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Thursday, May 8, 2008
Buying in bulk at farmstands and wholesalers
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Buying in bulk is an old strategy for cutting food costs, which is why you’ll usually pay more for smaller boxes of cereal than large ones.
It holds true for fresh food, too. One of my favorite farmstands, Osage’s in north Georgia’s Mountain City, offers such good prices on large amounts of just-picked produce that it draws buyers from metro Atlanta eager to stock up on strawberries by the gallon and peaches by the bushel basket. (At least, it did last year. Higher gas prices will probably dissuade some this year.)
Closer to home, those who want large quantities of fresh produce usually head to the Atlanta State Farmers Market in Forest Park and go to the wholesale side, on the right as you enter the market. Here, you don’t buy straight from the farmer. You buy from a company that could have purchased directly from the farmer, or could be just the last link in a long chain of brokers and packagers that stretches to other regions or around the world.
Some of the wholesalers welcome walk-in customers; others focus on large accounts that include supermarkets and restaurants. Usually you must buy by the case or half-case.
Recently, I visited Destiny Produce, a certified organic distributor at the state market that welcomes walk-in customers. It’s open daily, with weekend hours of 6 a.m. to 11 a.m. and weekday hours from 5 a.m. until around 4 p.m. DeeDee Digby, who manages Destiny and works to reach out to local growers, showed me around.
Some of Destiny’s offerings are purchased directly from Georgia farmers, like Sparkman’s Cream Valley milk from Moultrie, and baby beets and organic Vidalias from Relinda Walker in southeast Georgia’s Screven County. Like other wholesalers at the market, they sell in bulk by the case or occasionally a half-case. (Case quantities vary depending on the product. A case of milk, for example, is eight half-gallon bottles.) Some of its offerings are organic, but not all. It’s all spelled out on product lists that are updated weekly.
As warmer weather boosts local harvests, Destiny expects to have more from farmers within a 250-mile drive of Atlanta. Organic broccoli, cauliflower and carrots are coming in from Georgia farmers, and organic peaches and plums from South Carolina growers. (In early May, much of their stock came from California, with Florida and Central America other sources).
Prices change weekly. They’re lower than retail, but it’s a tradeoff: You’ll wind up with a lot of perishable food. And because some of these foods carry premiums in grocery stores, they’re priced higher than conventionally raised produce available from other wholesalers at the market.
Some of Destiny’s customers are buying clubs, which split the large quantities among neighbors or customers. Maybe others are like one of my co-workers, who likes to buy tomatoes a case at a time, drizzle them with olive oil and then slow roast for a couple of hours, saving them to use in pastas, on pizzas, etc.
If you’ve bought produce by the case, how do you prepare or preserve it? If you share with friends, how has that worked out? Do you find that you’re saving money?
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How Much Would You Pay for a Steak??
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In New York for the rest of this week to check out some of the Big Boy restaurants that are opening in Atlanta, I tried a kobe steak at BLT Steak last night.
I’ll give a full report when I return, but let’s start with the marked difference between what this restaurant looks like in New York — a small bistro, very loud, and believe me the distance between tables doesn’t pass the fire code (read: I’m not sure why they bothered with more than one table at all; they should have just given us all a spot at the same large trough) — and what I suspect it will look like in Atlanta. In Atlanta, inside the W Hotel Downtown, my guess is that it will lack most of the annoying little qualities — like a din so loud we couldn’t even hear the people sitting next to, um I mean on top of, us — that actually make it interesting. The look is New York, not Paris, but there are small touches like the signature blackboard menu, that includes daily specials like English peas with strong hints of mint and bacon and salsify with trumpet royale mushrooms.
That said, the food, designed by tres cosmopolitan French chef Laurent Tourondel, centers around beef (Lourondel has a slew of restaurants here and elsewhere that focus on a particular fill-in-the-blank for consumption: BLT Steak, BLT Fish, BLT Market. Here, beef gets all the perspective, sometimes naked and exposed (BLT-cut bone-in double sirloin), sometimes airbrushed until the last blemish has been removed (Japanese kobe strip steak, though on this evening the cut was filet).
The kobe costs $26 an ounce, and there is a five-ounce minimum. The waiter brought it to the table before it was grilled for me to see its perfectly marbled flesh. And once cooked to a perfect medium rare, it was velvety, juicy and exceptional. But it wasn’t $130 exceptional. Russell Crowe could have cooked it naked tableside and it wouldn’t have been $130 exceptional.
Kobe is incredible beef, and I’m a big believer in “you-get-what-you-pay-for.” And I don’t think BLT Steak is necessarily overcharging. I just don’t think it’s worth it. There’s just not as much there there as everyone yammers on about.
How much would you pay for a steak? How far would you go to get a really great steak?
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