It’s a bulk buy grudge match. It’s Costco vs. Sam’s Club. Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. Today, we’ll be answering the question. Does it actually matter where you buy your groceries? We’ll be making two identical dishes. We’re doing burgers and onion rings. One will be made with ingredients from Sam’s Club. The other will be made with ingredients from Costco. Then a judge will taste the two and see if they can decide which is from what grocery store. It’s a bulk buy grudge. Stop being sick. What did we say about being sick in the Mythical Kitchen? If we do it, we have to go to the closet in the corner. Yes, corner closet. That’s called discipline. We don’t, no, we don’t do that. I’m so sorry, Nicole. The Kitcheneers are sick, currently in the corner closet, but also, they went out and bought groceries. Let’s see what they got. Welcome to Costco. I love you. Welcome to Sam’s Club. Buy a gallon of mustard. We’re doing Costco vs. Sam’s Club today. These are the two major bulk buy wholesale retailers in America. Costco, I believe, went public in 1980 and was founded in the late 70s. And then Sam’s Club, which is from the Walton family of Walmart fame. They started this in 1987, so there ended up being this, like, huge rush. And they are direct competitors. And I’m so overwhelmed right now. Guys, someone, someone gotta make French onion soup because we’re making onion rings and we need like one onion. But that’s what these stores do. They make you buy in bulk, which can be great if you are a large family. And then if you are my roommate, Sean, in college, you end up with 15 pounds of spinach and I have to make spanakopita out of the rest of it because it was starting to go bad. But we’re making a hamburger with onion rings today. We’re really stoked because normally we do this with Dollar Tree and they ain’t got no produce. So we have a bevy of fresh produce over here. The total price of all the Costco ingredients to make one hamburger. It was $226 and it was $174 over at Sam’s Club, that’s a 23 percent difference. The quantities are so similar and the products are so, so similar they have. that the actual cost per dish is going to end up being the same change as well. It’s 23 percent cheaper over at Sam’s Club, which I didn’t expect. Cause I didn’t grow up with Sam’s Club. I grew up with Costco and the only reason I went there is because they have something called a chicken bake, which is a Costco sized Hot Pocket filled with hot Caesar dressing. I love that. So the main differences here. We got different beers, because they both carry different beers. We’re using Negra Modelo over at the Sam’s Club. For our onion rings, we’re using Michelob Ultra, someone got to take home 23 beers now! It’s still summer, we’re gonna have a party. And then, certain key differences, you’ll see some name brand switches. So we got Kraft Mayo over at Sam’s Club. We got Best Foods, A.K.A. Hellmann’s, over at the Costco, and I’m a big Best Foods guy. But you got the same singles. You got, you know, similar looking tomatoes over here, the plastic packaging versus Costco just lumping everything into random boxes. How much do you think that saves Costco every year? Because you go to Costco, they ain’t got no bags, they’re just shoving stuff in old boxes and it never quite works out. And I feel like it’s just for show at some point. It’s like TSA, it does nothing, but it makes people feel a type of way. Another funny difference. Over at Sam’s Club, you got the regular tomato ketchup, and then over at Costco, you got the Simply Tomato Ketchup, which I actually really love. I think that could be the key here, because we’re working with the same, like, 80/20 lean ground beef. A lot of these might be even coming from the same factory. You look at the spices, they look very similar, very similar grind, very similar color on the paprika there. Kirkland, got the apple cider vinegar over here. Name Brand over at Sam’s Club with Bragg’s. Let’s see if that three drops of apple cider vinegar make a difference. I don’t know how this is going to shake out. The buns are going to be a key difference. Ballpark, I grew up eating those buns. But over at Sam’s Club, you got Aunt Hattie’s restaurant hamburger buns. Those look a little bit better. This is going to be a dog fight. And my god, somebody, we’re doing a bar, we’re doing a poolside barbecue. Guys, we got to get together tomorrow because we’re gonna have a lot of leftovers. Let’s get cooking. I think I got a concussion when one of the Costco flower bags hit me in the head off of the ninth shelf because I’m seeing double right now. These are the same, friends. This is from the Costco over here. This is from the Sam’s Club over here, but I’m seeing the same thing. The only differences here, the paprika is redder. on the Sam’s Club. The paprika over here is browner. This is the Simply Ketchup. I want to see if we can taste the difference between the Simply Ketchup and the complexly ketchup. Not to be confused with, is Hank Green’s company called Complexly? Yeah, not to be confused with the Hank Green company. Shout out Hank, friend of the show. Complexly ketchup. Simply Ketchup? Nope, they’re the same. Well, whatever. We’re gonna make a burger sauce right here. So we’re just gonna dump, Boom. Mayonnaise going in. Classic Thousand Island style, but with a little bit of mustard in it because that’s how McDonald’s does it. Boom. Gonna add a little bit of sugar, paprika. I’m convinced that adding red dust to your food makes it better. Little bit of cider vinegar for some tang. A little bit of garlic powder for some garlic. Mustard, a little bit of umami comes with mustard. That’s not true at all, but I feel it. You know what I mean, scientifically? There’s no umami in mustard, but in my mind, I think that there’s umami in it. Give that a quick stir. Rotate the bowl, it goes faster. Because if you rotate the bowl at the same velocity that you’re rotating the spoon, you’re doubling the velocity. I got a D minus in physics in high school, so take that for what it’s worth. Okay, come over here, dumpy dump. This mayonnaise looks more like scrambled eggs. Astute cooking observation, professional chef man. Thank you. Dump the ketchup. Sugar, literally the same brand. Paprika, okay, the redder the paprika, the better. That’s what they say in Hungary. Cider vin. Oh, the difference also in cider vin. And wait, let me take some slurps here. So those are identical. That’s fun. Slop some mustard in there. The amount of vinegar that I’ve taken, like, shots on this show? Probably more than most cooking shows, I’ll tell you that. Give this a stir. Ree Drummond ain’t gotta shoot vinegar on her show. Ree Drummond. Pioneer Woman. She’s like one of the top 20 biggest landowners in America. You guys know that? Do you guys know that because of me? What stories haven’t I told you? This is something that I actually do at home. So I cut this off. This is for Caesar salads. That goes over here. You save that for later. Cause you want the crunchier, actually, if we’re being honest, like that’s for Caesar salads. Because you want the leafier part for salads and then the crunchy, ribs. Now that’s for hamburgers. We’re really going nose to tail on the cooking. We’re gonna make shred-tuce here. I’m actually gonna make one cut down here. And then you wanna pack it as tightly as possible. And then just run your knife. Well, I prefer shred-tuce on burgers, especially using romaine instead of iceberg. So you just want to make that like thick nest. And then you’re breaking up the thick ribs, but still getting that nice nutty crunchiness. Yeah, there you go. Thinly shredded shred-tuce.. That’s gorgeous. All right. That is where, and then it doesn’t matter because that’s all going in my Caesar salad at home. Okay. Oh, I forgot to make the cut across the ribs because you don’t want your strands to be too long. I like this lettuce because it has more heel to it. There we go. That is such poor, such poor knife cuts, Josh. I, you can’t fire me, I quit. All right, tomatoes. I like thin slices of tomato, and then I like to layer them. Also, always salt your tomatoes on a hamburger. I even started, dude, I’ve been making a lot of burgers at home, that was a bad cut. I’ve been making a lot of burgers at home, and what I’ve been doing is I will cut the tomatoes, I will salt them, and I’ll let them sit on paper towels to dry off the excess moisture. Dude, I’ve really dialing this down. All right. This is, salad tomato at the end of it. Stack all your vegetable scraps over here, and then Josh takes these home, and he gets vegetables. Doesn’t have to go to the store on the way home, because he has to pick up his dry cleaning. And that’s already gonna take 12 minutes. Stop for another 12 minutes at the store? Get the hell out of here. Beautiful. Okay, let’s eat. Kind of like a pear that tastes like blood. Tomato’s like a pear that tastes like blood. It’s like a little salty, a little irony. There’s glutamates in it. It’s called blood pear. Anyways, you guys are weird. I like to do thin whole slices of white onion, like super diner style. Pop out the nipple of the onion. I don’t like it. We all have, I don’t think there’s much difference to taste here. The only difference we’re seeing is like, literally this sauce looks more orange because the paprika has more red in it. There was no dye in it, so it must’ve just been like, a brighter cultivar of pepper. This has the organic ketchup. Again, nothing we can tell here, but so far it is an even, dead heat. Now I got to get it to make something. Now I got to onion rings What? I smell toast. We got all this stuff from Costco over here. The difference, Costco’s using unbleached flour, that’s their cheapest option. Then over at Sam’s Club we got bleached flour. I don’t think it’s actually gonna make any difference, especially cause the beers are actually really different. We got the cheapest options in the smallest quantities possible. At Costco, it was. Michelob Ultra, and then over at the Sam’s Club, it was Modelo. They sold this in six pack. This is Negra Modelo. This happens to be my favorite, a lot of beers. I’m going to take home 11 of them beers. We start making a quick web ad right now. I don’t remember the last time we’ve made onion rings on this show, and I’m pretty stoked on it. We’re gonna get these onions tossed in flour. The way I like to do it is you put a dry dredge of flour on it that just soaks up a little bit of the moisture from the, actual onion skin right there. And then we’re going to dip them into a wet batter. They’re kind of a deceptively hard food to make well. You just gotta be really careful with your battering. There we go, as I say it, I just schlop flour all over the place and dump in. Black pepper, garlic powder, paprika. Again, that’s like a great holy trinity if you’re just trying to spice something up real quick. You get your pepper, you get your orange, you get your garlic in there, and then we’re gonna drop in our beer. I’m gonna make sure the beer is nice and cold. You actually typically don’t want to like stir a beer batter too much because then you’re gonna develop gluten once the water is added to it. So you want to kind of just like gently mix it in. There you go. There you go, stir nice and slow. I’m only saying to myself, because I know you all have self control. I don’t, man, I see something like this, I just want to power through that bad boy. There we go. Gently, Josh. Gently with the rabbits, Lenny. I’m gonna start doing the other one while I’m doing this. Hold on, we got this. I think this is working. I think this is, well, I think it’s working. You actually want some lumps to be left in the batter. That’s how you know you’re not overbeating it. I want to massage the batter. Swedish, not shiatsu. Sometimes leaves a hot rock. Nah, I don’t like getting massages, man. It freaks me out. Who taught me how to use the back of utensils? Annaliese, sometimes greatness can’t be taught. You know, it’s like, who taught Jimi Hendrix how to play the guitar left handed? No one. You know, he just picked up the guitar, flipped it upside down, right handed guitar. Became the best guitar player ever. He played it with his teeth. You know, that’s me and using the, backside of utensils. It just works to me. You get two sides. It’s like Darth Maul’s lightsaber, you know? It’s just, it’s obviously a better situation. That’s how he was able to fight both Liam Neeson and, What’s the guy’s name? Ewan McGregor. Same time. You know, I don’t recognize their character names. To me, I watch movies and the actors are just playing the actors. Well, I want to mash at it though. I said you’re not supposed to mash at it, but I really want to, just real quick. There we go. No, now i’m gonna do it for the other one though. So it’s gonna be even. Okay, great. This one looks thicker. I’ll just add a little bit of water to that. Don’t show, don’t show them this. It’s all the same. Don’t show the cup. Guys, don’t put any of this in there. I need more water. Give me a second. Onions are ready to be fried. We’re going to go with the Costco insert. So we’ve got to find some identical. I want to find my biggest. Guys, cut onion ring onions bigger than you think you need to. And then you want to drop them in the beer batter. You got to like work with deft hands here. There you go. Kind of scoop it over. And you’re gonna take this. And gently rest it in there. And don’t deep fry your finger. You’re gonna want to deep fry your finger, but you shouldn’t. Again, notes that are only for me. I just, there’s, if you have the right amount of batter on your finger, you can cook your finger to a perfect like medium rare with batter on the outside that’s edible. That’s all I’m saying. One more. And we’re gonna repeat this process until we got a bunch of onion rings. Get out of there. Get out of there. Okay. They’re stuck together. That’s fine. Sam’s Club onion rings are done. Let’s see if they look any different. The only difference really is the beer and then the bleached flour, which shouldn’t really do much. What I did with these is I wanted to cook in descending order so I could do the little Benihana stack. And then I’m going to keep doing that. So that’s the main difference that the Sam’s Club ones are like a volcano, whereas the Costco ones are just laying there all stupid. These do look better though. They look more golden. I think it’s probably just the color of the beer. The batters look somewhat similar, but all I can tell you, these are some good onion rings, man, I’m about to have a good day. Hey, have you ever walked into a Costco and you get very overwhelmed by the labyrinthine maze and you wish you had a virtual guide to go through there? Well, what if I told you that Cortana, that’s right, the evil robot that leads you through the Halo franchise, will do that. No, you can go to sporked.com and they write about all of their own Costco favorites, including fall. Just the concept of fall. They write about that. No, you got, go to sporked.com They got Costco guides, you know what I’m saying. We gotta make hamburgers now. We’re gonna do a little smashy smash on them. We got 80/20 ground beef that, again, I think this came, actually, it didn’t come from the same cow, because any time you buy ground beef, you’re likely getting cows from three different continents or more mashed into one burger patty. A lot of people find that horrifying. I think it’s kind of beautiful. We live in a world without borders. Embrace it. All right. Beautiful. We have avocado oil from both places. Avocado oil. Great for a high heat cooking. Just going to swirl that around. I’m gonna get a nice little Maillard crust on it and put the exact same amount of salt on both. We’re going like proper smash burger here. I don’t wanna do it, man. I wanna eat some tasty hamburgers. Buns! Ballpark! Hamburger bun. Got sesame seeds. This one, less sesame seeds, but is more browner! See how that shakes out. Alright, these are smoking. Get them on. Check this out. Pow, right there. Gotta work quick. Gotta work quick. Do your shuffle, Josh. And then, we’re gonna take Yeah! I was gonna go lefty on that one, but I am so bad with my left hand. Boom. Little bit more smash on that one. There we go. Peel off the. We’re good. Peel off the. We’re good. A little bit more salt. Oh, and then now we’re gonna build the burgers as that’s going on. We got the sauce here. Again, from Sam’s Club, a little bit more orange. Still don’t know what to do with my left hand, so it’s going here. Two slices of cheese, slightly offset them, that’s gonna melt. Super nice, that’s gonna melt to be super nice. Golly, smash it down. It’s all getting me in the face! Alright, we’re gonna go right off the griddle, so we gotta work fast. Bottomings! Lettuce goes directly on the bottom. That gives you, it’s coming right up into my face. That’s going to give you a nest of beef juice, salted tomatoes, on top of the lettuce. That’s what the burger. That’s what the burger rests on. Lettuce. You son of a biscuit! Get. You piece of crap! It’s like my cat anytime after 5pm because Julia says, don’t feed him till 6! And then he just bites me all the time. I’m always walking around the house going no! Alright, burgers are done. Kill the heat. Cheese is sweaty. That’s what you want. No resting of the burger. Going right on top. Beautiful crust on that hamburger. I know what you’re saying. Hamburger? I thought this was a beef burger, you’re so stupid. Sitting in Germany, dumb-dumb. Alright, just gonna, we’re just leaving it there. Onion! I like to put onion directly on top of the hamburger. What strategic advantage does this give you? None! Do I put the whole thing? Screw it, we’re doing the whole thing. Take a whole, nice onion. That goes, yeah. Big onion energy, that’s what I’m talking about. Pickles! We’ve sliced up some pickles. They are, we got loads of little pickles. Sorry, I railed a Diet Coke. Hell yeah. I had to look at it because I can’t see over here. Our hamburgers are done. We got some beautiful smash burgers, some American cheese on there, all the toppings. We got some onion rings to serve it with. I can’t imagine there’s gonna be any difference between these, but I mean a 23 percent increase in price, that’s not too too similar. I mean if they raised all your grocery price to 23%, you’d be pretty bummed out. So, right now, this is kind of Costco’s to lose and Sam Club’s in the lead. We’ll see what happens when our judge gets here to taste it. Let’s find out. Gwynedd, we got hamburgers today, and some onion rings. If you couldn’t tell what these were, that’s it. One is made with ingredients from the Costco. Okay. Short for Cost Company. Got it. And the other is short for Sam’s Club. What’s Sam short for? Sammington, actually. That’s a family name. You want me to cut the burger in half for you? Okay. Alright, cool. Do you like Costco? I think when I have three large sons, I’m going to love the Costco. But for right now, I just don’t need to buy in bulk. – And. – No, totally. When I was in college, I had friends that would be like, oh, a 15 pound bag of fresh spinach. Really? And then they’d use like. What healthy college kids you knew. Well, the problem is they weren’t, because they didn’t eat the damn spinach, and it would just sit in our fridge Just rot, I know. Eat! Yay! Okay. I mean, this looks incredible. Can I have a bite of the other half? Yeah, yeah. Technically, you own the burgers now. Oh my god. It’s so good. We’re really good at cooking here. I know. Your big sons are gonna love your hamburgers. I can’t wait to meet them. Especially Thorbuild. And Papriko. Well, Paprika if its a girl, but Papriko if its a boy. That’s so convenient that it can, yeah, go either way. Unbelievable, like fluffy batter on these. Yeah, but still. It’s so good. I love it. I like when you compliment us, it feels nice. Oh my God, I’m having so much fun right now. Okay, it’s really saucy in a good way. Like this is a very delicious burger sauce. The quality of the meat is very good. I think I like this bun better than this bun, visually. Cause this one has so many more sesame seeds on it. But that one is? But this one is? More browner. More browner, yeah, you’re right. Yes, that’s correct. I’m a chef. Oh man, this is gonna be hard. Don’t you think? Made the shit out of these burgers. Man, I guess this one maybe tastes a little more expensive. I haven’t tasted, an onion ring yet, so I’m gonna do that. I mean, look how beautiful that is. Man. It’s gotta make you proud. Yeah, look at that. Hold on. Good crunch. Thorbuild, Papriko, and Strong Bad. You ready? Gwynedd, you’re gonna put your hand over the winning dish in 3, 2, 1. And where do you think it’s from? Costco. You are correct. This is the Costco burger. What gave it away? Are you just that good at your job? I am. I mean, I just went to Costco for the first time in my life very recently. Wait, get the hell out of here. For work or pleasure? I also don’t have three large sons, so I don’t really need to buy in bulk. How small are your sons? They’re itty bitty. One’s in my pocket right now. What is, what’s going on? His name’s Hamish. I don’t understand what’s going on. But I like that you out weirded me. Oh good! Oh my god, I love to do that. Costco’s 23 percent more expensive and there were so few differences in, a lot of the products were literally the same name brands but Costco had organic, or not organic, but Simply Ketchup in the Heinz like sampler box and the buns are different. At Costco they had the Ballpark and over here I thought these looked better but I think this bun performed better. I agree. Got Aunt Hattie’s over there, but, like, pretty dead ringer. I didn’t realize Sam’s Club was that much cheaper though. I didn’t, I didn’t either. Thank you, Sam. Sammington. Sammington. Sammington. Samwise. They’re both delicious. I think you can shop at either place and you’re gonna like, make really good food as long as you’re Josh, and then you’re gonna be fine. My large sons are really gonna enjoy all the leftovers they have. Gwynedd, thank you so much for stopping by Mythical Kitchen. And thank you so much for stopping by. Spay and neuter your pets. Go out there, be kind to people, unless they’re your enemies. Then treat them with abject cruelty. Read The Prince by Machiavelli. Say bye to Hamish. Bye Hamish! Show your local grocery store that you mean business with the new Sporked collection. Available now at mythical.com