Today, we’re putting two grocery stores to the test. It’s Dollar Tree versus Walmart. Today, we’re answering the question, does it actually matter where you buy your groceries? We’re going to make one dish with ingredients from the Dollar Tree. We are going to make an identical dish with ingredients bought from the Walmart. We are going to have a judge eat them and guess which came from which grocery store to see if you actually got to spend that extra dough. The Kitcheneers are out shopping right now. Let’s see what they got. Now before we get into all these groceries, you might be saying, Josh, I can see every line on your face, every blemish, all of the coffee stains on your T-shirt because you didn’t get a straw from Starbucks this morning, and I’ll tell you why. Everybody, we are officially filming in 4K! Give it up, give it up. Every Tuesday and Thursday, coming at you live in 4K. My idea was to go back to 240p, called the old potato resolution. They said, Josh, that’s a bad idea. I said, that’s what makes me look most attractive. Let’s get into the things I do know about, groceries. Over here, we have all of our groceries from the Dollar Tree. Over here, all of them. from Walmart. We are making shrimp tacos with a little bit of peppers and onions in there. And then we’re making like a Mexican rice, you know, like the delicious tomatoey stuff with some vegetables in there. We’re using a lot of canned ingredients here. We’re going to make a hot sauce out of jalapeño and pineapple. We’re making something I call hot sauce-naise. AKA salsa cremosa. Chipotle mayo minus the Chipotle, it’s any sort of pink, orange, spicy, creamy thing. You’re going to want on your shrimp tacos. So if we’re looking at all the ingredients, the prices are very similar. We spent $45 total over at the Walmart. We spent $30 total over at the Dollar Tree. However, if you break it down on a taco per taco, dish per dish basis, it costs $7.03 at Walmart, $6.99 over at the Dollar Tree Walmart, like man, they really operate at a massive scale, so they can afford to make their products really cheap. The shrimp. They’re really similarly priced. It was only 6 percent more expensive over at the Walmart. The biggest differences we’re seeing, hot sauce is a lot cheaper at Walmart just because it is so big. However, if you think you can’t finish an entire quart of Valentina hot sauce, you really underestimate how delicious Valentina hot sauce is. My favorite thing to do is just a high pour over just a bag of chips and then you shake it up. That is fantastic. Most of the differences we’re seeing here, they’re only coming from scale. A lot of the quality seems really similar. I think the peppers and onions might give an edge over on the Walmart side. We’ve seen the vegetables over, ooh, this is a solid brick. We’ve seen the vegetables over at Dollar Tree. Sometimes they can get, a little bit janky, almost as if they’re using, like, the discard. But I mean, like, shrimp per shrimp, these look very similar. A lot of the canned vegetables are gonna be very similar. Rice is kinda rice, no matter where you go. We’ll see, man, this is gonna be a dogfight, but at the end of the day, I’m gonna get to eat a bunch of shrimp covered mayonnaise and that’s a good day. Listen, we’re no stranger to cooking with Dollar Tree ingredients here, and I actually really love these episodes. They’re some of my favorite to make because we’re giving, like, practical home cooking tips, which is all to say, we’re just like you. Other ways we’re just like you, our kitchen’s constantly broken. Yeah, we shattered some glass on the cooktop over here. We intend to get it fixed. But again, like you, we probably won’t. We’ll probably let the fire alarm do the like one beep every three minutes for four months until it slowly drives us insane and then we stop. Until then, we are going to make some like Mexican rice here. I grew up eating from a Rice-A-Roni box from something just called Mexican rice. But you know, you get that delicious orange rice. One of the things I really believe in is that rice tastes way better when it’s orange. So we’re going to show you how to do that right now. Gonna heat up some pans. Over here we got Dollar Tree. We’re gonna add some vegetables to it, because like, it’s a great way to sneak vegetables into your diet. If you have to trick yourself like you’re a small child, I totally get it. Get some canned carrots here. Let’s try these. The Dollar Tree carrots look way better than the Walmart carrots. I love, hold on. Let’s get back to overcooking vegetables. No more of the crunchy broccoli crap. Cook that into a mush. I’m in. Bunch of carrots. These, the carrots from Dollar Tree actually do taste a lot fresher. We’re adding some peas in there. Let’s just get to it, man. Enough yapping. Got yappers over here. A little bit of vegetable oil. What we’re gonna do is we’re gonna kind of like toast some garlic and spices and then we’re gonna get some rice in there. Rice is one of those things that if you’re trying to make a perfect bowl of steamed rice. Sometimes it can get hard and a lot of people screw it up. Myself included. We’re gonna add an onion, garlic, black pepper in here. But, if you add a bunch of flavors to your rice, you can sort of confound the palate. And even if it’s a little bit mushy, you got delicious orange flavor. The fresh garlic from Walmart looks a lot better. Yeah, you can smell the freshness on that garlic that is in a jar. A lot of chefs poo poo it. It’s, true, like, it’s not as powerful as regular garlic. I’m like, great. It’s 12 times cheaper and 12 times easier to use. I’m gonna add 12 times as much. Toast up the garlic, toast up the spices. You can smell it getting aromatic. Like use your nose to cook. Use a small rat under your hat to cook. Use anything that you have to cook. My cat helps me cook all the time. He comes and he throws up on the floor right outside the kitchen. And, when he does that, I go clean it up. And by the time I’m done cleaning it up, boom, spices are toasted. We’re adding some tomato purée to this. The tomato purée is adding, I don’t know if you know this, orange is a combination of yellow and red. And so the yellow of the chicken stock combined with the red of the tomato bingo bango, that’s the orange flavor your body craves. Tomato purées look about the same. If you have a little bit of technique when you’re, if you have a little bit of technique, I’m like, Elizabeth Tár? Lydia Tár. I’m sorry. I call her Liz, she and I know each other. I’m like Tár If you know how to use technique when you’re cooking rice, which is to say, toast the spices, add the tomato purée and cook it down a little bit to concentrate those flavors, get them nice and jammy and a little bit caramelized. You’re seeing that like beautiful, in 4K mother F-ers! Seeing that beautiful, like ruddy red color right there. Kick ass, man, that rules. Also, big fan of toasting your rice a little bit. And if your stuff starts to burn, add in rice, add in liquid, anything else you add in there, it’s gonna prevent the burning. Toast our rice up. Get the rice kind of coated in that. Also, if you coat the rice in fat, I don’t know if there’s science behind this, but I believe it. So, I’m gonna say it. If you coat the rice in fat, it doesn’t stick together as much. Add in our stock. Turn that down to a simmer. Bang, bang, flavor gang. Shout out to Chuck’s Flavor Train. He’s the person I stole bang, bang, flavor gang from. It’s my favorite thing to say. And I met him up in Napa. Chuck, you’re the best, man. Drop this to a simmer. You want to generally bring rice up to a boil. Stir it around, make sure it’s even. Drop it to a simmer. A lot more groaning today. Than I wanted to. Why does Arnold Schwarzenegger never come on the show? Dude, we’re basically making paella here. Cool, cool, cool. Stir that. I want to get a little taste on the broth real quick. We’re not adding salt because the chicken stock is already salted. Yeah, it’s gonna be good, man. That chicken stock is actually really solid. I’m not sure if it got the MSG in it, but it is tasty. A little lighter on flavor on the Dollar Tree one, at Walmart. I think the tomato puree, you can almost see it here, the tomato purée here feels more watery, and so I think we didn’t get as much of like a caramelization on it. This one’s got a little bit more depth of flavor, but I think it’s gonna even out to be pretty good. Both these are gonna be damn tasty, and I’m gonna cover it in mayonnaise, because, listen man, it’s shrimp taco night. I’m covering it in mayonnaise. We’re gonna cover these, let them simmer. I just fully turned off both pots. Don’t, don’t do that. Don’t do that. Without the cat throwing up near me, I have no internal timing mechanism. I just don’t know how to cook. Hey, do you want to find out what other Dollar Tree items are also great? Do you love typing URLs into a web browser? What if I told you to go to http://www.sporked.com and you can check out their rankings of all the Dollar Tree ingredients. Really, they do great work and they’ve ranked a lot of Dollar Tree stuff. So, you should do it. We’re gonna cook some shrimpies. We see we got the shrimpies from Walmart over here. They are a lot bigger and frankly look a lot better. These are probably like 21 to 30 shrimp. I guess these are one, these are 31 to 40. Oh, if you see numbers next to shrimp, that means how many of them there are per pound. I don’t know if people know about that. You guys know about that? It’s like the Dewey Decimal System, but for shrimp. And also I know what that is and I don’t know what the Dewey Decimal System is. But the shrimp here look a lot bigger. The shrimp at Dollar Tree also were not peeled of the vein. Maybe it explains why they’re a little bit cheaper. So we’re gonna sauté that up. First though, we’re gonna make a hot sauce, out of purely canned ingredients. Full disclosure, never done this before. We’re gonna see how it goes. But we’re gonna make like a pineapple jalapeño hot sauce. We’re gonna add some canned pineapple in there with a little bit of that liquid for some sweetness. Listen, there, there ain’t no appropriate ratios to this. So we’re just gonna go dumpy dumpy, see what happens. We’re gonna go five jalapeños in there. And then we got some white vinegar. Blend peppers with vinegar and salt and then anything else that you want to add flavor to. Add more salt than you think you need because that’s where the money in the hot sauce comes from. And then I have some extra water and a protein shaker back there. Again, just like you baby. Just like you drinking 50 grams of protein every three hours, you know what I mean? All right, good, good. Oh, God dang it! Stop it, no! Let’s see what that tastes like. What do you guys think? Well, it’s a really appealing color. It’s kind of like if you drank split pea soup and then went to the bathroom at the old Pea Soup Andersen’s and had to completely evacuate it. Okay! Okay, I’m not mad about that actually. The pineapple gives it some really nice sweetness, which is perfect for seafood. Seafood and some sort of citrus fruit go together really, really well. That kind of rules actually. I might thin it out. Should I thin it out a little bit? It’s gonna smell a little bit like protein powder, but we’re gonna use the water for both. So it’s gonna even it out. Yeah, that rules, man. Great. Hey, three, four, five ingredient hot sauce. If you count the protein powder. That’s pretty damn good, man. And do that. We’re gonna blend up the other one. Jalapeños and pineapple. Pop that in there. Big ol’ fat jalapeños. Most of my fruit intake as a child was canned pineapple liquid. And look at me, I turned out kick ass. So I can only endorse that. Protein powder residue, there’s probably a little bit of creatine in there as well. You’re gonna love that. Kids love creatine. That’s a thing I do know. We’re gonna pop the lid on. How do I? I’m just gonna blind Well this one turned into a much fresher version of split pea soup. This actually looks like it. So. Sorry, that got me in the back of the throat real quick. Damn, that one tastes way better. Why? I think the canned jalapeños were just a lot better in that one. We weighed it out. It’s the same amount of ingredients, but the, guys, Walmart is on the right. Damn, that’s delicious. We ate as good. This is Nicole’s idea. That’s a rad idea, Nicole. Great job. Thank you! No, I’m proud of you. I don’t say that. I’m proud of you. Yeah, for what? Name my achievements that you are most proud of. I think you’ve really improved, like, in your personal relationships. You think so? I’ve been, I’ve been going to therapy. I think you’re a really talented cook. Nice. You’re so funny. Yeah. And? I like your necklace. Oh, I, yeah, it’s, I’m a necklace guy. I think that you have sensible shoes. I got these on sale at Lulu Lemon. That’s the most interesting thing I’ve ever heard, Nicole. That’s incredible. On sale? Yeah. How much on sale? What are we talking about here? So, typically these are 149, but I got them for 112. I got, I got these Vans for 50 bucks. And I have great hip flexibility. I’ve been working on that too. Oh, yeah, I was gonna say, definitely. Thank you. Well, it’s good. It’s, you know, not without work. Pans are heating up. All right, you want your pan rip roaring hot anytime you’re cooking shrimp. They release a lot of moisture just like me. It’s, listen, we’re in the doldrums of summer here, and I am wet constantly. Just quarter cup of water floating down there. You don’t want it. Nobody wants it, but it’s there. You can tell the pan’s hot by smashing your hand directly onto the surface. You dare, you double dog dare me? Go ahead, try and evenly space the shrimp out. There we go. You don’t want to overcook your shrimp. Overcooking your shrimp is death. So we’re gonna get that in there. Boom, hit it with spices. We got chili powder, we got paprika, we got garlic, we got onion. We’re gonna add our shrimp over here. Go as quickly as possible. Burn your hands! Feel something! Rage against the dying of the light. I’m gonna go ahead, hit those, quick little flip. So these shrimp, much bigger, they’re gonna take a little bit longer to cook, probably. Way to tell if a shrimp is done. If they’re small you can kinda just tell, cause it doesn’t take very long to cook. But if they’re big like this, the key that you’re looking for, you don’t want them to be a C shape. C shape, if they fully close, that means they’re overcooked. But if they’re a nice J. You want to pull them because they’re going to continue to cook off the heat. I’m going to add a little bit of garlic. Don’t be afraid also like don’t be afraid to like really season your damn food, like, especially if you’re working with ingredients from Dollar Tree and Walmart. Stuff like onion powder, garlic powder, paprika, black pepper, simple spices. You use them in the right way. They really can go a long way. I’m a big fan. Don’t buy into this food purity nonsense. I do have a food purity ring though. The Jonas Brothers told me to get one. These are cooking quick, so I’m gonna go. I’m gonna go. I’m gonna add my peppers and onions. Just get those kind of heated through. Drop in a little bit of lemon juice, I actually do like to cook acids into my protein sometimes. Acid does not get less acidic when you add heat to it, but the perceived acidity changes, which is interesting, but you can just add acid while things are cooking. It doesn’t always have to be off the heat. Like, I feel like a lot of French chefs would tell you. Little bit of hot sauce. Ooh, that Valentina, she’s thick. Valentina, girl, where’d you get all that from? We’re pulling it, man. All we gotta do is make some tacos, make some hot sauce-naise, pull that rice off. Like, calm down. Over on the Dollar Tree side, we have Kraft Mayo. It is the whitest, not necessarily culturally, maybe, but also just in color. That is incredible. It’s like they have bleached their mayonnaise. And we’re gonna add some Goya hot sauce to it. We need more orange. We need more appealing to the palette. I should be, you know the, the commercials for like the Duncan Williams paint shop or whatever? And there’s like a guy blending paint? I like that. I could be that. But for mayonnaise and hot sauce, just that. Is that a job? I guess it is a job right now. I’m getting paid. We got our hot sauce-naise. I wanna try it, man. There’s no better combination of foods in the world. You’ll be like, peanut butter and jelly. No way, man. Hot sauce and mayonnaise. Great, best thing I’ve ever had. Also the best thing I’ve ever had. Love that. It’s actually, this mayonnaise does taste sweeter, which is interesting. I’m wondering if there’s less salt in the hot sauce or more sugar in the mayonnaise. That’s fun though. Alright, toasting up tortillas. This, Dollar Tree, for whatever reason, has incredible flour tortillas. It’s a brand called Del Barrio. And you can see, like, if you can see your hand through a tortilla, which you can because it’s 4K, baby! That’s a good sign. That means there’s a lot of lard in there. That means that it is generally pressed very thin. Walmart, can’t see the hand as much. Also, this feels a little bit plasticky, but we’re gonna dry toast the tortillas in there. Big fan of dry toasting it. Some people will throw it directly on the burner. I’m just not a fan because for me, I feel like I can taste the butane. Am I crazy for that? Wait, even like blowtorch food, you go to like a nice sushi bar and they’ll like blowtorch some crap on there. I feel like I’m just eating a gas tank, man. If I want to eat a gas tank, I’ll eat a damn gas tank. Boom, done. If you want to serve these, keep them hot, wrap them in a damp dishcloth or paper towel. And we’re gonna, I think what I’m gonna do, this is what I want to do, this is how I eat at home. Just a layer of mayonnaise, unashamedly. Also, if you go to any restaurant and they’re covering something in like a mysterious orange squiggle, it’s just mayonnaise, dude. Yeah, load that up with shrimp. Shake up this hot sauce. Turn that. That’s looking great. These are incredible tortillas. Get some of that hot sauce on there. Fold it over. That’s good. Pow. Out. Yeah. Oh, hip cramp, hip cramp. Fight through the pain. There you go. Making mayonnaise tacos is an extreme sport. We’re gonna get more shrimpies in here. Oh, hot sauce. This hot sauce seems to have separated. The Dollar Tree hot sauce with the pineapple and the jalapeño has separated and I don’t know why. Could have been the pineapple wasn’t cooked for as long in the, in the can before it was canned. We’re about to find out what that’s about. Close up that taco. Get a nice portion of rice. I’m gonna burn myself. Nice portion of rice. We got any garnish? Somebody get me like a, I don’t know, a toothpick with three olives and some cocktail onions on it. Random sprig of rosemary sticking out of the rice. You guys like that? That’s how you know a restaurant’s gonna be bad if there’s just like a stick of rosemary fully sticking out of mashed potatoes. That’s just like, you didn’t figure out anything better in the last 30 years to do than that? Times have changed. This is so close to what I’m gonna eat for dinner tonight completely independent of this episode. This is it. This is how I eat at home. I think it’s great. Here we got your shrimp tacos with a hot sauce mayonnaise, a little pineapple jalapeño hot sauce, some red Mexican rice with vegetables thrown in there. I think this is going to be a dog fight. These are two very close dishes at a very close price point. Again, $7.03. $6.99 here. Let’s see what the judge has to say. Gwynedd Stuart, from sporked.com How many Dollar Tree items have you ranked? Don’t be scared! Why would you be scared? How many Dollar Tree items have I ranked? Yeah, we were talking up your Dollar Tree rankings earlier. Yeah, we go, me specifically, I have been to Dollar Tree a number of times. I think they always have like really weird unique stuff there. Have you been shopping at a Dollar Tree recently? I sure have. In fact, one of these dishes came from the Dollar Tree. And one of them was plucked from the Walmart tree. – Okay. – That’s your job to figure out which. We got shrimp tacos. We actually have a little bit of pineapple and jalapeño hot sauce. That sounds nice. All from canned ingredients. And then we got a little bit of like Mexican rice and vegetables thrown in there. A little bit of hot sauce-naise, peppers and onions in the taco. Dig in. Enjoy. OK, sounds good. I’m going to start with this one. Yeah, we don’t know why that hot sauce separated and this one didn’t. Should I give it a shake? Give it a shake. Give it a shake. Give it a try. Okay, there’s already the creamy sauce inside of this. Yeah, there’s already both sauces inside of there, if I’m being honest. Oh, okay. Load it up. Thank you for your honesty. It’s much appreciated. Okay, I’m gonna give this one a bite. Looks nice, right? Oh, shrimp. Call that the devil’s share. I mean, with the sauces and everything it’s really good because you get the creamy sauce and then it’s like the brightness of this sauce, too. Sorry, I didn’t mean to slam it down like that. You’re drunk, go home. Yeah, I know. Okay, bye. These rices look very similar. I feel like usually when we’re doing these, like, the veggies are like a tell-tale sign. But these veggies look very similar. Everything from a can. But when you’re boiling it in a bunch of rice, they’re already gonna get overcooked. No, I love that. I think that canned vegetables are good in rice. It’s good. Tastes great. I wanna taste like an individual shrump. Just a little shrumpy. People don’t know that shrimp is the plural. Shrump is the actual singular. That’s true. I don’t know, that’s pretty good. – Okay, I just gotta. – Well, you haven’t taken your shot of hot sauce-naise Okay. It’s meant to be like an after dinner palate cleanser. Bottoms up. These shrimp are much larger. – Yes. – Did you notice that? Some people say that it doesn’t matter. You’re so astute. Oh, okay. It’s more just about the ergonomics of it all, you know? The motion in the ocean. Okay. Okay, it’s very good too. It’s gonna be harder for me to tell what’s what with this one, I think. Because they’re both pretty good. No one said your job was easy, man. You know, rise to the occasion. I know, I need help. Someone help me. Are you tasting any difference between the rices? And are you seeing any differences? I do see a difference in the rices. The description I would give is that these grains of rice have kind of split. Does that make sense to you? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, so, typically you would sift rice. Typically the higher quality rice will be more sifted, and have more whole grains in it. Wow. Yeah. That’s so interesting because the rice that’s like split, I like it better. I don’t, it reminds me more of like what you get at a Mexican restaurant. 100%. I like that. Gwynedd, I’m going to give you a count of three, two, one. And at one, you are going to put your hand over the dish that you like better. Okay. In three, two, one. Wow. And which one do you think is Dollar Tree? And which one do you think is Walmart? So I actually like this one better, but I think this is the Dollar Tree one. Gwynedd Stuart from sporked.com You are absolutely correct. That is Dollar Tree. And I think, what was the giveaway for you? The smaller shrimp. Yeah. But, like I said, I like that kind of rice. – I agree, and also. – It tastes great. Most people wouldn’t even say the shrimp is small, most would say that’s average, and these are kinda like too big and unwieldy, and I think intimidating for a lot of people, frankly. It doesn’t even, your mouth can’t fit around it. I’m not making, I’m not trying to make anyone feel self-conscious. – No. – I’m just saying. We’re shrimp positive in this kitchen. Gwynedd, thank you so much. Can I eat all these leftover shrimp? Absolutely. Thank God, and thank you all so much for stopping by the Mythical Kitchen. We got new episodes for you every week. You know the deal. Comment your favorite sporked.com article below. Yes! Get the most out of your local Dollar Tree with Sporked’s recommendations for the best drinks, snacks, and more. What are you waiting for? Head over to sporked.com