I like the concept here. I'd like to see more of these head to heads with similar franchise's cookbooks.

I think the Westfall stew should be more like a gumbo. One of the key ingredients in the in-game recipe is okra, which thickens a lot of gumbos and similar dishes. Another thing is the mishmash of meats, that while fantastical is not far off from the game, fish, shellfish, and domesticated meats in gumbo.

Westfall Stew is a bit of a stretch based the lore it came from. It's a humble stew made with accessible ingredients and yet the cookbook interpretation is far extravagant from it.

Personally, when I go for a beef stew, I'm not looking for the wheel to be reinvented. I want hearty, warm, and inviting. You can have all the flavors in the world, but if it doesn't fulfill that, its not worth its weight as a beef stew. I've made the one for FFXIV and wouldn't mind trying the WoW one, but based on how you described them both, the FFXIV one wins for me.

For a stew made by farmers the Westfall stew sure is extravagant. I find it equally interesting and odd that they talk about needing substitutes for the meat, but not for the wine or spice mixture.

The Beef Stew looked better imo, it looked more appetizing to me with those colours, the Westfall one was just all grey/red ish apart from the carrots

This is a great format, I hope you make it a recurring series.

Huh, just realized something about the way they were cooked. It looked like you can actually cook the FFXIV stew on your little campfire set when you craft it ingame. All in one pot.

The Exquisite FF14 stew sure seems a hell of a lot easier (and affordable) to cook Love this new format! Hope to see more! Get more use out of the cookbooks. Please slow down the scoring a little bit! It went very quick

The ffxiv stew feels like it was more meant to be cooked as opposed to the wow one was a really in depth concept that probably turned out great but not sure id ever bother doing

I think the Westfall stew strays too far from the ingrediants used in game for me, it doesn't even contain okra. It also seems too expensive for something cooked by rural farmers. I couldn't personally give it the upper hand in theming due to that.

Is this a one-time thing or a new Format? Because this video was entertaining, educating and just perfect! I'm always excited when you upload, you motivate me to cook when i usually don't have the nerves for it. I think I gonna make stew today!

FF won before the second dish was even done prepping. Juniper berries? I hate cookbooks that have completely normal recipes but one singular ingredient that's so niche to acquire no one is going to go out of there way to buy it unless they are doing it for a camera/views. Stew especially should never have ingredients that need to be hunted down and shipped overnight in order to acquire. But that's just my personal opinion. I like stew, it's homey, comforting, and most importantly easy to prep and make.

Having eaten both (I own both cookbooks and I love my slow cooker), the Exquisite Beef Stew is the one I go back to for its simplicity. You can jazz it up if you want other flavours, because as a base for extra creativity it can't be beat. Westfall Stew is a more complete package that evokes specific flavours, though I feel it doesn't adapt quite as easily to the slow cooker without altering the spices somewhat, and juniper berries are a pain to find so I use a slosh of gin xD. Both are good in their own different ways, which is reflected in this video wonderfully.

The results is really a surprise though. In terms of themes, I would have expected the FFXIV 1 to win. In the game, you make the stew by using carrots, potatoes, dzo (beef), flour, and pepper. Which is basically almost the exact same ingredients as the cookbook, minus some due to ingrediants limitations in game for crafting. It also looks almost identical to the in game design and the theme where people were to eat it. So it would win the theme category. On the other hand, the Westfall stew is purely an reimagination of the actual item as the stew is actually made with boar meat+water when crafted in game, and do not actually call for red wine nor any of the veggies used. The author has much more freedom to reimagine the stew as he/she wishes. The cooking method also does not really fits the way the stew is made, with how it calls for repeated use of an oven with precise temperature control thus further dropping the theme score. Additionally, despite how it is supposed to fit the theme, the author is just making his own recipe up from scratch, i don't really believe that with how poor the villagers are, they have free access to red wine, beef, and pearl onions. Furthermore, lets be honest, with how much WoW retcon their lore, the story for the stew doesnt count for much either. So overall, Exquisite Beef Stew wins for theme. For appearance, the Exquisite Beef Stew looks super appetizing and fits the game design to a T, which i think the author did a good job recreating the recipe within its limits. Whereas, despite how theres no full recipe nor picture of the westfall stew, the author put in almost no effort to make it look better and simply just made his own recipe of beef stew instead of the boar stew it is in game. So definitely the Exquisite Beef Stew wins in looks. For taste, the exquisite beef stew uses standard ingrediants while the westfall stew uses pearl onions in place of potato, bacon w/ bacon fats in place of oil, red wine in place of tomato paste, and added in barley for texture. Its more of a soup than a stew with how watery it is. However, i would imagine it tastes much better due to how fragrant the bacon would make it and how the red wine adds a nice mix of bitterness and sour thang to it depending on the red wine used. So overall, i think the Westfall stew would be something that looks bad but tasted amazing and wins the taste round. Also, to be fair, in the actual theme of the game, you would have to boil the meat rather than bake it as it is supposed to be a dish that could be made in a tavern with medieval themed cooking appliances like brick oven and steel pots. So the author messing about with the theme and the cooking method might have been the reason for the meat being tougher than ffxiv's.

My reaction each time one of your videos pops up: YESYESYESYESYES! Love ya man!😊😊❤❤❤

I absolutely love this format and how you highlighted the differences between these similar recipes!

More comparisons like this would be great, really like the concept!

Great idea. Definitely would love to see more franchise recipe face-offs.

I really like the idea of a Clash of Cookbooks! Can't wait until the next one 😁

I feel like I would just combine the two recipes together to make an Exquisite Westfall Stew. I like Exquisite Beef Stew as a base but then adding in elements like the bacon, pearl onions, barley, mushrooms and red wine. Also I'm wondering why the Westfall Stew didn't include Okra since the quest description clearly has okra on the ingredient list. I'm not a HUGE fan of okra, but I could see adding it in and changing up the spices to more a Cajun flavor profile and turning the stew into a kind of Gumbo.

I like this new format. I would enjoy more of these in between the cookbook reviews.

Very interesting idea for a video! Would love to see more of these.

Nice concept for a video series! Looking forward to more culinary duels.

Absolutely stoked for the potential future of this series

i love this format, definitely looking forward to seeing more videos like this if you decide to make it into a series 😊💞

I don't have much to say on the other two categories, but i definitely feel like 14 should have pulled ahead on theme. The westfall stew really felt more like them just slapping a random recipe from real life with the name, while 14s beef stew felt far more...realistic? Realized? I dunno. I could totally see the beef stew being a real meal eaten in its given are in 14. But when i think westfall, ideas of redwine mixes and pearl onions are very much not what i see.

Really like this format!

Well deserved 100k Subs! You are so unbelievably underrated

This is super cool! I never thought I'd be interested in a death battle between themed cookbook recipes, but here we are haha. I think I would personally be more partial to the ffxiv variant of the stew, but I can respect the wow stew for its complexity given how little the author had to work with from the game

Loved this idea. hope to see more of it

The Knight's Bread and Exquisite Beef Stew go very well together

Love to see how the channel evolve

What a cool concept! I can’t wait to see what other dishes will go head to head!!! 🍛 ❤

Such a fun and well-thought-out format. I'd be more than happy if this became a series! I actually like that you pit two similar franchises too as I feel like judging the lore and food presentations for each cookbooks would be fairer that way (though I wonder if it would be more difficult to do in the long run)

Ngl, he has the coolest cooking video ideas on the platform.

Adding to everyone else, I really think this could be a series that you can do more of and it would let you go back to your other books like the Necronomnomnom. Keep up the great work! 😃

This is really cool, I’d like to see more of these as it acts as a good excuse to try more recipes from the cookbooks

Ohhh VERY excited to see more like this! more so if it's for recipes you wanted to try in a book but couldn't for the reviews! Also really cool to see the variations in the same general idea, how many ways can you cook beef stew? how many ways is there to make apple pie? etc.

I grew up on a farm in the middle of Amish country Pennsylvania. The Westfall stew looks hilariously simlar to stuff I grew up eating, kinda a brown mishmash of meat, potatoes, carrots, etc., with rice, barley, flour dumplings, whatever to stretch it. Was delicious though, no matter how ugly.

I love this please make this a series it would be great to see

What a fun and wonderful idea this is.

The custom characters in SC fighting it out immediately sold this for me ^^

The Exquisite Beef Stew is pretty close to how I do mine, but I like to give the tomato paste some time on direct heat, before the beef gets added back in, and use less beef broth but add in a dry red (usually a cabernet sauvignon). Oh, and nutmeg of course. As to the Westfall stew, I can't for the life of me make sense of the recipe not calling for the beef to be browned before adding it to the rest of the stew.

I just stumbled on your channel about a week or so ago and i really like your stuff. Would love to see more like this I really liked it and judging by the comments so does everyone else!

Delicious😋, well done👍

What an amazing concept! Have a sub my good sir!

dig it. hope book battles become a regular feature.

Idk if this is a new series or not but I loved the concept and getting to see of these cookbooks

The fight of the century!

Huh, looks like they went the Beef Burgundy route with the Westfall Stew.

I would absolutely love more comparisons like these, as this was just super fun. If I were to suggest one episode for this, I’d like to see some recipes that include lamb or mutton, some of my absolute favorite meats to work with

I love the concept and the way you presented it, it was fun without overdoing it, and it was fun to see how two similar foods were made so differently. I hope you will do this again ^_^ Funny how you struggled to find juniper berries, in Norway I find them in most stores in the countryside all year, whereas when I tried to make the Orobon Stew, I struggled to figure out what buttermilk was, where to find it in stores and, learning nobody knew what it was, searched on the internet and found ways to recreate it but that an American baker living here had to bring with her buttermilk whenever she visited the US. Strange how areas change availability. I also agree with how the lore is presented in the WoW-cookbook; I understand that they were not allowed to bring in more concrete lore in the XIV-cookbook, but I do like descriptions that give a bit more insight into local cultures or the like, especially when they bring in details from the game itself. Hope to see more like this! ^^

Love the new series

Stew nation, rise up!

Voting for please make this a series. It was fun and im looking forward to more

God damn it, I shouldn't watch this while fasting. Both the meals look amazing

These both look great! Though, for me the easy winner is the Exquisite Beef Stew, just because I'm really not a fan of strong onion flavours, and mushrooms are one of the things I dislike the most out of any food, so the full onions and presence of mushrooms at all just immediately puts the Westfall one at a very harsh disadvantage. I'd eat it still, but I'd be doing a lot of picking to get the stuff I'm not really a fan of out of the way, sadly.

Great intro

Great concept doing the whole head to head format. In my opinion though, I’d have to rate the d&d cookbook’s traveler stew as the G.O.A.T. 🔥🔥

The small onions do kinda look like eyes

I'm more inclined to favor the simple rich flavors that harkon back to hearth and home. So I'd take the Excquisite Beef Stew.

I'm too picky to eat the Westfall stew, plus the exquisite stew has more potential when it comes to leftovers. You could make a sandwich and a potato soup or a pie.

Nice fun format! :D I hope it's here to stay! :D

Fun video. I would like to see you explore some more of these video game/IP showdowns. it's seems like it could be a convenient niche for you to take advantage of while also being a good watch.🎯 On a side note. Chuck is so ridiculously expensive all the time where I am at. New York Strip is cheaper than chuck this week and last week. So even though I have had good steaks I am low key thirsty for some pot roast or beef stew. Also, today tied a record HIGH of 52 in Boston today, first time since 1891. If there was ever a day in June to make an argument for beef stew, today was the day. (goosebumps and chills in June, it's just not right)

Not the herbs blending with the green screen 😭

You should make a Burger Battle Royale with a recipe from each cookbook you have (if there is one, ofc)

Wanna try Westfall stew but that looks expensive.

Yo man spencer's has been having some cookbooks like the ones you feature lately, pretty great there's a ramen one too that has all kinds of ideas n stuff.

Now that's a cute idea.

I make westfall stew from time to time, it is amazing in the winter with bread.

I'd love to see these compared to the D&D beef stew, which has been my favorite.

That was a fun watch. I wonder if cooking the West Fall Stew in the over is what made it so the beef wasn't as tender as cooking the Exquisite Beef Stew in the Dutch Oven over the stove.

I'd rather eat murloc eyes than mushrooms. 😁🍄 I love making a stew that is mix of those two recipes.

Miso, this format is brilliant. Oh my gosh am I excited for more head to head dish challenges! So cool.

westfall stew is instantly disqualified for adding barley and pearl onions for me. though now i want to try adding mushrooms into my normal beef stew recipe

That exquisite stew is just Saturday at grandmas wtf its just missing the rice on the side and a big slice of butter

Damn, now I want some beef stew… I thought I had passed this phase! 😩

Overwatch vs Halo? Star Trek vs Star Wars? So much potential! Love this idea

Pearled barley in beef stew??

I really think Exquisitive should tie on presentation for being a perfect representation of the in game picture. It should be a tie, not a victory. I also think the westfall stew looks too fancy to come from Westfall? Like I expect that thing to be served in a mark up restaurant at Stormwind. Meanwhile the Exquisitive Beef Stew looks exactly what it is in the lore. A rustic, yet high quality, food found in a restaurant from a place caught between class struggle.

Nice to see some Soul Calibur love

Very good, now make Warhammer 40k Corpsestarch Stew!

I will eat both of them... looks so delicious

Having no horse in this race makes it all the more enjoyable XD Edit: if you can't find juniper berires in stores, see if they grow in your area. I can never find dried ones, but we have a bunch of them growing all over in the woods near our town.

Now do coffee biscuits!

My family is having Black Bean soup tonight.

FFs beef stew looks like our own Beef Menudo. 😅

Very interesting. I love cooking but with my job I rarely have time (and my housemates leave the kitchen in a fucking state), so I've been trying to find stuff that'll get me excited to clean the kitchen and cook a large batch. Game recipes are my latest attempt lol so this was well timed by the algorythm. Honestly though, in terms of ease in cooking (and price) though I would say Westfall loses and that's not because I'm an ffxiv fan but purely because it is a LOT of extra prep and ingredients by comparison. A lot of extra spices that I'm unlikely to use in other areas, red wine, and some of them, like you said, I'd need to order online. The only thing I don't have right now from the exquisite stew is actually bay leafs and beef broth. Both of which are a fifteen minute walk around the corner to the store away.... I need to get me that recipe book 8)

ill pick the ff14 stew. the wow one seems like a pain in the ass to cook.

Nah you're trippin, no way westfall presentation is a 10

Personally speaking i dislike mushrooms and red wine so i would not eat the Westfall Stew which is a shame as i also love those tiny onions. So would have to be the Exquisite Stew for me.

Lok'tar ogar

the recipes both look interesting but what if you combined it? i realized the ff stew lacks the spice and wine to enhance the flavor, while the wow stew lacks the thickness by adding starches used in traditional stews. that could be epic

I love it! Are you able to do some Legend of Zelda BOTW recipes?

I really like the Exquisite stew based on looks and the chosen starch texture. But Westfall has mushrooms and bacon and those exotic berries. I need both. I need hybrids. 😅

you should get more judge for this kind of content, not only maybe it could be biased but also i want to see another reaction for it lol

💯

How about a World of Warcraft Shadowlands cookbook lmao: Pickled Meat Smoothie, Butterscotch Marinated Ribs, Cinnamon Bonefish Stew, Irridescent Ravioli with Apple Sauce.... and the most terrible of all Banana Beef Pudding with a desert of Steak a la Mode.

From the thumbnail I thought ugh, this Westfall Stew looks so ugly. But the more I look at the more it grew on me. Sophisticated is the right way to describe it and I don't doubt it has a far more complex flavour. However I'm more of a fan of simple cooking and FF14's stew with its bright colours is something I would definitely make for friends.