Today, we’re putting two grocery stores to the test. It’s Costco versus Sam’s Club. Today, we’ll be attempting to answer the question, does it actually matter where you buy your groceries? We are going to make the same dish using ingredients bought from two different grocery stores, the Costco and the Sam’s Club. Now, normally we like to make a nice. Healthy-ish weekday dinner. But today, since it’s National Seafood Boil Day! Just invented! Just invented right now! We’re gonna make a giant seafood boil from each place. A judge is going to come in and blind taste each dish to see if they can tell which grocery store was made from. The Kitcheneers went down to Costco and Sam’s Club to buy up all the sea critters they could. Let’s see what they got. Oh, this is too much stuff and I feel overwhelmed. No! No, we are the masters of our destiny and it is National Seafood Boil Day, the most holiest of all holidays, so we must persist. We got all the ingredients to make a, I’d say classic seafood boil, but we’re actually going more in the direction of like a Viet Cajun seafood boil. We’ll talk about that later. We have all of our ingredients from Sam’s Club over here. We have all of our ingredients from Costco over here. These are two grocery stores. They make their money on economies of scale. Uh, you, they sell the giant two packs of Frank’s Red Hot. They sell, where is it? Get out of here. They sell the, this is like a five pound thing of cayenne pepper that we had to buy from the Costco Business Center. Fun fact, you can get into the Costco Business Center with any Costco membership. Why would you want to? I don’t know. I really don’t know. We’ve spent a total of $360 over at the Costco and we spent a total of $280 over at the Sam’s Club. However, when you average it out per these giant seafood boils that we’re making, the costs were roughly identical. It was about 104 from Costco and 102 over at the Sam’s Club. The main differences we’re gonna see here, Sam’s Club, they had the king crab legs. Now for seafood boil, crab is a great thing to add in there. A lot of people might not go with king crab. That’s like the absolute best crab you can get. Dungeness crab, however, that’s what we’re using over at the Costco. I think it has really, really great flavor. It is a lot cheaper. It comes from the West coast, uh, shrimp. Head on shrimp, shrimp heads are really important to me in a seafood boil because that is where you get a lot of that flavor, but the shrimp were a lot more expensive at Costco because they are a lot better, these are 914 shrimp. Have you ever seen numbers next to shrimp? Uh, that means the amount of shrimp it takes to get to a pound. Each of these shrimps are between 1/9th and 1/14th of a pound over here. These are 2130 shrimps. So they’re going to be a lot smaller. Costco strength to me is in their curation. So like the most important person in the wine industry works at Costco because it’s their job to go to all these vineyards around the world and decide which wines end up in Costco. And they take it very, very seriously. They do the same thing with any product, like. This here hot link sausage from the Costco. Ah, I gotta lean. Ah, it’s going up against the Farmer John smoked sausage. Love Farmer John, local L.A company. And these are significantly more expensive than Costco. We’ll see how that goes. Then, what the hell else do we got? Oh, hot sauce. You gotta have that Louisiana vinegar based cayenne sauce. Tabasco is kind of the original, uh, of that variety, but to me, lacks a lot of that good vinegary punch from something like Frank’s Red Hot. So that could cause a difference here. Come to the back of the store with me. Come on, come on, let’s go. Beer. Kirkland. Eugh. Now I grew up drinking Kirkland Light. This is Kirkland Lager over here. This is about a 1. 20 per can of beer over here. Uh, nobody knows what brewery it’s brewed in. Costco does a practice called white labeling where everything is Kirkland signature. So this could actually be another brewery that you would have drank. Nobody actually knows. But we’re doing that at $1.20 per beer versus good old fashioned Coors Light. It’s the coldest beer in the game unless you’re dumping it in a boiling pot full of crabs but this is 70 cents per can that is a 36 pack for 24 and 80 cents Which like if you’re above the age of 21 and in college, My God, there is no better deal. We would hunt for deals on 30 racks. We called them bricks. Do you guys have special names for a 30 pack of beer? We’d be like, hey bro, go pick up a brick. Ah ha, ah ha, ah ha. Cause that’s what we sounded like in college. We got our work cut out for us. We gotta start boiling up a bunch of seafood. This is one of my all time favorite meals to make. Again, this is like a big special occasion meal. And what better day to make a seafood boil? The National Seafood Boil Day! Everyone, come on! So we have the National Seafood Boil Day tree in the corner. We’ve decorated it. That’s why it smells like rotting crabs. A lot of dead crab corpses on that. I mentioned earlier that we’re not exactly doing a traditional Louisiana seafood boil. And the ingredient that’s differentiating it is right here in this pot. This is butter. If you look at the butter sticks from the Sam’s Club and the Costco. There’s just like one butter factory that’s making like billions of pounds of butter and they’re getting it, slapping their labels on it. So that is not gonna be the difference. This is more of a Vietnamese Cajun style seafood boil. Uh, butter is really big in Vietnam. There’s actually a cult classic brand of canned butter. Cause like some people follow cult classic movies. I follow cult butter, apparently. Uh, but butter’s really big in Vietnam because of the French colonial influence. And so, when a lot of Vietnamese refugees were resettled after the Vietnam War to the, uh, Louisiana Delta, they worked in the shrimping industry and they were like, yo, we can put butter with the Cajun spices on the seafood boil. And then a lot of that population actually ended up in Houston, which is like the Viet Cajun epicenter. But I grew up in a big Vietnamese neighborhood in California. Shout out Westminster! Shout out Garden Grove! Shout out Fountain Valley! Little Saigon! Where are you at? Asian garden mall. Let’s talk about the garlic here. So we’re using fresh garlic. You could have used jarlic for it, but like when garlic’s such a prominent flavor, you want it fresh. Over here from the Sam’s Club, you look at these bulbs of garlic. They are so much bigger, which to me is generally better just because it cuts down on prep time, but it doesn’t necessarily always equate to better flavor. We did find some mold in the Sam’s Club garlic, and that’s kind of the problem when you’re buying in bulk from these big retailers. I’ll never forget. I’m gonna start cooking, but I’m gonna dump the garlic into the butter. Along with the spices. I’ll never forget my buddy in college buying a 10 pound bag of spinach from the Costco and then he like used it in two smoothies and the spinach is starting to go bad. And so I made a spanakopita birthday cake like I made a three layered spanakopita cake for our Greek roommate just to use up all the spinach. It was great so in on the one hand, it’s you know, a bad thing and on the other hand, you know, necessity is a mother of innovation spanakopita birthday cake the candles stuck in there nice a little bit of sugar, just to neutralize all the acid from the hot sauce there. So we got the spices toasting in there, we’re doing a classic cajun blend. We got smoked paprika. We got paprika. We got garlic. We got onion. We got black pepper, we got some oregano. Normally you would go thyme. We couldn’t find thyme there. Uh and the cayenne, that’s where you’re gonna add all that spice. I want to taste the hot sauce here Tabasco versus Frank’s Red Hot, I mentioned tabasco is kind of like the OG Louisiana hot sauce, but that doesn’t almost mean it’s better. I think Frank’s Red Hot may have improved on the formula. Like, Tabasco’s like, kind of unemulsified too, it’s like a little bit grainy. Tabasco, only three ingredients, salt, vinegar, aged cayenne peppers. Okay, Frank’s Red Hot. It’s so much better seasoned. Like, you taste the lacto ferment on the peppers more. I love Frank’s Red Hot. I think there’s like, a lot of Louisiana hot sauces. You got Red Rooster, you got Trappe’s, you got Louisiana brand hot sauce. To me, I don’t know if there’s anything better than Frank’s Red Hot. I put that [bleep] on everything. Marketing works! Gonna ambidextrously, not ambidextrous, bidextrous. Pandextrous. Dextrous curious. We’re gonna whisk these together. Yeah! That is a hell of a color right there. That is, if you ever see a food that looks like this, just like red, greasy, with chunks of garlic, you’re in for a good time. And we’re in for a good time. You know why? Cus it’s National Seafood Boil Day! Come on everybody! Sing the National Seafood Boil Day song! Seafood boil, seafood boil, I love shrimp and crabs and sausage. They didn’t get the memo. We are truly going back to our mythical cooking roots today. We’re boiling for safety, but we’re also boiling for flavor. Speaking of which, you gotta get some flavor in these pots. As you see, we got the biggest pots known to man. The idea here, you got your potatoes, you got your corn, you got your eggs, you got your sausage. Those are the non seafood eating things. Then we have non seafood flavoring things. We got whole lemons, we got garlic, we got onion, we got bay leaf, don’t eat that. We’re gonna add some beer here. I mentioned we got the Coors Light. This is just 85 degrees Coors Light. This is like, you ever take a Coors Light in the hot tub, and then you kind of let a couple Coors Lights float around in there so you can grab them? And then you got hot Coors Light keeps you warm on a cold day? Warm, flat Coors Light. Is, is there a term for negative nostalgia? Like negstalgia? It is negstalgic for me. It’s like Tailgating for like a UCLA football game like during the Chip Kelly era where they were like not doing well, you know what I mean? Well, oh even hotter beer. I mentioned that Costco white labels their beer and you don’t know where it’s from I completely lied It says on the box that this is from Deschutes brewery, which is a fantastic brewery in Bend, Oregon, just a mile from the last blockbuster on earth! Bend, Oregon C’mon! Home of the Deschutes Brewery and the last blockbuster I heard. Dylan is silently nodding. He knows. Yeah, yeah. And they say you can buy anything from Sam’s Club at Costco. You know what you can’t buy? The Mythical Kitchen pint glasses. You can only buy these at mythical.com. Get the new bundle! It comes with a warm Coors Light. Alright, we’re gonna toss the beer. In there all the mouth juices that got on the edge of the glass will boil off. Don’t you worry. Toss that in there and we’re just gonna go in with all of our stuff right now. We’re gonna go salt, salt, ah! Old bay, old bay. Oh thing about the old bay. So old bay is obviously a brand name product, it’s mostly like celery salt and powdered bay leaf in cayenne stuff. It’s really good. But this old bay from the Sam’s Club is a lot redder than this, which likely means that are oxidized. You look at the expiration dates, Costco’s out here selling Old Bay that expires in three months. This Old Bay expires in nine months. How dare you? Bay leaves, bay leaves are great, man. They do do things. People say they don’t do things. They do things. They make your stuff taste like bay leaf, which is a good flavor. Also, they have essential oils that can actually like temper sulfuric compounds, but just put the bay leaf in because someone told you to do it. We live in a society. Add in the lemons. So what we’re doing right now, we’re effectively just making a broth, right? And that broth is going to season all of this here seafood. But it’s like a quick broth. You’re gonna let it boil for about 15 minutes with your sausage in there. All those pork fats kind of like jump out. Yeah, buddy. Yeah, buddy. Let’s try the sausage. Farmer John’s. Cold sausage snack, nothing wrong with that. Coarser grind on Farmer John’s, which I do generally like. You might use a smoked andouille sausage, hot wings, perfectly fine, at least for me. The bite of spicy sausage, after all that sweet seafood, is so delightful. And the sausage is going to carry a lot of that flavor. Bang, bang. Potatoes. Corn, I found out. You guys want to know it? Who wants the fun facts from Josh? Yeah! Fun fact! There’s a plane. Hold on. It’s gonna be so fun, though. You’re not gonna know, you’re not gonna know what hit you when I get you this fun fact. Do you know that the euphemism for butthole, cornhole, is because people used to wipe their butts after they pooped with spent corncobs? Hence the term cornhole. In Finland we sauna every day. Why? Because sauna feels nice. In the summer you get in sauna, you go out, you jump in lake. We love to sauna. That does smell really good. Also, like it actually smells kind of vaguely. Fogged up. That’s gonna cause an eye infection. If you see me with pink eye in the next video, it’s not from butts. Anyways, let’s try the yeah Let’s try the broths here. See if there’s any difference taste that Coors Light. Yum, not like hyper, hyper seasoned, but like very well seasoned. Again, we’re tossing it in that Cajun butter afterwards. Get that little bit of Coors Light. There’s something. Slightly better about that broth. All the seasonings were equal. I think it might be the flavor of the sausage. Eggs! Hard boiled, pack of hard boiled eggs. You can never go wrong. You can pop them as a snack. You can throw them in your seafood boiler. You don’t want to boil them off with all the aromatics for a long time. Uh, because then it’s just going to get like a hard boiled egg flavored broth. And literally nobody wants that. But we’re going to toss them in along with the seafood. Now, ain’t nothing to it but to do it. I’m just gonna toss the crabs in first. Get those at the bottom. Jump in there. Don’t crawl away. I’m kidding. It’s been dead. Alright, so we have, um, um, um. We have two pounds of crab. We have three pounds of shrimp. Gotta go quick, gotta go quick, gotta go quick. However The crab, we actually weighed the king crab from Costco and it said two pounds, but it was only one pound after all of the moisture loss. Which like, that’s some BS. Not Costco, Sam’s Club. Sam’s Club is BS, Costco is good. Everything is submerged, that should cook up pretty, pretty quick. Now I just, ah, ah, run! This is why you train plyometrics. Screw it. No, there’s too much juice on there, I don’t want all the juice in. These shrimp don’t have the heads on. They are easy peel, which means they’ve been de veined. So the shells should be pretty easy to get off, but you are gonna get a lot of flavor from the shrimp shells. If you just make a broth with just shrimp shells, everyone talks about don’t, don’t discard your chicken bones, make em for stock, and you got people putting like a rotisserie chicken carcass or all the flavors already spent out of it in a broth. No, no, no, shrimp shells! Make sure all that’s submerged. Now we’re just going to boil until the shrimp are cooked. You can tell because they’ll turn pink. If the shrimp are cooked that means everything else is cooked and your eggs are warm. If any of your eggs hatch just put a lid on it. I got chicken soup. In Finland, we love to do shrimp baths. Alright. Oh, come on! Look at that. Is this your king? Alright. I’m gonna drain a fair amount of it. Just save that for soup. Put it in your cereal. All these bad boys. Dump all that out. Is that all gonna fit? Yes, sir! That is, come on, that is a hella good looking plate of food. The shrimp aren’t overcooked too, that’s like one of my biggest problems with seafood bowls is people overcook shrimp. And now we take all of this Cajun garlic butter, don’t be shy. So here’s what we’re gonna do, we’re gonna dump all of this Cajun garlic butter over the top and then, do I just go in with the gloves? No, why? Okay, fine. All right. Let’s pull this, we’ll figure out a way to toss that. Yeah, buddy! Get those delts strong, do those front raises. Keep those fingers pointed towards the edge of the walls. Yeah. Alright. Dump all them bad boys out. What? I can’t tell where it’s going. I don’t know what got there. Hold on, just give me a sec. I’m touching up the gloves. I’ll eat the glove potato. We’re gonna try and more evenly distribute this butter. We’ll get the butter around. Yeah! Typically, you would throw this in a giant plastic bag. When I go to my favorite seafood boil spot, the old Boiling Crab, they put everything in a plastic sack. I went to one seafood boil spot out in Alhambra, which is like a big Vietnamese neighborhood, and they were like, how spicy do you want it? And they had like eight levels of spice, and I was like 8, and they were like, are you sure? I said, yeah, come on. I’m a pro at this. Eight. Um, and then we got probably $200 worth of seafood between two people. And, uh, yeah, that was too spicy. It kind of ruined my whole meal and I had no one to blame but myself. And I ate all of it and I just felt terrible. Okay. Come on. All right, I’ll figure out a way to ma, cheese and rice this is, there you go, there you go just give it the old rub a dub dub. Here you have it, a National Seafood Boil Day, which is every day in the Mythical Kitchen. Here we have our seafood boil from Costco, our seafood boil from Sam’s Club, we got a judge coming in to try all of this. This is my lunch, I’m eating 16 eggs and a king crab. I feel like I don’t have to explain anything. I feel like you can just see. Really crazy. Thank you. I feel so privileged today for this, for this bounty. Especially because it’s National Seafood Boil Day. Oh my god, it is! How do you usually celebrate? Uh, mostly I sing the song and dance around the National Seafood Boil Day tree. Oh, okay. The one with the hanging dead crab carcasses. How does the song go again? You know it. Seafood boil, seafood boil, shrimp! Shrimp, shrimp. Seafood boil, seafood boil. Crabs, crabs, crabs. You know it. There’s a dubstep remix. You know it. Um, my family wouldn’t let me celebrate when I was a child, so. Uh, dig in. One of these is from Costco, one of these is from Sam’s Club. Your job’s to guess which one. My job’s to eat these eggs. Um, I really, okay, so just based on appearances, I really want to start with this one. And you know why? Because I ate an egg from that one? No, because of the shrimp! Look at them! They’re so beautiful. One of these places only had head on 913, and then one of the places. My God. Easy Peel 2135. Um, so do you eat heads? Always. I know. I don’t. What? Give me your shrimp head. I know. I’ve been to, um, restaurants where they give you the head and I leave, and I leave my heads behind and I can tell it really insults people. But I just don’t want them. It’s a good reason not to eat them. Yeah. At my wedding my brother made me take a shot of Fino Sherry out of a shrimp head. Was it good? So good. Mmmmmmm. I’ll have what she’s having. It’s so good. Oh my God. The flavor of the sauce down here is incredible. This corn is the best thing I’ve ever had in my life. Oh my God. And now they know what you can save the corn cob for. Wait, what is it? Is it something gross? You ever heard of the term corn hole? Yeah. It comes from the fact that people used to wipe their butts with spent corn cobs. Wow. I love learning new things. Look at that. That’s so hot. Look at that meat. Mmm. Dunk it. Mmm. Really good. Yeah. I don’t want to stop eating, but should I move to this one now? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Because this looks good too. But obviously, like, you know, the shrimp are already. But the crab here is different. This is Dungeness Crab, but it’s King Crab. Taste wise, Dungeness, I think, is a little bit sweeter, but King Crab, you have those gigantic legs that you get those big, like, almost filets. Mm hmm. Crab leg, where Dungeness, you have to work a little bit harder. But as far as flavor goes, I love a Dungeness Crab. I think, yeah, I don’t think that I have Dungeness Crab as much as I have King Crab, but it was sweet and it was really good. Ooh, look. Look at that meat. This is messy. I like it. Mmm. Mmm. Mm mm. Do you have any inkling right now which one is Costco and which one is Sam’s Club? I think that’s Costco. Why’s that? Our taste tests in Sporked, I have been really impressed with the quality of seafood at Costco. And these head on shrimp just, like, yell Costco to me. Mmm, interesting. But the king crab over here. Do you hear them yelling? I wanted to live! Ha ha ha ha ha! God. Okay. So, that’s good. I like it. I’m gonna try this one now though. Yeah, sausage about to slurp you. With it’s corn hole. Butter up your sausages if you’re not already doing it. Hmm. So I would say this sausage maybe has like a little more spice to it? Does that sound right? Holy. Both of them are really good. Like, they have nice casings and stuff. Yeah, this one makes like a little bit less of an impact. It’s still really, really good though. Sorry, I’m just making a pile of discarded meats and things. Wait, do you think you have all the tools at your disposal to make a final decision? I think so. Um, which one was Costco and which one was Sam’s Club? I think so, yeah. I think I am gonna, I’m gonna stick with it. I’m gonna say this is Costco and this is Sam’s Club. And in 3, 2, 1, you’re gonna put your hand over the winning dish. In 3, 2, 1. You are correct. One, that is the better seafood boil, and it is Costco. Okay. Costco seafood rips. I mean, this is insane. Like, you couldn’t, this is, like, from a restaurant. Like, it is so unbelievably good. I, I don’t know, this isn’t me tootin my own horn. I kinda just dumped stuff in a pot and then threw it on the thing with butter. But, like, this is, uh, about as perfect a seafood boil as you can get. It’s incredible. The one from Sam’s Club is perfectly fine, of course. But the head on shrimp from Costco, they make a difference. The Dungeness Crab, I think, tastes better than the King Crab. I agree. Yeah, Costco does a great job of picking stuff out. And now, hey, you know what your prize is? Can we get Gwyneth the, the cayenne prize? The cayenne? Mmm, scallops. So sorry, we didn’t have your prize at the ready. There you go! Yay! You won! You take home six pounds of cayenne pepper from the Costco Business Center. Take a picture. Alright, we’ll give you your novelty check for the price of that for like $27. Thank you so much. Of course. Thank you so much. Bye bye! See ya! Thank you so much for stopping by Mythical Kitchen. Ooh, scallop. For more episodes, tune in live for the mukbang of us eating all this right now. I have the mic cued up right to the throat. So you can hear the glug glug. Eat my shrimp heads. See y’all next time. For all your beverage holding needs, check out the new Emblem pint glasses. Available at mythical.com.