon, and the fish has not fallen apart. Beautiful. Right on top. Come on, everybody in the live studio audience, give it up. What’s better than that? What’s better than that? Dude, I miss when cooking shows had a live studio audience. It never quite made sense, but man, Emeril Live, holy smokes. What a moment in time that was. We never quite on Mythical Kitchen developed like a catchphrase, did we? Our only catchphrase that really took off is about dying. And that doesn’t get, that doesn’t get a studio audience as jacked up as bam! We’ll, we’ll get one. What about like, what if we hit it again? Kerplunk! We don’t like Kerplunk. Salmon’s going on top. There we got it. We got broiled lemon pepper salmon with ravioli and a cream, cream, cremavera. It’s just a cremavera sauce. You don’t have to say primavera cream sauce. Everyone in the live studio audience, and you know what they say, If you can’t kerplunk it, you gotta funk it! I’ll see you next time! Nobody says that! They’re gonna now! Gwynedd Stuart from sporked.com welcome back to the Mythical Kitchen. Do you have anything to say about the efficacy of astrology? I believe it 100%. It’s science where I come from. Florida. Yeah, that makes sense, that makes sense. We have two dishes in front of you. We have a lovely ravioli in a primavera cream sauce. Primavera just means spring, but it means frozen vegetables tossed into a pan in America where Gwynedd comes from. And then we have some broiled lemon pepper salmon on top. One of these dishes is from the Dollar Tree. The other is from Aldi or Albrecht Discount as you may know it. Oh, that’s what it’s called some places? It’s a portmanteau. Well, Aldi is a portmanteau of Albrecht Discount. Wow, I had no idea, and I’m a grocery expert. Okay, so this one has carrot spears versus carrot coins? – Correct. – Medallions? Yeah, we did not coin the carrots ourselves. Okay. These were factory coined. They look really nice. Thanks. We didn’t make the ravioli either. These were both pre-made. I figured. I cooked the salmon good. Okay. The cheese inside is like, a little pasty maybe. I guess pasty’s not like, what you’re going for, necessarily. Don’t wear cheese pasties. You’ll get a rash. My God, that would be so cute. I don’t want people to yell at me, but I don’t like, love salmon. It’s not my favorite fish. It’s like a lateral move from chicken for me. Okay. Yeah. I don’t mind, I eat it a lot, cause like, you’re maybe supposed to, or maybe not. I don’t know man, everything is confusing. Everything is confusing, but I think, I think it’s good for you. Both of these salmons were frozen in a bag, they did appear to be the same species of salmon, but one of the bags indicated you should cook from frozen, and the other from fresh. And they said due to the specific nature of this fish, it performs best, when cooked frozen. I have no idea what that means, or why the fish has performance issues. I know we all get in our heads sometimes. I’m looking at these raviolis now, and I like, they look a little better to me, I don’t know. But, I like these vegetables better. That ravioli doesn’t have a lot of flavor. If you had to guess how many cheeses were in each ravioli, what would you say? I would guess, honestly, one. One cheese, but I bet they were like, four cheese ravioli! One of these did indicate a number of cheeses in their ravioli, and the other did not. Okay. Interesting. Are you tasting any difference in the salmon? I feel like these salmons were maybe brothers. Or sisters? Siblings? Cousins? Lovers? I think that one tastes a little bit better to me. Okay. Can I eat some of your food? Thanks. Yeah, please do. Alright, I’m hungry. You were saying? Okay, I’m ready to guess. Gwynedd, which dish did you prefer? I preferred this one. Why, why come? Why come? I don’t know, I like the mix of vegetables a little bit better. They also look like they have more color. Those peas are very, like, canned pea color. And those look like frozen peas, which I think are like slightly higher on the hierarchy of peas. You ever see Pleasantville? Yeah, no I have, yeah. When the world turns to color, it’s like that. I’m from the 90s. And Tobey, Tobey Maguire or Topher Grace? Tobey Maguire? Tobey Maguire. And Reese Witherspoon. Classic. It is a classic. Gwynedd, which dish do you feel is from Dollar Tree? I think this one’s from, from Dollar Tree. Yeah, you’re right. This one’s from Dollar Tree. This costs about $5.50 per plate, which, like, $5.50 for a beautiful meal. Five ounce portion of salmon, pretty good. And then this is from Aldi. It costs about $9, the entire thing. We did have to use canned peas and canned green beans in this, whereas this, you get the frozen, you get that additional pop of brightness. And then the salmon from Dollar Tree said you should cook it from frozen. You’re right, that doesn’t taste as fresh as that one, but still, you know, serviceable. It is not bad. At all. Dollar Tree. Not bad. How many cheeses in each ravioli? One, five. Okay. I know. So when you’re flinging hay from a deficit like that, what can you do? Gwynedd, thank you so much for your brutal honesty and for introducing me to the culture of Florida. It’s what I do best. And thank you all so much for stopping by Mythical Kitchen. We’ve got new episodes out every week. You know the deal. Like, don’t like, comment, subscribe. No, no, no. Tag a friend who is from Florida and say, what’s going on down there? Yeah. We should know. We deserve to know. And what kind of Gatorade are you? That too. Gatorade flavors are the new zodiac signs. Check out which Gatorade flavor you are at sporked.com