Today we’re putting two grocery stores to the test. It’s Walmart versus Target. Today we’ll be answering the question, does it actually matter where you buy your groceries? I will be making one, just like a nice chicken, vegetable, and potato dish. You’ve eaten dinner from Walmart, and then one of them bad boys from the Target. We are going to have a judge taste each dish and see if they can tell which came from which store. Now we got the kitcheneers out shopping. Let’s see what they got. We’re cooking normcore dinner today. The first thing I do when I wake up is I make my breakfast, it’s collagen water. And then I want something simple, so I’m gonna make buckwheat waffles. I milled the buckwheat while my husband rested like the lord on the seventh day. I’m so sorry, I’ve been mainlining so much Nara Smith content. Love her to death. Husband’s so handsome. Again, we’re making some like real normcore food here. This isn’t food that I make a lot. Normally I like to, I don’t know, get all the entrails out of a crab carrot base and stuff it with mac and cheese. But today, we’re making a very simple pan seared chicken breast with a pan sauce and then some mashed potatoes, some broccoli. Blanched, seasoned, sautéed. It’s going to be delightful. Everybody should need to know how to make a chicken breast. And if you were not there for the Cook Food Good era of Mythical Kitchen, R.I.P. You might not know how to make a chicken breast taste good, so we’re gonna teach you how to do that. Now, we spent $80 over at the Walmart for the entire recipe, and we spent $74 over at Target. This is what $80 buys you now? Damn, dude, I get all those tweets about inflation. That sucks. Anywhom, when you actually break it down on a per dish basis, Target is about 30 percent more expensive overall. And you kind of see it across everything. Everything’s just a little bit more expensive at Target. The big ticket items, chicken breast. This chicken breast is $2.50 per pound at Walmart. That gives me like a little bit of hope that you can still get animal flesh for $2.50 a pound. These are gigantic chicken breasts. We’ll figure out how to butterfly those. Over here, you got some slightly more discreet. We’ll see if there’s a difference in the taste. To me, chicken is something that I will spend extra money on, especially because there’s woody tissue syndrome. We know about this? Like 10 to 20 percent of our chickens are infected with this mysterious muscular disease, and nobody really knows where it comes from, and it makes your chicken taste kind of crunchy. And it’s a weird plague, but any whom. So I will spend more money on chicken, but, over here at Walmart, it is very cheap. The other interesting fact that we found out, spices. If you go to Walmart and you’re just getting Great Value, which is their in house store brand, they are so dirt cheap, but they have a limited spice selection. So, if you have to get the name brand stuff at Walmart, it is a lot more expensive than if you go to Target. They have a better selection of spices in their own store brand. So that’s the only thing that we actually saw was cheaper over at the Target. I’m really curious about this. I think potato for potato, those are probably coming from the same farm. These olive oils were definitely bottled in the same facility. I’m curious. Actually, no, one more crazy thing. Why the hell this mustard so gray? What graying agent did they add to this? That is crazy. Well, anyways, this one’s gonna look like crap. But those are probably going to taste different in our little Dijon honey pan sauce. I’m ready to get cooking, man. Let’s make some normcore food. Let’s cook for our 15 children. Let’s do it, baby. Are there two different things of potatoes, or did I just get a concussion? I’m seeing double, this is crazy. That’s the show. These are Yukon Golds, they’re maybe my favorite potato for mashing. I think russets are too starchy. I know people like them. Not this guy with the concussion. What we did, we simply boiled them in water. And then, the trick that I like to do, it’s a little annoying, but you drain them. Pop them in the oven for like 10 minutes to evaporate some of the water, because otherwise, you’re just getting a bunch of water in your potatoes. So, we’re gonna go ahead and add some of our milk. I can’t just drink this out of here. That’s not hygienic. I’m learning. I may have a concussion, but I want to taste the milk. It’s also half and half. It’s half milk. It’s at least, the glass is half milk. That’s what I believe. We’re going to add the butter to it. There we go. Jiminy Christmas. Okay. Go ahead and mash ambidexterously. I just want to melt some of that butter. I don’t want to add kind of coldish cream, but also keep all your stuff. I’m kind of body rocking here. I look like, what’s the Australian breakdancer? RayGun. RayGun. I hate that every, who won gold in breakdancing? Either men or women. That sucks. That sucks that we don’t know that and we do know Raygun, God. I think not only did she single handedly destroy breakdancing, I think she single handedly destroyed academia across the world. I kinda believe that. I think there’s gonna be not only backlash against the breakdancing, cause it’s already out of the Olympics. You saw they announced that. They were just like, no more. No more thanks to her. But even like academics, people are just like, if that’s what you can get a PhD in, we should kill the whole system. I don’t know that I disagree. I’m glad I didn’t graduate college. We’re using white pepper. If you’re classically French trained, you would know that anything white, you should not use black pepper with, you should use white pepper so as to not see specks, because then the aristocracy. No, no, no, don’t use that one, don’t use that one, don’t use that one. Oh my God, the episode was almost ruined. I totally forgot what I was doing. Well, don’t put it over there. I know, I still remember, it’s on the left. Why are you putting it next to it? It’s not like, can you all calm down? I am a professional, is something that I think I’ve yelled probably nine or ten times a day. And if you have to keep reminding people, not great. There we go, a little bit more, measured, boom. Okay, we’re gonna mash that all in there, and garlic. Roasted garlic’s overrated to me. Like, I want to, I want to feel something. I want to ride the lightning of raw garlic sometimes. Interesting thing here, they’re feeding the same hormones to the chickens as they are the garlics, dude. This is nuts. This is like, I told you not to worry about it, man. And then, I’m gonna grab I wanna try this, cause I have this theory that I believe to be true, which is that the bigger a vegetable is, the less good it tastes. This is on that side. I want to see if this is the same pungency. So we’re gonna kind of, I understand in Goodfellas, they slice the garlic with it, but the only Scorsese movie I’ve seen is Gangs of New York. And so I’m just gonna do that and like, okay. Try that. Have you guys seen Gangs of New York? No? Not one of you? Okay, let me slice. This, this tiny knife is kind of working well. Okay, let’s mainline some raw garlic. Big garlic? Tastes like. Tastes like garlic. That’s so funny, this is, the smaller one literally is sharper than the bigger one. However, when I’m cooking at home, you’re under a time crunch, right? You’re trying to get on the couch, run some Rocket League, while Julia, like, paints or does something adorable. And so I will go for the bigger cloves of garlic because they’re easier to freaking cut than shelling all the other ones. So we’re gonna grate like half a clove in here. I’m gonna try and add a little more. Full clove is gonna be a lot. Even though it is. Send it! Negating what you said eight seconds ago. Full clove. Full clove. Good. And now, yeah, we’re going whole clove per whole clove. You give me big, dull garlic. I’m gonna grate a whole clove of each. Great. Perfect. Grand. Fine. Okay. Whip that. God, it is so much easier. Let’s give them a taste. Oh, man. I used to think I didn’t like mashed potatoes. Kind of into that, cause to me it’s just a vehicle for raw garlic. I love that. It is really well seasoned. Mash is good. I don’t think there’s gonna be, I can’t imagine there’s any difference. The garlic is gonna be the big difference here. So funny, we grated a whole clove of garlic into that. That was double the size of that whole clove of garlic. This tastes like less garlic. Everything else was measured out to the gram. That’s so funny, man. The garlic at Target is, without the hormones, that au naturel, natty, body building garlic is so much more pungent. All right, man, well, we already got some key differences. Let’s make some chicken. Hey, you! Do you want to know what groceries to buy at Target and Walmart? Well, you can head over to sporked.com where they’ve written several articles about the best groceries at each. Check out sporked.com, your official home of, collectible antique sporks. Is that what they do? Right now, we’re gonna make some chicken. As you can see, we’ve put the chicken into little bags. Because what we’re gonna do, these are both 14 ounce chicken breasts, which I cannot stress enough, in nature, chickens should not have breasts that big. And I know, who am I to be the breast police of the world? But when I was nine years old, I did have a shirt that said, it said, female boobie inspector. And I, I was like a, like a really large child. And I think I bought this shirt for five dollars at the Venice Beach. And I would just wear that. Where were my parents? Well, I know where my parents were, but. Anytime I don’t get a chance to pre-salt my chicken, either a wet brine or a dry brine, whenever I buy groceries, I literally just salt all my meat and throw it in the fridge. Like I’m a freaking doomsday prepper. But that’s how you make meat taste the best. But if you can’t do that, cause sometimes you can’t, just season it really well, put a tasty sauce on it. I’m going to pound these out because another key to chicken breast cookery is making sure the thin part is just as thin as the thick part or at least getting yourself somewhat of the way there because the thin part is going to cook faster, that’s going to get drier, have a higher internal temp than the thick part. The big old hormone boys over here at the Walmart. This is really thick, so I’m gonna need to pound it out. I don’t really have room to do it here, so I’m just gonna turn my back to you guys. Give me a sec. And this is the big reveal that I’m wearing shorts. You know which chicken is which? What? Do you know which chicken is which? Yeah. Well, what I’ve done is I’ve switched them. So if I just simply pivot over my right foot, then we’re back to the original. So as long as these don’t cross. Oh no. Oh no. As long as, no, the Walmart is in my left hand. I am a professional. You want to do it like pretty, you want to do it pretty gently. Cause you don’t want to like actually bruise the chicken meat sometimes. You want to bash it kind of gently. Because otherwise you can like physically split the chicken breast apart. I don’t like, what are they laughing at? It’s supernatural to do what I’m doing. You gotta beat your meat or else you’re gonna have a bad dinner. We are getting there. I don’t like this. I really don’t know what’s going on. Does it look like I’m? Yes. It does? But I’m not, to be clear. They should know that. Put up, can we put up like a lower third that says Josh is not doing what it looks like he’s doing? This is salt. Again, you just gotta eyeball it, all this salt from up high, heavy, heavy, and now I’m doing something incredibly brave, that if this goes on TikTok, I’m gonna get destroyed for it. I am merely going to season a piece of chicken with salt and pepper, and then I’m going to open myself up, Like, who gets shot in Apocalypse Now, like, Willem Dafoe, you know? All the arrows penetrating me of people saying that I’m not seasoning my food properly, but. One, salt and pepper tastes delicious. A king in 1300s medieval Europe would weep at the amount of black pepper that I have on this chicken, but I’m going to put a lot of spices and love in the sauce. If you have a nice, well seasoned piece of meat that is properly cooked, and then you put a very flavorful sauce with many spices and other ingredients into it, that’s great. You don’t have to unload the entire spice rack on your meat every single time you cook. Sometimes a nice sauce can accompany it very well. Let me heat these pans up. Make a nice little pan sauce here. I do like searing some of the pepper into this core grouping the pepper. I need that Turkish guy who shoots just like he’s executing someone. Nevermind, man. Olympics still in the brain. Someone said I look like a wish.com Caeleb Dressel. I don’t even know what that means. Yeah, got a nice heavy sear. You’re gonna want some of the oil splatter on your shin. But, good news is, you’re wearing shorts. And then Vans with no socks. Just like all the kitchen professionals. Let that sear off. Two, three minutes. We just want to get a little bit of color on it. Again, you don’t have to worry about the internal temp yet. You’re gonna finish it in the sauce. All that steam heat kind of running through it. Give me about, I’m just getting destroyed with splatter shrapnel, this is fine. What? Yeah, I totally [BLEEP] up. I’ll tell you what, I didn’t even bring me a LaCroix, I brought myself a Celsius. And I remember that, you guys can drink from my old warm one that I’m drinking from. Here, I’ll get you LaCroixs. Oh, come on. No, no, no. We have nothing more important to do right now than get both of you La Croixs. You know, let’s go. Let’s do it. Well, I have another hot half drink one if you guys want it. The thing is, you asked me what flavor I want. Like, you said, what flavor do you want? And then, I always tell you, I don’t want coconut or clear. Yeah. And Annaliese likes coconut. Yeah, well, Annaliese doesn’t like coconut, but she’ll drink coconut. No, no, no, she likes it. You like coconut? Hey, can we have some quiet on set? Look at that. Nice and golden brown. Pan’s hot, but I don’t, what I don’t want to do is turn down the temperature at all. Why? Because, like it says on my apron, life’s too short to cook on medium. You never know what’s gonna become a catchphrase and what’s definitely not. Nicely seared. Great job, Josh. Going right back in the raw chicken pan. I know what people are saying. Josh, you have never followed proper food hygiene. Why start now? We’re boiling it in the sauce! It’s fine! Yeah, it’s pretty good. What order of operations should I do this in? Let’s figure this out. Well, I can, like, BS some stuff that I do. So, check this out. We got spices. We got dried dill, we have thyme, we have garlic powder, and we have a little bit of cayenne for heat. Add that in there, kind of toast up the spices and herbs. That’s a fun thing to do. Cool, cool, cool. Getting nice and toasty. And then we’re gonna take, I had a little baby spoon. We’re gonna take some Dijon mustard. Again, this is so, so, so gray. That’s incredible. But the yellow in mustard actually generally comes from turmeric anyways. It’s an okay Dijon. It’s like a Grey Poupon imitator, except it’s a little bit more acidic. Not a ton of that horseradishy punch that you want from Dijon. Let’s try the Walmart Dijon. It’s a much better mustard. You get like a lot more of that kind of astringency, which like that’s what you’re paying for, man. Cream cheese! Cream cheese! Great way to get creaminess into a sauce and hopefully not have it break. It’s a great little cheater thing. If we’re talking about normcore cooking, if we’re talking about tradwives, you can’t talk about tradwives without cream cheese, damn it. A little bit of water, about a half cup, just to thin out that sauce. Everything’s gonna cook together, come nice and homogenized. We hope, man. Love this. Okay, we gotta go. We gotta go. This cream cheese is melting. I want to use the metal whisk on the nonstick pans. I know people are going to be pretty mad about that, but I want to do it. You shouldn’t do it. Hold on, I’m, kind of, kind of bashing up the cream cheese right here, right here. Give me a sec. I sort of can’t, I need more water. I was literally just about to say, a great thing to do is add more water to your pans. And it is, it is a great, like a great thing to do. A thing that legitimately separates like good home cooks, good chefs from not good is water, right? Like that is, water and salt are the two main ingredients in almost all foods. So if you have a sauce that has over reduced, which is to say there’s not enough liquid and it’s burning, you have stuff scorching in a pan, the best way to shut that down immediately is to dump water into it. Because water, when it cooks out, it just becomes steam and it’ll be exactly as your pan left it. Understanding how water manipulates volume and temperature is super, super key in being a home cook. It’s like, you guys know Ricky Raindrop? Ricky, did I stutter? Ricky Raindrop. Ricky Raindrop was an anthropomorphic, water droplet that taught us how the water cycle works. He didn’t tell us about how Nestlé has just been stealing all the water from Southern California for 40 years. But, he taught, evaporation, condensation, percolation, right? Something like that. Chicken breast, back in the pan. Get, get off, idiot. All right. Wait. I think it might have it. Dude, I think we might have gotten a woody chicken breast. If we do, there’s no do overs. That’s what Walmart put out. Oh man, all right. Well, you guys already thought about it. All right. And ladle some of this sauce. Dude, that cream cheese is just. We all thought the cream cheese would just seamlessly melt in there, right? Yeah. I also thought you were gonna use the whisk, so. Yeah, I didn’t want to do. Dude, there’s so much [BLEEP] cream cheese chunks. God damn it. All right. Just lean into it. Yeah, we’re doing a chunky rustic cream cheese sauce, man. The other chicken. Why does it feel, why do I feel like I’ve cooked? Stop using the same spoon! Well, who gives an F, man? I do! Wait, okay, which, now what do you think the best move is? Lick the spoon. It’s hot! The final chicken cooking tip that I have for you is use a thermometer. The USDA says you should get it to 165 degrees. It’s not important what I think, and how that differs from the USDA’s health standards. I will say, at 155 degrees, salmonella is killed after being held for 17 seconds. 165 is merely the insta kill temperature for that particular bacteria. You choose your own adventure. I know what temp I’m bringing this chicken to. We got our chicken cut and sauced here and the jury is still out on Walmart whether or not it has that woody tissue syndrome. We’re not gonna try it until Jordan gets here, but it’s gonna be a fun adventure for all of us. Sauce tastes good. Now we’re gonna make something that I make, like, probably two, three times a week. We’re gonna take broccoli florets. These have been gently steamed and drained. I don’t know. Shocked? Shocked? A lot of things. We steam, we cooked this broccoli and put it in a bowl. Olive oil, a little bit of Jamie Oliver’s special, I call it. And butter, you got bitterness and like, complexity from the, I’m just, mixing oil and butter’s fun. I don’t know why we do it, but we do it. And then, shake that bad boy around, we’re going to drop the garlic into it. Lemon, garlic. Why doesn’t this? Crank that higher. Because why? Life’s too short to cook on medium! Thanks. Just gonna dump our broccoli in, just kind of get a little bit of a toast on it. There’s still gonna be a little bit of excess moisture on the broccoli. That’s why you’re hearing that fun sizzle and then this one, I think the butane’s low so it ain’t cooking as fast We’re gonna take that, as all that garlic’s toast and we’re gonna add lemon juice in there. That’s going to stop the cooking process. Fantastic. All you’re trying to do, get off, turn off the fire. All you’re trying to do is get all of that garlic and what not to adhere to the broc. Dump that bad boy in there. There it sizzles. Josh gets burned again. What’s new on the cooking show? Cool, so that butter, the lemon juice, the little bit of steam from the broccoli all kind of amalgamates into a sauce. Plate that up, make it nice. God, is this not the most normal ass dinner we’ve ever made on this show? I love it. Add the lemon juice. Fire! There you go. I feel like a lunch lady right now. I think that’s my retirement plan. It’s either that or track and field commentator. I think I’d be great, man. I’ve got to get Letsile Tebogo on the show. Nestle that in there. That’s for me. That’s snacking broccoli. Give it a nice little flippy flip. Perfect. Don’t use the tongs, because, oh, you’re going to get the broccoli smell from Target on the Walmart broccoli. Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. That’s right. No, Nicole, that’s right. Aiming for which one I want my last broccoli to be. This one’s the last one. Oh, we did it! The most normal thing we have ever made on this show. We have our chicken breast with our lovely honey Dijon pan sauce with all that guar gum infused cream cheese. We got our mashed potatoes, some broccoli, this is all gonna come down to the chicken breast today and I am curious to see who wins out. Jordan Myrick from sporked.com welcome to Mythical Kitchen. Hello. What is this? I think you ID’d it properly about two minutes ago, when you said, oh, we got chicken with brown on it. That’s what it looks like to me. That’s kind of, yeah. Chicken with brown. Is this gravy? We’re calling it a honey Dijon pan sauce, but like, potato, potato, you know what I mean? And we got some mashed potatoes, some sautéed broccoli, one is from Walmart, one is from Tarjay. Please eat. Okay. Thank you. I will. You ever expect better words to come out of your mouth than they don’t? Every damn time I open my mouth. I feel like most people would think that Target is better than Walmart, but I will say that at Sporked, we’ve had great experience with Walmart, so. This is the test. You have no idea what we’re talking about, but. Yeah. It’s not. We thought it might have, but it’s not. Good. Can you notice, like, a difference between, like, the flesh of the chicken? Yes, that’s the biggest difference I noticed. Yeah. But if I can be honest with you, it’s not that one of them seems good and one of them seems bad. Yeah. They both just seem different from each other. What’s the main difference you’re noticing between the two? Well, let me eat it again. Hold on. God. Oh, I have to eat the food that somebody else cooked me. Okay. This is quid pro quo because earlier I was eating all your snacks that you had out in the kitchen. That’s true. And I think I said I would lay down my life for a certain sandwich cookie, no spoilers, but find out at sporked.com. This is firmer, more firm. This is softer. Yeah. And this is more like. Do you know what I’m saying? Like an accordion. It’s like, well kind of, it’s like compressing more. Yeah, yeah. What do you think that says about the chicken quality? Probably has water pumped into it or something to make it seem bigger. That’s what I would assume. That’s a potential, no, that is a potential guess. We don’t know that for sure, cause I don’t think they would have to disclose that, but that is a common tactic. Right? Like that’s what it feels like to me. Like something’s pumped inside that, maybe. While we at Sporked generally find Walmart’s products to be better than Target’s products, I think the more, well, I think the more expensive one is Target because you told me that. And it’s the end of the work day. I wasn’t supposed to say that, but. And I want to go home. I don’t know Josh. I guess this is Walmart and this is Target. I’ve lost my mind and forgotten everything. Yapper. And both taste so similar, minus chicken texture. That is the main difference we found. You are absolutely correct. That is Walmart. This chicken was about half the cost of this chicken. And I think you nailed it. It is the texture. It could be from water that has been injected to it, so you can sell it at, you know, a higher weight. Or it could just be that they’re using chickens that are grown a lot faster and that tends to happen. We’re talking about this woody tissue disease, they call it, where the muscle expands too fast, but it’s kind of still a mystery. But yeah, this chicken is a lot denser. These were cooked to the same temp, very similar, but this is a dish you would eat again? Before you told me all that stuff, yeah. Jordan, thank you so much for coming. Thank you so much. You’re my favorite tradwife. I appreciate you having me today. Come back tomorrow. I’m gonna mill my own buckwheat flour. It’s just a simple, quick, easy snack. I’m then gonna start hand pulling the noodles over the course of three, four hours. And it’s definitely not a sign up from a large religious organization. Thanks for stopping by Mythical Kitchen! We’ll see you next time. Check out sporked.com and find the best foods your grocery aisle has to offer.