April 23, 2015 - 8:37am
Lots of eggs, lots of butter
Here's two dairy questions I thought of recently:
1: I'm looking at some recipes I was given from someone whose father ran a bakery for many years. A lot of the recipes call for eggs by the quart. That's a lot of egg breaking to do. Is there some alternative way to generate a large volume of eggs for baking - powdered eggs reconstituted, or similar
2: I noticed I keep buying more and more butter to bake with. (several pounds, every trip to the store) I'd like to get something better than the stuff on the supermarket shelf, but the specialty butters cost 3x as much, from what I've seen, and buying it in bulk doesn't help the price much. How do you get butter - assuming you use it as fast as I do?
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a restaurant supply store. They sell broken eggs by 10# and large blocks of butter. If you are not re-seller with a business tax number you will have to pay the tax if it applies. Food distributors don't typically sell to the public but my local RSS does.
All the restaurant supply stores I can find are for equipment - mixers, fryers, cabinets, and so on. "Fresh" material like eggs I haven't seen at any of them. Maybe I'm not searching the right way.
all the wholesale food for restaurants as well as all the equipment. They don't deliver so you have to pick up but the price is less than a wholesaler who delivers.
There are wholesale food sources. Reinhart food service is all over the country (I'm assuming you are in the USA) and there are others. Their minimum quantities tend to be large. Butter…good quality unsalted…would need to be frozen to keep it from going bad. Eggs often are in 15 dozen lots. Some folks form "buyers clubs" joining with other home bakers, day care providers, etc to share the large food order. A tax number is generally needed.
Not sure if you're in the US. Costco sells all that in bulk. But my friend owns a restaurant and i got a copy of his business license and got membership to Restaurant Depot. Refrigerator space is the real challenge.
aimed at restaurants, bakeries, etc. although finding them and getting them to supply you might be tricky - depending on where you are.
I use a few online sources and local shops who let me have a trade account - so I buy butter by the "stick" - which in the UK is vastly different from a US stick - in that it's literally what they've blocked up - often in the range of 2-3Kg. I have my own chickens but when they can't cope I buy eggs by the tray directly off a local producer - a tray of mixed size eggs is cheaper than sized ones. The down-side is breaking them for volume (and separating them if needed). You can buy cartons of pasteurised egg yolks and whites though, but I've not had to resort to them - yet.
The other issue you might find with some suppliers is that they have a minimum order quantity - and some you need to pay to become a member of their little club (e.g. costco in the UK) although the savings can offset that considerably if you have the volume.
So keep looking - I'm sure you'll find suppliers eventually.
Oh - on the butter front - the place I buy bulk butter from comes out at the same price as cheap supermarket butter, so no real difference price wise, but I know exactly what farm it comes from rather than some big anonymous dairy. I could probably go directly to the farm, but it's a couple of hours round trip.
-Gordon